Take online payments today!

More and more services are offering quick, easy and cheap ways of taking payments via your site. We tell you who you can trust with your cash!

Shopping online is on the up and much has changed in the past few years. However broadly speaking there are still two main ways to take payments on your website.

The first is of course using a credit or debit card through a direct connection to your bank or via a payment gateway. The second way to take cash online involves third party payment services like PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon Flexible Payments.

Lets look at the costs, questions you should consider and some of the key differences.

For SME's using services offered by your banking provider - such as Barclays EPDQ, Merchant Services from HSBC or Streamline from Natwest - can appear the easy option, BUT these maybe costlier than shopping around. Likewise PayPal, which is great for making small payments cost-effective could be more expensive for processing credit & debit transactions.

So, how do you decide which is the best option? Well, you need to consider the volume of sales you expect to be making, therefore you can work out your processing charges. You should also look at how many transactions your provider will allow before increasing their prices. In some cases it may be a free, but based on low volume of transactions.

As a rule third party payment services charge 4-10 per cent of your transaction amount. For newer, low volume sites it's usually a good route taking these higher fee's for lower fixed costs while you grow the site/business. Once established with some trading history it is well worth looking at payment gateways, where costs could be 2-4 per cent.

For more info and advice email michael@dpi21.com