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With the variety of options available to a business looking to make its products and services available to the public online, this may be the first question you ask yourself: What is the best way to accept payments online? The following questions may follow: Which method will best suit my business and my customers? how much will it cost? Is it worth it? Every business owner can answer the first three questions differently, but for any business, “Is it worth it?” The answer to this can be given an emphatic yes. No matter what business you’re in, there are many ways to increase your revenue online, making your storefront available to a world market 24/7. You are not limiting yourself to local customers; You have the ability to expand your target market horizons indiscriminately. In this article, we will discuss the top two payment acceptance options for retailers when they decide to get into e-commerce for the first time.
Lately, the continuation of this country’s poor economy has caused many brick-and-mortar-based companies to close their doors. Storefront locations carry with them the burden of high overhead and an absolute need to increase sales or face closure. Smart retailers have been able to offset some of this loss by shifting their focus from face-to-face selling to online. They are also attracting lots of new, loyal customers to their online storefronts, picking up customers previously unavailable due to the presence of their now-extinct competitors. Nowadays people are not only doing online shopping while sitting at home. Given how we live in an “I want it now” society, the market is shifting even more towards mobile e-commerce sites. A potential customer may be stuck in traffic and remember they need to order tail lights for their truck. The company that gets this business is the company that reaches out to the needy customer on the spot. Just thinking of the possible situations where a buyer would use your online shopping platform can produce a list containing hundreds of examples, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t want to accept online payments in a safe, secure environment. are not ready.
Let’s first look at what’s most recommended as a “newbie” option for accepting payments online: PayPal. Known around the world for its integration with (and as an asset of) eBay and its ease of use, PayPal has become the online payment gateway of choice for most new merchants. Payment gateway is defined as an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes online payments for businesses. PayPal may be a good fit for your business at first and help you sell and process payments online, but in the e-commerce world, it is not seen as the desired permanent solution. One of the major advantages of using PayPal is that they do not charge monthly account maintenance fees. This may be important to you if you’re just getting started in e-commerce and are unsure about how much online processing you’ll actually be doing and whether it’s worth investing in a more professional payment processing option. If you intend to sell your items on eBay, you will of course need a PayPal account in order to accept payments through the auction site. If you’ve previously submitted payments through PayPal, it’s fairly simple to transfer your account to be able to accept payments.
Now for the bad stuff: yes, PayPal is easy to set up and understand, but on your customer’s side, a merchant relying on PayPal to accept payments is seen as a less trustworthy, less established, potentially unprofessional business. Is. Your customer’s checkout process is interrupted. Upon checkout, your customer is taken to PayPal’s external website to complete the transaction, forcing the customer to sign up for a PayPal account if they don’t already have one. The big downside to this is that your customers may not want to sign up with PayPal. This appreciative response will result in a reduction in sales. We’re not going to review transaction fees here because they’re constantly changing, but in general, PayPal takes a big cut of each sale. PayPal doesn’t integrate visually with your website’s storefront, which means you can’t customize colors, fonts, headings, or maintain a look that’s consistent with your brand image. One final disadvantage of relying on PayPal to process customer payments online is that after the checkout process is complete, you no longer have access to important customer data. You haven’t learned anything about the person you just bought from: where do they live? How did they hear about your company? Did they find your site easy to navigate? All information about relationship building is lost to you. If you realize how important this information is to the growth of your business, you may want to move to a different payment gateway as soon as possible.
Let’s say you’ve set up a PayPal merchant account, but you want to project a more professional image of your company online. You can put PayPal on your website as an available payment option for your customers who may prefer to pay through them. It’s important to offer whatever is most convenient for your market. You’ll probably want to wait and see what kind of credit card processing volume you handle through both PayPal and our other payment gateway option, Authorize.Net, and then decide whether to use one or both payment options on your site. will be present or not. Authorize.Net is capable of allowing your buyers to enter their payment information directly on your site. It doesn’t force your customers to sign up for a third party account and keeps your site’s appearance consistent. By accepting payments directly on your site, you present a more professional image to potential customers. When a purchase is made, the funds are deposited directly into your business bank account. Alas, there’s always a downside: Authorize.Net charges you a monthly service fee. Like PayPal, there is a fixed transaction fee with each purchase. You need to set up a merchant account with one of Authorize.Net’s resellers (a merchant account allows your business to accept credit cards), but this isn’t necessarily a negative thing because any business Having a merchant account will be essential for business existence, especially if they also have a brick-and-mortar location. PayPal is not an option when transacting face to face.
When answering this article’s primary question, “What’s the best way to accept payments online,” it really depends on you and your business situation. Are you looking to test the waters to see if an e-commerce solution is something that will build your bottom line? Use PayPal for a few months and see how you fare. Are you a large business doing hundreds or thousands of sales per day? I wouldn’t hesitate to make the jump to Authorize.Net right away; You will save more money and get your payment in such a way that there is no thought of the monthly service fee being seen as a burden.
© 2010 Lorraine Wolfe
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