February 4, 2008
Having a product, a website, and a shopping cart isn’t enough. Learn the various methods available to allow your customers to do that most important thing in ecommerce, pay you.
The ever increasing market for ecommerce has created a wide variety of methods by which a budding entrepreneur may do business online. This article will review the most common methods available to allow customers to pay for goods on a website. These include, in rough order of complexity, online check solutions, 3rd party processors, and finally merchant account / payment gateways. Depending on the nature of your business, one of these will probably suffice. Larger businesses may even consider providing multiple payment methods in order to cover as many potential customers as possible.
Online Check Solutions
Online check solutions allow customers to submit payment via their checking account. This requires the customer provide their checking account number and routing information to the processor in order to complete payment. In theory online check payment will reach a broad range of potential customers, since it is more likely to find someone with a checking account and no credit cards than with a credit card and no checking account. Online check solutions may also be able to hook up with an existing business checking account and not require the opening of additional banking accounts, unlike most merchant account solutions. Broad reach and ease of use are the main positives, but there is a negative. Increasing emphasis on Internet fraud has created a public concern about the safety of doing business online. Some may not wish to make online purchases with their checking account, in absence of the easier resource a chargeback on a credit card provides.
3rd Party Processors
Increasing in popularity, 3rd party processors allow online shop owners to take credit card payments but alleviates the need for them to apply for their own merchant accounts. As the term implies, 3rd party processors perform the credit card transactions through their own merchant accounts, and charge a percentage of the transaction, plus perhaps other fees, to the merchant. These transaction fees are usually higher than a merchant would pay through their own personal merchant account, but the inconvenience of obtaining a merchant account is part of the broad appeal of 3rd party processors. The most well known of the 3rd party processors is PayPal. There are competing services, though. Some, such as ClickBank are geared towards so-called “downloadables,” and others like CCBill target other niche markets such as subscription websites.
If you are considering the use of a 3rd party processor, first think about the nature of your business and the volume you can reasonably expect. If you are selling downloadables like software packages, or are considering a subscription site, PayPal may not be the best choice. If you are selling physical products, then think in terms of volume. With a 3rd party processor you will be paying higher percentage fees and transaction fees, which, if you start doing a brisk business, will cost you more over time. If your volume goes up, it might be better to consider the use of a merchant account with favorable terms. Finally, keep in mind one downside to 3rd party processors. In the eyes of a prospective customer, they can make the store appear less reliable and reputable. The very difficulty of getting a merchant account does lend it an air of respectability, as theoretically, the owner had to provide more credentials and undergo closer scrutiny.
Merchant Accounts
Full merchant accounts allow store owners to charge customer credit cards directly, without the help of a 3rd party company. The money charged goes directly into their account. Having a merchant account can create a more secure identity in the minds of your client, as they are not as easily obtained as a 3rd party processor. Unlike the comparatively small selection of 3rd party processors, there is a much wider selection in merchant account providers. This makes careful shopping a must. Again, look at your product and try to estimate demand. There are a variety of fees associated with a merchant account, and how a specific account assesses these fees can make all the difference. Stores that sell a low volume of goods in a monthly period should look for a merchant account with a higher transaction fee in exchange for a lower base monthly fee. Higher volume stores should look for the opposite, lower transactions fees and a higher monthly fee. More money may be saved with the higher monthly fee in concert with a low transaction fee percentage. Some merchant account providers, like PayQuake, offer a variety of tiered services to meet both kinds of need.
Where to look for a merchant account? You may want to start with your current bank. Most banks have merchant account solutions, and starting with an institution with which you are already a member may have some benefits. Make sure you discuss merchant account solutions for online transactions, as their accounts and fees (as well as approval difficulty) may differ from those designed for “brick and mortar” store fronts where a card is physically swiped for payment. Prospective online shopkeeps are by no means restricted to working with their current bank for merchant services. A number of large institutions provide merchant account services over the web. CardService International is one such organization, as is PayQuake (mentioned earlier), but there are many others. Shop around and look for the deal thats best for your particular needs. What might be right for one business won’t be the best fit for another.
