How To Accept Credit Cards Online

If you’ve used a website builder, such as WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix, it’s relatively simple to implement online payments. Simply check out the site builder’s available third-party apps, extensions, and plugins. You won’t need technical expertise to get these apps working for you, so it’s one of the easiest solutions if you already have a website.

Another way to add payments to an existing site is to look for a payment processor that supports payment buttons. Shopify offers a range of packages, but if you are just in the market for a payment button, you can get by with the cheapest plan, Shopify Starter.

PayPal is another provider of easily-implemented payment buttons, though its payment processing fees are relatively high. Unlike with Shopify, you can use PayPal buy buttons for free (aside from the processing fees). You can even offer PayPal payment buttons to your customers as a secondary payment method, supplementing your primary payment method. After all, hundreds of millions of people have PayPal accounts, and many of them prefer to make online purchases with their PayPal balance.

While adding payments to an existing site is incredibly convenient and often requires little work, you won’t get quite as many tools as you would with a hosted eCommerce software solution. That brings us to the best option if you want to build a new site or have no website to start with: eCommerce software.

eCommerce software apps, sometimes called shopping carts or online store builders, are hosted, all-in-one solutions for online sales. Adding an eCommerce feature to an existing website requires you to choose a platform, buy the domain, and pay for hosting. With eCommerce apps like Shopify, you’ll get everything in a single package: online sales and product management, hosting, and sometimes even the ability to buy a domain name directly.

Typically, eCommerce apps will also help you centralize control of sales across multiple channels so that if you sell on social media, on eBay, or through another channel, you can handle order fulfillment through a single platform. That even includes buying postage (at a discounted rate) and printing the shipping labels.

Some online store builders will offer marketing tools or integrations with marketing platforms and integrations with the best point of sale (POS) systems.

Generally speaking, even if an eCommerce app doesn’t offer all of the features you want, you can search the app market for available extensions and integrations to get what you need. It’s worth researching the available add-ons as well as the native software features.

One of the easiest ways to accept credit cards on a website is by using a hosted payment page. This feature redirects customers to a secure checkout page hosted by your processor when they need to enter their payment information. If you’ve ever used PayPal to make an online payment and had to hop over to PayPal’s website to check out, you’ve used a hosted payment page.

Hosted payment pages are very easy to integrate into your website, usually only requiring a few lines of preformatted code that you can cut and paste into your site. By momentarily directing customers off your site to check out, you’ll eliminate the hassle of having to secure and encrypt your server to meet PCI compliance requirements. Sensitive credit card data will never be stored on your server, dramatically reducing the chance of a data breach.

Generally speaking, invoicing software is cloud-based, so you can access it anywhere. You can customize invoices and send them via email or generate a shareable link to the invoice. But unlike old-fashioned invoicing, this method includes a link to pay directly in the invoice. Your customers follow the link, enter their payment details, and bam! With the best invoicing software, you get paid much more quickly.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of being able to buy products directly through social media channels was novel and experimental. Nowadays, you can create your online shop through Facebook, Instagram, and buyable pins on Pinterest!

Shopify stands out as a very good solution for selling through social media. While its core offering is an online shopping cart, Shopify’s Starter plan includes access to buy buttons and the ability to share and sell products via Instagram, WhatsApp, and many other social media channels.

If yes, do you like your website? Would you rather abandon it for a better site with more features? If you already have a site and don’t want to go through the effort of creating a new one to sell a handful of products, adding payment buttons or using one of the many available plugins might be the easiest option.

Of course, you don’t need a website to accept payments online. Very small and part-time businesses can get away with using online invoicing software or social media to make their sales. However, for any full-time operation, we strongly recommend that you have a website to promote your business and process credit card payments online. The COVID-19 pandemic only served to emphasize just how important it is for businesses to stake out their corner of cyberspace in the 21^st century.

When it comes to numbers, you need to look at both upfront costs and monthly (or yearly) costs. How much can you spend at the outset, and how much do you expect to be able to afford on a monthly or annual basis?

Keep in mind that the more technically advanced your website is, the more you can expect to pay to build and maintain it. Likewise, the more inventory you have, the more you can expect to pay. If you decide to go the custom route or hire a developer, don’t forget to add these to payment processing costs.

While credit and debit cards are the go-tos for accepting payments online, they aren’t the only options. For starters, there are ACH bank transfers, which are less expensive to process and allow customers who don’t own a credit card to buy from you. ACH payments are often preferred in B2B environments, but some consumers favor them, too.

While almost all providers offer an eCheck/ACH payment service, PaymentCloud and Stripe place more emphasis on this feature. You should also consider alternative payment methods, such as Apple Pay, which can be much less expensive to process than other card-not-present options.

Although you will definitely need a payment processor to accept credit cards, you won’t necessarily need a true, fully-featured merchant account. Payment service providers (e.g., Square, PayPal, and others) can process your transactions but do not provide individual merchant accounts. Instead, they aggregate all of their users into a single shared merchant account. This practice simplifies the account setup process by eliminating the need for credit checks for low-risk businesses. Unlike actual merchant accounts, you won’t be issued a unique merchant ID number that identifies your business to the credit card processing networks.

Additionally, traditional merchant accounts are often only available to businesses that process higher volumes, which can cause a huge stumbling block for a smaller business that is just launching or an owner without established credit. The main drawback that we’ve seen with using a payment service provider is that account holds, freezes, and terminations are more frequent due to stricter underwriting guidelines.

As we note in our look at the cost of credit card processing online, payment service providers work best for small, low-volume, and seasonal businesses. Established businesses with a higher processing volume should typically invest in a full-service merchant account.

The more customization you need (both in your site and in the payment flow), the more you’ll need to either outsource a developer and web design team or take the time to do it yourself. With many of the providers we’ve profiled above, however, you can probably get by without having to touch code at all if you don’t want to.

If you want to sell online, security is critical. That means ensuring your site is PCI compliant. The more involved you are in the payment process and the more sensitive information your website handles, the more burden you are taking upon yourself.

Fortunately, many payment processors and other software providers offer solutions to keep your customer’s information secure and reduce your PCI burden. In many cases, you may not need to do anything because the sensitive data is all tokenized or hosted elsewhere!

You’re going to need to keep track of all those online credit card transactions, and you’ll need accounting software to do so. Integrating your accounting software with your payment processing service sounds like a good idea, but that’s not always the case.

QuickBooks, for example, is the industry leader in small business accounting and a great product. However, the optional QuickBooks Payments processing service won’t be a fit for all businesses using QB for accounting. In any event, most merchant service providers on the market today integrate with QuickBooks, so don’t feel locked into a single provider just because you use it.