Earning And Making Money

Getting Paid For Your Products, Services And The Work You Do

To receive the payments for your products or services, or the work you do directly with your clients as a freelancer, product reviewer or expert adviser on the internet, you will need to find a way to get paid, one of the most common ways of doing this, is to accept credit card payments.

 

The Basics – What You Need To Know First
 
You can accept credit card payments online with a merchant account, payment gateway and/or shopping cart software. The merchant account provides you with an account with a financial firm/organization you may use for credit or debit card transactions, a payment gateway allows you to actually accept credit/debit card payment transactions securely online, a shopping cart software helps your customers/clients (web visitors) in selecting multiple items, products or services at once, for single payments. A shopping cart software may also keep track of your inventory and may also provide you with some shipping options, if you sell tangible or physical goods or products.

You will most likely have to pay some fees to set up and use your own merchant account and/or payment gateway. Generally, you will need a website of your own to accept payments through a merchant account on the internet. You may or may not use a shopping cart software with your merchant account, a lot will depend on how you want your customers/clients to place their orders through your site, and may also depend on if you need some other option or feature, that may be available in some specific shopping cart software. You may choose to use a free or paid shopping cart software with your merchant account and gateway. You may also simply choose to present your customers with a payment form/page, to fill-in their payment details, and a receipt page that confirms when an order has gone through, without using a shopping cart software.

You will mostly need a shopping cart software if you want your customers/clients to place some orders for more than one item at a time. You can link, integrate or connect your site with your merchant account, payment gateway and/or shopping cart software by yourself, if you know how, or you may need to outsource this out to a web designer/programmer, you can do this through some of the outsourcing sites listed here.

If you are selling a tangible/physical product, you will need to provide some shipping options for your online customers. You may handle your product shipping by yourself, or may choose to use a third-party courier service. To use a third party courier service with your online order payment system (that is, your merchant account and payment gateway), you may need to registered an account with a courier service, and will need to become familiar with how to integrate your online order payment system, with the courier service system, there should be some sort of guide, from your chosen courier service provider, on how to do this.

Some shopping cart software may come with some common or popular shipping options already integrated with the software, and all you may need is to plug in or add your account number with specific courier services, and set some shipping options for your product. With some other shopping cart software however, you may have to integrate your courier service shipping module from the ground up, you may choose to do this by yourself too, or may outsource the task out to a web designer/programmer too, you can easily get some web designers/programmers at some of the outsourcing sites listed here.

If you want to encourage others to sell for you (that is, as affiliates), you will need an affiliate tracking software, which is an additional software you will need to add or use with your merchant account order payment system, to track the sales/revenue you earn through your affiliates, so you can pay them later at some specified period of time. You may outsource the integration of your affiliate tracking software, with your merchant account order payment system too. You may use a free or paid affiliate tracking software/service, and may also have to install/set up the affiliate software on your site, or may choose to use a third party affiliate tracking service with your merchant account setup. You may also want to have a look at some of the other affiliate tracking options discussed, in some of the later sections below.

An online business (or merchant) can accept credit/debit card payments for a product or service, with a merchant account through a website or even a blog. While a freelancer, product reviewer or expert adviser may accept his/her fees directly too with the same, through a site/blog, and may also get paid through the payment systems of the outsourcing sites, he/she may have joined.

Setting up a custom merchant account and payment gateway is usually ideal for those with large volume of sales or orders, you may however want to look at other alternatives or options as discussed in the next section.

 

Other Options – Free Ecommerce Services (Use It With Or Without A Website)

If you cannot set up a merchant account for whatever reason, you may use a third party payment service (that is, a third party payment processor), to receive your credit/debit card payments on the internet. And you can do this for free too, without having to pay any upfront fee.

In addition to receiving your credit/debit card payments through a third party payment processor, you may also use them too to accept e-currency payments (e-currencies are online currencies that are solely used on the internet). Examples of third party payment services you can use to accept e-currencies are AlertPay and OKPay.