With any merchant account from any provider, verify it provides a payment gateway that is compatible with your ecommerce store software. The payment gateway is the bridge between your online storefront and your merchant account. There are a great deal of them, just like different store software, but most perform equally as well as the next. There will probably be a “gateway fee” charged as part of a merchant account package’s costs. Most of the common store packages support a variety of payment gateways, so finding one that is compatible with a chosen merchant account shouldn’t be too difficult.
Conclusions
A number of options have been considered. Online checks, though common, may make customers uncomfortable in a world where Internet fraud is such a hot topic. 3rd party processors make taking credit cards easy, but that same ease works against them in the eyes of the picky consumer who won’t take a PayPal store “seriously”. Merchant accounts provide the most common, respected means to take payment, but they can be difficult to obtain and the sheer number of choices can be confusing. No matter what option, or options, chosen, do the necessary research and find the solution that works best for your individual needs.
About the Author:
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.
Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.
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“Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we own to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” Carl Jung
It started a couple months ago. I spotted a chandelier from a dozen feet away at one of my favorite shops downtown. Charmed immediately, my mind raced on how I could possibly talk my husband, Ernie, into buying it for meor even worse, how I could sneak it home and surprise (no…shock) him with it later. Made of black rod-ironwith a primitive brass rooster suspended between a couple of curlicued edges, it “spoke to me” and I knew I had to find a place for it in my home. Trouble was: it was non-electrified. Candles only. While this certainly added to its innate charmfor me anywayI knew that it’d be a hard sell for my husband. That it’d be the deal-breaker. Too impractical. Too unnecessary. Too French.
I kept my eye on it, visiting the shop every week or so to be sure no one had bought “my” chandelier. When it went on “clearance” ten days before my birthday, I practically jumped out of my skin. I knew a New York dealer would snatch it up and re-sell it in the city for more than double, with the lucky buyer still feeling like she found the deal of the century.
When I not-so-subtlety informed Ernie that nightat his own birthday celebrationthat I found what I wanted for my birthday, he retorted, with some annoyance, that it was highly inappropriate for me to talk about my materialistic desires while we were celebrating his big day. As (almost) always, he was right. I blew it.
Unbeknownst to me, our oldest son, Nick, and Ernie strategized and that week, Nick went to the shop, bought the chandelier, had it wrapped, and hid it in our house until we celebrated my birthday the next week. Needless to say, I couldn’t have been more delighted that this charming new addition was about to be a part of our home.
The chandelier sat on the floor of my dining room for the next four weeks. What with a seminar I had enrolled in taking up my Saturdays, with back-to-back business trips for Ernie, and with taxes due, blah blah blah….we didn’t have a spare minute to get around to hanging it (not to mention the fact that we had no idea where to put it.)
So I started walking around the house, trying to figure out where I would put my way-too-charming, way-too-impractical, way-too-French chandelier in my home. And when I did so, I realized that I needed to shake things up. That we needed to re-arrange furniture, re-distribute decorative accessories, and re-hang our artwork.
The arrival of spring generally has this effect on me. Fresh starts. Puppies. Bursting bulbs. Injections of sunshine and color. So it seemed perfectly reasonable to make sunrise on Easter morning our deadline. Getting my whole family on board, we mentally got psyched up to spend the weekend getting the house all shook up.
We went into attack mode. We sorted and sifted, re-shelved and re-shifted, re-hung and re-made. With drill in one hand and hammer in the other, we walked room to room, with eyes roaming for new arrangements, new furniture and art placements, and new uses for old things.
It took us awhile to figure out where to put the rooster chandelier. Purchased with strong magnetic attraction yet with no idea of where to hang it, we found one only by hoisting it up in several different rooms of the house. With trial and error, by re-doing and un-doing, we not only found a spot that, once hung, made it appear as if the house was practically built for this chandelier; we finished the bulk of the “shakin’ up job” at the same time that our bodies begged for beds. And when the sun rose on Easter morning, we woke up convinced that the shakin’ up was all worth it.
Life is all about shakin’ things up. If we don’t shake ‘em up voluntarilyfinding something for the house or the body or the kids or the spouse; or taking the vacation; or bringing home the new petthat requires re-arranging the status quoit seems that life shakes things up for us. Whether we’re ready for the shakin’ up or not. Husbands change jobs. Kids go off to college. Toddlers discover the joy of running. Houses burn down. Best friends move. Loved ones get sick. All of these shake things up. Sometimes this leaves you thinking: “I was perfectly happy unshaken, thank you very much!”
