How To Receive On Site Payments
One of the many challenges that most new internet entrepreneurs face is receiving payments via their site. When starting out most of us don’t have a bottomless sack of money. How can you cheaply and securely receive payments? There are many payment processors on the internet. Some are cheaper than others. I’m going to highlight just one today. This one is free.
We’re going to look at:
Where to go for reliable, secure and cost effective payments processors
How to install the payment buttons in a web page.
PayPal: This is the free option. We will explore the free option here and in another article I will explore some of the good cheap options available. Go to PayPal.com and open a free account. You will need to verify yourself and PayPal will tell you what they expect for you to verify your identity. PayPal is a very secure and safe way to receive payments.
Before you begin to think about creating your payment buttons, there is one thing you will need.This is the URL of the download page. You will need this information as this is where PayPal sends your customer after payment has been completed.
Now you need to log into your PayPal account. After you log-in look for Merchant Tools. Open Merchant Tools and this opens up to you some options. These options are: Shopping Cart, Buy Now Buttons, and Subscriptions and recurring Payments.
You would choose the shopping cart if your site had a number of products available. The customer can pick and choose as you would in a super market. After choosing the items wanted the customer finalizes their sale by going to checkout and paying for the items in the cart.
Buy Now Buttons are used on sites where the sales page offers just one item. There are no choices to be made, only to buy the product on offer. This button will send the customer directly to PayPal to finalize the transaction.
As is the case with buy now button, the subscription and recurring payments button is for just one item. Payments continue to be made at intervals specified by you. These can be weekly, monthly, yearly or any period you specify. This payment system also allows for a trial period and then the payments at the specified intervals.
Once the details are filled in PayPal provides you with an encrypted script that you need to install on your sales page. You will need to position it where you want the payment button to appear.
Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor, scroll down the page to where you want the button to appear. Now click your mouse here so that the cursor is blinking where the button is to appear. Create a table. Click your mouse inside the table, and change the view to code view. You should now see the cursor blinking in the code. Make sure you have copied the PayPal code to the clipboard of the computer. Click on “Edit” and then “Paste”. This will insert the PayPal code into your page. If you need to center it just use center as you would text.
You can test it by switching to browser view and see how your page will display on the internet.
You have now successfully inserted a payment button into your site.
Filed under: Business