There are three broad ways to turn your web site into a place where your customers can buy your products and services and pay you money for them.
The first is to get a merchant account and set up a professional private shopping cart. This makes sense if you also do consumer shows where you can take credit card orders, or otherwise have reason to take credit card orders in person. However, if you’re predominantly a web-based business, it’s probably overkill. It requires installing somewhat arcane software, it requires going through and configuring said software, and getting a signed security certificate, and the list of things that can go wrong (without you being aware of them¡) is long and somewhat scary.
The second is to get a payment transaction service. There are a few of them, though the market leader is PayPal, with StormPay being a good secondary source. The major benefit of a Payment Transaction Service is that all the risks of running a shopping cart are run by them – this means that your customers will perceive them as being more trustworthy and less risky. These services do charge a small percentage of each transaction, roughly comparable to using a merchant account, so it’s a net wash. Most of them will also let you accrue interest on any balance sitting in your account.
The major drawback to these third party payment transaction services come down to regulations. They are not banks, they are not regulated
like banks, and they have less legal protection than banks do. This means that they WILL seize accounts or close accounts as part of dispute transactions, and will be very pro-active in doing so. There are lots of tales of woe about PayPal in particular for companies and consumers who got accounts seized and closed, or hacked into. This can generally be avoided by the simple expedient of having good customer service, emailing your customers regularly, and shipping whatever you’re selling in a timely fashion with a tracking number.
The third option is to get an eBay shop or an Amazon.com shop. If you sell electronic products that are downloadable, there are other sources to sell ebooks, like fictionwise. While a PayPal transaction fee will be in the realm of 2-3% of the purchase price, these shops will take a cut of anywhere from 10 to 25%. However, they’ll almost all calculate shipping in ways favorable to you, and they get you something that’s very important:
Exposure.
Your web site will get exposure from people who know your products. No small business web site can get exposure like Amazon.com or eBay; fortunately, you can create your own web site and use Amazon shops plus eBay shops to make one combined multi-dimensional sales process.
All of these techniques have their place and their proper time – and most of them just take a little bit of studying to figure out what needs to be done to set them up.