And yet sometimes shakin’ things up is exactly what’s needed. Shakin’ up forces you out of your rut. It gets your creative juices flowing. It stretches your imagination and requires you to “get out of your brain” (as I kept repeating to Ernie as we scratched our heads over the chandelier thing).
As spring fever starts grabbing you by the throat, try getting mentallyand physicallyprepared for the shakin’ up that life will undoubtedly be bringing your way. Keep your eyes wide open for the infinite creative possibilities that living a “shakin’ up life” affords.
Despite the way that life has shakin’ up our worldwhat with it turning it upside down and standing on its headit’s keeping us on our toes. Alert and ever ready. With expectant optimism for God’s best. Each day. All the way.
Carolina Fernandez earned an M.B.A. and worked at IBM and as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch before coming home to work as a wife and mother of four. She totally re-invented herself along the way. Strong convictions were born about the role of the arts in child development; ten years of homeschooling and raising four kids provide fertile soil for devising creative parenting strategies. These are played out in ROCKET MOM! 7 Strategies To Blast You Into Brilliance. It is widely available online, in bookstores or through 888-476-2493. She writes extensively for a variety of parenting resources and teaches other moms via seminars, workshops, keynotes and monthly meetings of the ROCKET MOM SOCIETY, a sisterhood group she launched to “encourage, equip and empower moms for excellence.” Please visit http://www.rocketmom.com.
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With the advent of ‘Service Pack 2′ for Windows XP operating system, Microsoft have really made the forums hum.
Every forum on computer problems is replete with complaints that since downloading and installing ‘SP2′, many ‘third party’ applications don’t work.
This service pack was needed to keep viruses and trojans out of people’s computers when they are on the internet, but it has caused a world wide backlash against the software giant because people’s favored applications won’t work, or the computer crashes when they try to open them. Many people have said they will buy a Mac or try Linux instead.
What causes all this fury against Microsoft who are only trying to make surfing the internet safer?
Maybe there was an almighty rush to release this service pack before it had been thoroughly beta tested on all applications to see what the issues would be.
The complexity of this service pack is such that you really need to have a degree in I.T. just to set it’s parameters, instead of relying on it’s default settings, before you can successfully use it. It really needed a dvd movie to accompany it to visually show what you had to set before starting up any ‘third party’ applications, but this was not thought necessary because Microsoft were offering free technical support via a free phone number.
Some applications require that you open ports manually, but who would know that without clear instructions?
Some of the applications that need ports to be opened for them include the following:- “Visual Studio.Net”, “SQL”, “Backup Exec 9″, “Ghost Server Corporate Edition 7.5″, “Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate Edition 8.0″, “SMS 2003 Server”, “CuteFTP 5.0 xp”, “Exceed 7.0 and 8.0″, “Kea! 340 5.1″, “View Now 1.05″, “Microsoft Operations Manager 2000″, “AutoCad 2004″, “Backup Exec 9.1 4691″, “Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard”, “Cold Fusion MX Server Edition 6″, “eTrust 6.0.100″, “Netshield 4.5″, “IBM Tivoli Storage Manager” …and the list goes on.
Many games won’t work. Games that need “DX9.0c” to run, are not supported by the ‘SP2′, so games don’t run.
Virus scanning software by McAfee, Sourcenet, Sonic Wall, Command Anti-Virus, either give error messages, or crash the computer.
Most scanners including Umax scanners may not work and give error messages, or continually re-boot the computer.
Some of the features of Ebay Toolbar will cease to function. Users of Ebay’s Enhanced Picture Service are locked out.
Applications which may not work are programs that have to contact a server to work at all, some ftp, multimedia streaming software, ‘new mail’ notifications in some email applications. Some programs reported not working are webservers such as “Internet Information Services” (IIS), “Remote Desktop”, “File Sharing”.
Many large companies are so concerned about the applications incompatability issues that IBM have notified all staff not to install ‘SP2′.
Complaints to ‘third party’ software suppliers are soaring as if it is their fault applications don’t work.
