Accepting Credit Card Payments on your Website

Why offer online payments?

If you plan to offer products for sale (shopping cart) on your website or would like users to subscribe online, you will want to accept their product or subscription payments online.

Credit card payments also allow you to take advantage of the impulsive nature of customers:

  1. Impulse buyers. After reading your advertisements and hype on your site, buyers would be all fired up about your product. If they have a means of making a purchase immediately, you've secured that sale. If you only allow cheque payments, the additional time it takes for them to get their cheque book and mail out the cheque may be a deterrence. They may also have second thoughts later.
  2. International customers. Credit card payment is a tremendous convenience if your customers are overseas. It automatically takes care of the problems of currency differences as well as the time it takes for a cheque to travel to the vendor. You will lose a large number of overseas customers if cheque payment is the only way you can accept payment.

Methods of Accepting Credit Card Payments

There are actually two ways in which you can accept credit cards on your site.

  1. Through your bank. To accept credit card payments through your existing bank you need to set up an 'internet merchant bank account'. Your bank charges you an additional fee for this: usually a setup fee of $200 - $400, monthly fees of $30 - $60 and a transaction fee similar to normal credit card transactions, 2.5% - 3.5%.

  2. Through an online payment gateway like PayMate. This handles the transaction and delivers the payment straight to you normal bank account. Again, there are fees: For low-volume accounts there is no monthly fee but a 2.4% per transaction fee. They also charge the buyer a fee of 3% plus $0.50 which you may wish to absorb.View the current PayMate fees.
  3. Through the well known Paypal. This is an online option that collects the payment from your customer (via credit card or their own Paypal account) and places it in your Paypal account which can then be transferred to a normal existing bank account. Paypal is free to set up and charges no monthly fees, but typically charges 1.1% to 2.4% + $0.30 per transaction fee.
  4. Through a Third Party Merchant. There are numerous companies around that are willing to accept credit cards payments on your behalf in exchange for various fees and percentages. These are also known as "payment gateways". Here are some of the most popular facilities:
    1. E-path
    2. E-way
    3. Transaction Network Solutions

At BLAST we can install any online payments facility you wish to use or we can recommend one. Contact us now.

Valid CSS!