Paypal

Paypal can be a great asset to your online business. It is the largest and most well known payment processing gateway on the net. If you want to sell any sort of service or product online, chances are your customers will have an account on Paypal. What they like about it is that it does not send the card information to the merchant. This is perceived as a much safer transaction. What merchants like about it is that they can take credit cards without having to sign up for a merchant account, which can be costly and the application process can be quite extensive. With Paypal, it's just a quick sign up and you are ready to take credit cards, EFT, and others. It's not difficult to see how offering such a service would be a good thing for any business. Especially since many on the net use Paypal exclusively for their transactions because of it's security measures.

Even if you do have a merchant account, there is still an advantage to offering Paypal as an alternative or as your main source. Besides the sheer amount of users, scripts that handle shopping carts, donations, membership systems and other internet transactions generally use Paypal as their gateway. So using Paypal can save in coding and modification costs to install scripts on your server.

Accounts on Paypal come in three types, personal, business and premium. For a business account, you will need to have at least the second one type to take payments. Fees are taken from incoming transactions, with no monthly fee for most websites. I'll explain that in a second. The fees are generally minor and correspond with the merchant fees for card processing, but there is no rental or membership fees, so it's cheaper in than the standard merchant account. Customers, by the way do not pay a fee to make a payment.

How your website handles the transaction is what decides whether there is a monthly fee. Most sites are set up so that the customer goes to the site, buys something, is sent to Paypal's site to complete payment before being returned to their original location. This does not cost the merchant anything extra (except in the incoming fee discussed above). Some sites don't like Paypal being in the center. In the pro-version customers are not directed to Paypal at all and thus stay on the site that they originated the sale on. This does have a monthly fee if you feel that your site needs this service.

There is another type of payment system that Paypal accepts and that is by email. There is no monthly fee, startup, only the incoming fee that is normally charged for a transaction.

The convenience that Paypal gives to websites to take credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, and even bank transfers instantly is worth the small fee structure and a potential boom to the customers that visit your site.