Even e-books downloaded from the internet are refusing to fully open.
The only way to get these applications to work is to uninstall ‘SP2′ by going to ‘Start’ then ‘Control Panel’ then ‘Add Remove Programs’.
Microsoft, as if to shove the blame on users, have warned that installing ‘SP2′ on a ’spyware’ infested machine is a ‘bad idea’.
Summing up the pro’s and con’s of installing ‘SP2′, one forum poster stated it simply:-
“Windows XP is incompatable with SP2″.
About The Author
Tony Dean is a published author and runs a web site selling ebooks and software for immediate download: http://www.ebook-sales.com
To subscribe to his weekly ezine ‘Ebook-Sales Ezine’ send blank email: ebook-sales@aweber.com
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Rafael Palmeiro had us all believing that he never took steroids. Being a former major leaguer, he had me convinced as well. He also fooled the American public into thinking that he was one guy who abstained from it’s use.
What are we to believe now? Steroids in baseball has got way out of hand and has effected us all. What are our kids thinking? What are we teaching them? That it is alright to take steroids and to lie to congress.
It is shameful to think about it all. Steroids are a harmful drug that can have lasting effects and can even lead to death. It has a high morbidity rate with side effects of rage and depression and suicidal thoughts.
It’s time for all to wake up. To play the game right and to play it straight. What good is a record if you cheated along the way. What kind of integrity do you have?
The game needs to have players that represent honesty and integrity. It needs to have players that perform and do well from the result of good old fashioned hard work. People who will not only represent themselves but represent the game in a positive fashion.
Rafael Palmeiro is another example of the problems we face in society today. It’s time to go back to our roots, and do things the right way. With hard work, integrity, honesty, and a compassion for others. Not with enhancing drugs, deceitful testimonies, waving fingers, and a highway travelled by dishonesty.
Bill Bathe - former major league ballplayer who played for the Oakland A’s and S.F. Giants and played in the 1989 world series. Was tutored under such greats as Eddie Matthews, Billy Williams, Harmon Killebrew, and Dusty Baker to name a few. Website is http://www.pro-baseball-drills-and-equipment.com
You can subscribe to an XML or RSS feed directly from the home page for a direct feed of updated articles and news that will come right to your page.
To learn more about steroids you can visit his webpage http://www.pro-baseball-drills-and-equipment.com/steroid-in-baseball.html
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We have all seen the ads in magazines offering online degrees
from some vague and mysterious “universities”. Even if their
name as the University of Sing Sing doesn’t immediately put us
offer, their offers of not attending any classes should cause us
to pause for a moment.
Other signs of an online degree scam include a “school” that
doesn’t care about your academic record but wants your
MasterCard or Visa number for their records. Their only
admission requirement is that you fax or mail them a copy of
your c.v. or resume for their review. Another indication that
there might be a lack of legitimacy is that they promise you a
degree in 30 days. What the heck are you going to learn in 30
days? Nothing. But that is what your online degree will be worth
as well from this “institution” of higher learning.
Warning bells should go off as well if the online degree is
priced at an extremely low cost or for a lump sum of a couple of
thousand dollars. First of all you know that even an
undergraduate degree at any regular university will cost you at
least $30,000 to $50,000 a year so what exactly do you think you
will get for a few grand? In addition colleges or universities
seldom offer flat rate fees. They normally charge a set fee per
course or credit plus any associated costs.
Don’t settle for less when you can get and deserve more much
more. Reputable online degree programs offer you the real
opportunity to learn in your subject area of choice and at the
end of the day you want you and your family to benefit from your
studies. Avoid the online degree con artists and choose a school
and a program that will give you an accredited online degree
that you cannot only hang on the wall but take to the bank as
well.
Take advantage of the online opportunities to improve yourself
and your earning power. The United States Bureau of Labor
estimates that you will have the opportunity to dramatically
improve your salary by acquiring an online degree through a
distance learning program, up to $10,000 a year for people who
complete an online MBA program.
Online learning is a great way to gain new skills and improve
your future. Just make sure that the program you enter will be
of maximum benefit to you and not just to some paper degree
granter sitting in their parent’s basement. Be informed and get
the education and online degree that will fulfill your dreams.
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