You can generally convert e-currencies into the more traditional form of currency or money (that is, checks/cheques, wire transfers etc). You therefore have the option of accepting not just credit and debit card payments, but also e-currency payments and orders too. You may join more than one third party payment processor sites, to accept different types of e-currencies. The more payment options you have for your online customers/clients to place their orders, the more money you are likely to make on the internet. To use these services, you should ideally look for third party payment processors like AlertPay and OKPay, that will allow you to set up one or more free business accounts, and charge you, only when you actually receive a payment from your customer/client’s order.

Another form of third party payment processing is the provision of an online marketplace by some third party sites on the internet. With these, you can set up an online store for your service or product on a third party site, and then refer potential customers or clients to buy, order and pay through such sites.

With third party payment processors, you may simply use a url or button link, that your potential customers/clients can click on, to get to a form that accept payments/orders, on the third party payment processor site, after setting up the details for your products or services, with the third party payment processor.

You can accept payments directly for a product, service or a task/work done using the services of online sites like AlertPay and OKPay, with or without a website or blog. This is especially handy/useful for freelancers, product reviewers or expert advisers, who may not have a website or blog of their own, but still want to accept payments directly from their clients, without having to go through the payment system of an outsourcing firm/site.

If you need a little more than a url or button link however, for your orders, you can in most cases, use some of the available plugins (that is, codes) provided by third party payment processors, to customize your site or blog, to receive your payments and orders, and may generally be able to use these services too, with a shopping cart software.

If you want others to sell or promote for you as affiliates, either as an online merchant with a product to sell or a service to provide, or as a freelancer, product reviewer or expert adviser, who may wish to get some referrals through affiliates, you may choose to use an affiliate tracking software/service, with the third party payment processing services too. You can then pay your affiliates through the third party payment service, at some specified time later on, or through some other form of currency like checks/cheques etc. These may encourage more affiliates to join your program, especially those with existing accounts on these services. You will need to review each specific third party payment processor service, to know what is available and how to fit the service with what you want.

Some other option for accepting payments and orders, and tracking affiliate sales and revenue, is through an affiliate network. Affiliate networks can provide you with a way to accept online payments, and will also track your affiliate sales and revenue too. Examples of affiliate networks are AffiliateBot and LinkShare.

You can use any one of these services, (that is, the third party payment processors and affiliate networks), as a product owner (merchant), freelancer, product reviewer or expert adviser. To start free, you may get a free business account with OKPay and AlertPay, with no set up or upfront fee.

To encourage more orders, you should accept your online payments in more than one currency, or with more than one payment method, that is, credit/debit cards, AlertPay, OKPay etc, even if you have your own merchant account. This may also ensure that when one payment service goes down, your customers/clients can still place some orders through some other service.

You will need to ensure that you read the terms and conditions for any ecommerce payment service you may want to use online. You will want to be careful with ecommerce services that may charge you for inactive or dormant accounts, that is, you may be charged some fees, if your customers or clients fail to buy or place an order, over some specified period of time, as these type of charges/penalties may totally drain your profits over time, if you only get some orders now and then.

And if you wish to use an affiliate network, you may want to avoid affiliate networks that deactivate inactive affiliate links (that is, affiliate links that online customers or clients fail to buy or place an order through, over some specified period of time).

Not only will the affiliate lose some of his/her revenue if a customer/client decides to buy later on, but this may create more than just a little bit of work, for the hard working affiliate, since he/she will have to gain the same approvals again, from the corresponding affiliate program of each deactivated link, and may also have to replace his/her affiliate links, in all the content pages and/or promotional materials, they may have been used before.

Most affiliates that are aware of affiliate networks, that run their sites in this manner, will generally avoid such networks, or any affiliate program that may be associated with them. You should therefore compare several affiliate networks and the other options you have, as discussed here, to set up an affiliate program that will encourage more people, to join your own program.