E-commerce
Basics
There are many possibilities for conducting transactions over the web,
from simple and cheap to complicated and expensive.
PayPal
The cheapest/easiest is PayPal
- this is an inexpensive way to start taking payments quickly, especially
if you don't have a merchant account. With PayPal, your visitors can pay
you with a credit card or by sending a payment from their checking account
(echeck). PayPal provides a shopping cart and many other free services
that are helpful to sites that are starting out. They charge 2.9% +$.30
per transaction and have no start-up fees. The downsides are that PayPal
is not a very customizable solution, and it can have an "amateur"
feel.
PayPal is inexpensive both because there are no merchant account or payment
gateway fees, but also because PayPal provides a very easy way to integrate
their shopping cart into your site, which reduces development time. To
implement it, just sign up with PayPal, and click on Merchant Tools, and
then on Make Shopping Cart Buttons to get started. You will input your
options for each product and it will produce a snippet of HTML code which
you put in your page where you want the "Add to Cart" button
to be.
A word of warning: Paypal has been known to seize merchant funds under
the guise of the need to make an "investigation" concerning
a transaction. They have been known to hold these funds for up to 6 months.
It is for this very reason why we no longer use Paypal as an alternative
payment system. Use them at your own risk.
Non-profit Payment Solutions
A similar solution just for non-profits is Network
for Good, which allows you to accept credit card donations on your
site. They charge 3% of each transaction. There are other services like
this (try a Google search), but this is the most popular.
Mal's E-commerce Cart
Another inexpensive option is a free solution called Mal's
e-commerce. Mal's is a shopping cart system that is remotely hosted.
With the free version, you can accept PayPal, offline payments like checks,
and credit cards if you have your own way to charge them already. It will
store the numbers securely for you to run offline. For $6 a month you
can upgrade your cart so it can integrate with a number of popular payment
gateways like Authorize.net. In this case you would also be responsible
for merchant account and payment gateway fees.
Fully featured shopping carts
Finally, there is the option of creating a full e-commerce solution. This
involves several different components - a merchant account from a bank,
a payment gateway service that allows you to accept payments into your
merchant account from your website (this is sometimes bundled with the
merchant account as a complete package), a shopping cart or payment script
that integrates with your payment gateway, and certain elements of the
server environment like having an SSL certificate and a static IP. There
are some shopping carts that are available as pre-packaged scripts such
as the fully featured X-Cart that
can be customized for your situation, or a custom payment script can be
developed that exactly matches your needs. Full e-commerce is much more
expensive and time-consuming to develop than PayPal or Mal's, but it can
be integrated into your site for a truly seamless payment experience.
It can also save you money in the long run if you are doing a high volume
of sales.
Merchant Accounts
There are many merchant account to choose from, often including your local
bank. E-onlinedata is
the merchant account provider we have chosen to work with.We did several
months of research and determined that e-onlinedata was the company that
had the best balance of low fees, solid customer service, and experience
serving online merchants. We have published a testimonial of a merchant
that chose E-onlinedata. You can read it here.
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