How to Accept Credit Card Payments

Is there a 'best' company, a superior service for credit card processing on your niche market website?

There are quite literally over a thousand different providers and methods for accepting credit card payments online.

I'm going to recommend only two companies based on their ease of use, minimal service cost, and reputation. These two are best for start up businesses and new internet entrepreneurs selling digital products.

Credit Card Merchant #1 - Clickbank

The first service I use and recommend is ClickBank (they may just be the biggest credit card processor for downloadable reports and ebooks).

ClickBank comes highly recommended for the start up niche marketer. Why? Because sooner or later you will want an army of affiliates helping you to sell your downloadable products. ClickBank does all the work for you.

Finding and managing affiliates via the ClickBank network requires no extra work on your part. Affiliate marketers in the know (other niche-market promoters) will find out about your product just from surfing the Clickbank marketplace. We all do this at least once per month to see what new products can be offered to our email lists, through pay-per-click, or on our websites to earn extra commission.

Affiliate marketers will advertise your link and/or recommend your info-product in exchange for whatever  commission rate you set. Industry standard is a minimum of 40% payment to your affiliates - any less and not too many marketers will pick your product to promote - after all promoting a product can be costly - either in money or in work involved.

Now don't worry that you don't have time to manage an affiliate team and make payments to them. ClickBank collects all payments and mails both of you a check. You don't even need to keep records!

The cost to set up an account with ClickBank is $50, but you can sell a multitude of products on any number of websites with one account. This is one $50 charge you won't mind on your credit card statement because with proper promotion, you and your affiliates will be receiving checks before your credit card statement arrives!

Credit Card Merchant #2 - PayPal

The second service I use and recommend is PayPal. PayPal is the best known (due to it's increased use on ebay.com) payment processor, but only use it if you plan on selling every copy of your product yourself (without affiliates).

PayPal has recently added a few new features to it's service offering - namely affiliate management (still not as smooth as Clickbank's interface), and subscription payments. Subscription payments are a bonus feature that you will eventually need in your online business. PayPal automatically bills your customer and pays you on a pre-determined schedule without fault. If you were running any kind of membership site or monthly billed service PayPal is the one for you.

There are currently no start up fees to open an account with PayPal and you can start receiving money right away from your ebay sales or website purchases. A great way to get going with your online business. 

Registration is free at PayPal. If you can manage it right off, register for a business account (it looks more professional at the payment screen for your visitors to see a business name than rather than a personal email address).