Online Payment Options

The challange of making money online is to find ways where people are willing to pay you.

If you still haven't found a way to make money online, you couldn't possibly have read any of the step-by-step guides from my website. For example, you could easily make money from an AdSense Website, or in Affiliate marketing. However, if you do engage in affiliate marketing or as a publisher in CPC advertising, then you don't even have to worry about payment alternatives, as the affiliate company or affiliate network you're working for will take care of the payment processing.

However, if you're running your own e-commerce store, or if you are charging people for any products or services through your website, they you need to provide at least one payment option.

PayPal (Global)

The easiest way, probably, is to get paid through PayPal. With PayPal you can...

• Accept credit cards.
• Send and request money worldwide.
• Track your online spending.

As a merchant you can capture funds, which is a request to process the payment your buyer authorized. If successful, the capture moves funds from your buyer's account to your PayPal account. You can also reauthorize, which offers you a new honor period for your authorization. Finally, you can void the authorization, which removes your ability to capture funds on the authorization, and returns PayPal balance funds to the buyer if applicable.

It's free to sign up for a PayPal account or to send money to friends and family. You can also transfer funds from your bank accounts to your PayPal account at no charge.

Authorize.net (United States)

Authorize.net is a Payment Gateway which can help you accept credit card and electronic check payments quickly and affordably. More than 200,000 merchants trust Authorize.Net to manage their transactions, help prevent fraud, and grow their business.

Authorize.Net acts as a bridge between your company and the financial entities that handle the processing and settlement of credit card transactions.

Your Merchant Bank Account is the bank account that allows you to receive settlement funds for credit card transactions processed through the Internet.

The Acquiring Bank is the bank that holds your merchant bank account. If you signed up for the Authorize.Net Payment Gateway through a reseller or other sales organization, you may not have a direct relationship with your acquiring bank.

The Processor refers to the payment processor that processes credit card transactions. The Credit Card Issuer is the financial institution or bank that issued the credit card to your customer. The Credit Card Interchange System refers to the system established by the credit card associations that allows acquiring banks to submit credit card transactions to the credit card issuing bank for settlement on behalf of their merchant clients.

The following steps describe the actual credit card process:

1. A credit card transaction is submitted to the Authorize.Net Payment Gateway.
2. Authorize.Net automatically passes the transaction over a secure connection to the Processor.
3. The Processor passes the transaction to the Credit Card Interchange System.
4. The Credit Card Interchange System routes the transaction to the appropriate Credit Card Issuer.
5. The Credit Card Issuer approves or declines the transaction based on available funds and passes both the transaction results and, if approved, the appropriate funds back through the Credit Card Interchange System.
6. The Credit Card Interchange System relays the transaction results to the Processor.
7. The Processor relays the transaction results to Authorize.Net.
8. Authorize.Net stores the transaction results and sends them back to the customer, and/or you, the merchant.
9. The Credit Card Interchange System passes the appropriate funds for the transaction to the Acquiring Bank.
10. The Acquiring Bank passes remaining funds to the merchant bank account you use to receive settlement funds.

On average, steps 1-8 take only 2 to 3 seconds, so Authorize.net is really fast.

2checkout.com (Global)

2checkout.com provides turnkey e-commerce solutions to thousands of business customers around the world. 2CO's proprietary technology supports back-office functions including financial reporting, tracking, fraud prevention, affiliate tracking, customer service and sales tracking.

WorldPay (Global)

WorldPay enable thousands of businesses to accept payments on the Internet, by phone, fax or mail. Credit and debit cards, bank transfers and instalments. In any language and most currencies. All through one merchant account, one payment processing system.

Protx (United Kingdom)

Protx provides secure online credit card and debit card payment solutions for thousands of online and mail order businesses across the UK.

Thet have grown to become the largest independent Payment Service Provider in the UK because our solutions offer our customers exceptional value for money without compromising on the level of service and functionality they provide.

SECPay (United Kingdom)

SECPay is the UK’s largest independently owned processor of secure, real-time, online credit and debit card transactions.

They specialize in the provision of payment services for merchants on the Internet, through Call Centres and for Mail Order Fulfilment Houses. SECPay handles the capture, authorisation and settlement of credit and debit card payments and all the associated electronic and physical security required.

DIBS Payment Services (Scandinavia)

DIBS Payment Services is the leading Scandinavian Internet service provider, founded in 1998. They serve more than 6,500 customers from its offices in Copenhagen, Aalborg, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Oslo.

PSI Gate (United States)

PSI Gate (Payment Services Interactive Gate) provides Premier Secure Transaction Processing Services that is a world class solution deployed on Sun Solaris, Oracle and Sun Enterprise Servers in a fully redundant, mission critical, clustered configuration. They are able to ensure maximum performance while taking into account power, security, disaster tolerance and bandwidth requirements.

Related Services

• VeriSign - show that your Web site can be trusted.
• HackerSafe - provider of website security services.
• MasterCard.com
• VISA

Accepting Payments Is Easier Than Ever Before!

...as long as you rely on established services (as the ones mentioned above).

Adding ecommerce functionality or simply the option to accept electronic payments on your website is easier and more affordable than ever before. Use the resources and information that you've been given on this page to accept payments for the products or services that you are selling online.

If you run into problems with the implementation, there's always someone to ask. For example, if you're running an osCommerce store you could use the community forum, or you could get help directly from the support team of the payment processing system of your choice.

Making your own payment system though, and working directly with the big credit card companies, is nothing I would ever recommend. This will cost you a lot of money in startup costs, you would probably have to hire a security team and you would have a great deal of responsibility as you would need to store very sensitive customer data in your database. The only exception would be if you were charging for millions of dollars per day through your website.

Do yourself a favour and save yourself a lot of work: Team up with established payment services rather than making your own system for processing credit cards, you won't regret.