Accepting Credit Cards Online: The Basics

I have quite a few people ask me about taking credit cards as payment for their online products. My first question to them is how many sales they are currently making. If they are not making any sales yet, or just one or two per day, the answer is very simple; a free PayPal shopping cart is the best choice at that point.

PayPal’s buy buttons and/or shopping cart buttons are a young ecommerce site’s best friend. There are no fees charged for simply using PayPal’s shopping cart and buy buttons. Of course normal selling fees are charged, but these are comparable to what one pays for “normal” credit card transactions. Adding the buy buttons to a web site is a simple copy and paste operation.

My point is that it costs nothing to use PayPal’s system; there are no monthly fees.

In the U.S., Internet site owners can accept PayPal payments from PayPal members and credit card payments from non-PayPal users. There are limitations to accepting credit card payments in some other countries.

However, there is a slight drawback to using their cart. They push using PayPal as the payment method. This is may be a turn-off to some customers, and I have no doubt that some sales are lost because of it. However, the trade-off for its ease of setting up and the fact that it is free, still make it the best choice for a young site.

In your site's early days, your time is better spent with marketing instead of learning and setting up a complicated shopping cart. After the site is making 2 or 3 sales per day, it’s time to begin thinking about a “real” shopping cart system. A more robust cart includes such things as:

• A database of customers (this one is very useful!)
• The ability to cross-sell and up-sell
• Inventory control
• Sales history via graphs and reports
• A variety of allowed payment methods

There is a cost for these features however. There are several ways to add a full featured shopping cart to a website. The lowest cost method is to simply purchase shopping cart software and add it to the site. This is the most difficult method and should be used only by experienced programmers.

A preferred method is to purchase a package from a host which includes hosting and the shopping cart system. This method will usually cost from $19 to $49 per month starting out. Our hosting/shopping cart system used for Cactus Canyon costs $99 per month.

Probably the easiest "real" shopping cart solution for most to set up is the 1shoppingcart system. I use 1shoppingcart for many of my sites and find it very user friendly and relativley easy to set up.

In addition to the shopping cart and hosting costs for a regular shopping cart, there are merchant account charges. The merchant account is the credit card account the site uses which is connected with their bank. Most merchant accounts charge a monthly fee or at least a minimum usage fee of around $20 per month. On top of these charges are the per sale charges which are from 2 to 3%.

A full featured shopping cart has a learning curve to it. Compared to the simple PayPal buttons, a robust cart is very complicated and takes time to learn. This is why I suggest using a simple method like PayPal’s system. A young site NEEDS traffic. A young site’s owner needs to spend as much time on Internet marketing as possible; using PayPal’s cart frees up more time for marketing your young site.