How To Accept Credit Cards

Unless you are exclusively doing affiliate marketing as your business model as a home based business owner, you’re going to need to be able to accept credit cards.

If you’re selling anything online, you need a way to accept credit cards.

I recently had a client who decided he was going to start selling on online auction sites.  He wanted me to give him some pointers on how to get his items to sell – he had been having some trouble.

So I took a look at one of his auction listings and found that he wasn’t accepting credit cards.  He was only willing to accept a personal check or money order.  If I were looking at a listing like that, to me it would scream fraud.  In this case it wasn’t, but you need to understand what people are thinking of they see you don’t accept credit cards.

I eventually got him straightened out and he starting making sales.

And if you have a standalone website, accepting credit cards is even more important.   I ran an ecommerce website for a few years in the early 2000s and while I offered the ability for people to mail in a check or money order, it was used approximately 1% of the time.  99% of the time, people used a credit card to pay for their order.

So let’s talk about your options for accepting credit cards online.

PayPal
PayPal is where many people first turn to start accepting credit cards online.  The fees charged by PayPal are actually quite reasonable and getting an account is extremely easy – you can start getting paid by people in minutes when you get setup with PayPal.

While there are more flexible and robust systems for accepting credit cards, there are many people who use it as their sole method of accepting online payments.

During my eBay seller years, I was a heavy user of PayPal, and it was my exclusive method for accepting credit cards for much of that time.

Caution: While you can use PayPal to process hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions each month, you need to be careful.  If your account suddenly starts to get a lot of activity, PayPal may hold your money for up to six months as a security precaution.  Once you start running significant amounts of money through your PayPal account, I recommend you get a real merchant account (see below) for processing credit cards transactions.

Google Checkout
Google Checkout is Google’s competitor to PayPal.  You’ll find that if you’re an eBay seller, you can’t use it, however.   (eBay owns PayPal and doesn’t want Google encroaching on their “cash cow.”)

However, this is another very easy way to accept credit cards online, and the fees are quite reasonable just like they are with PayPal.

Clickbank
If you’re only going to be selling digitally delivered products, you can use Clickbank to process your credit card transactions.   The advantage to using Clickbank is the large network of affiliates they bring to the table that can help you sell your product.

Their processing fees are quite a bit higher than that of other accounts and their system is only for processing digital products, but if you’re in that specific are and need credit card processing, this could be the right fit for you.

Merchant Account
Eventually, just about every business owner gets their own merchant account.  A merchant account will allow you to get the customer’s credit card information and process the card.  It will also allow you to take orders over the phone or in person.

However, getting a merchant account isn’t always a cheap or easy process.

I remember the first merchant account I got cost me nearly $500.  Not only that, but they also had a big pile of paperwork for me to fill out, and they even mailed me a one time use disposable camera that I had to use to take pictures of my place of  business and the types of items I was selling.  I then had to overnight the camera back to them so they could develop the pictures.

Fortunately, these days it’s a little bit easier to get approved for a merchant account.

I recently got a new merchant account and it was a far easier process.  I filled out all of the forms online, got a verification phone call and I was all setup.   There was no mountain of paperwork or camera to take pictures of my office.