Accepting Credit Card Payments Online
If you need to accept payments for goods or services through your website, the easiest way for your customer is to accept credit cards.
Some options to accept credit cards through your website are:
- Implement a third-party merchant facility, such as PayPal. Integration is very cheap, because you link to PayPay’s website where your customer enters their credit card details. This solution is not as professional, but is quick and cheap to implement.
- Ask for credit card details using a secure form, and have these encrypted and stored in an area where you can view them. You then process the credit cards manually through your EFTPOS terminal or virtual terminal provided by your bank. This option is relatively inexpensive to implement, but requires you to manually process the payment each time.
- Integrate directly with your bank’s credit card gateway (most will have this service.) It will involve more programming than the other options, but allows you to both offer instant payment and keep the customer entirely on your website. It is also generally the cheapest option as you only pay the fees charged by your bank.
Choosing the most appropriate option depends on the nature of your business, sales volume and budget.