One of the most common questions I’m asked when peple are looking into starting an e-commerce store is, “How can I accept payments?”
Most people assume that it involves going to the bank, getting a machine, and that it’s very expensive. It’s especially daunting if you’ve only ever had a physical store, and don’t know the ins and outs of how this Internet thing works.
Thankfully, there are plenty of us out here looking out for you. Accepting payments in your e-commerce store is actually quite easy. There are a number of options. Paypal is an easy one, that doesn’t require your user to have an account and will take any number of forms of payment. However, the drawback is that the user will have to jump from your site to Paypal in order to pay. The benefit is that Paypal doesn’t charge a monthly fee or their standard account, so all you pay is a percentage of your sale.
However, I like to recommend people go right ahead and run cards on their site. Most good shopping carts have modules that will allow you to set this up pretty easily, and you only need a merchant account that comes with authorize.net. Once that’s set up, we can set up payment processing in just a few minutes, depening on which shopping cart you use.
As for cost, these vary by merchant. I’ve seen as little as $10 a month to more than $30 a month, depending on the options you choose to add and how many types of credit cards you want to accept. Don’t forget, they’ll still take a cut of every sale.
Finally, the last cost involved is getting an SSL certificate for your hosting. This is an added annual cost, and what this does is ensure that the credit card and personal information is transferred securely from your site to the merchant site. It’s an absolute necessity if you want to accept credit cards. SSL certificates can run you anywhere from the low-end of $39 a year to the high end of $2,800.
I’ll cover SSLs in another post!
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