If you plan to sell things over the Internet, you'll also need to plan out how people will pay for them. Collecting money online:
credit card Credit cards may be the most familiar method of collecting online, but they aren't the cheapest or the easiest. If you have an existing business, you already know about merchant accounts. If you don't, you're about to learn. In order to receive credit-card payments online, you have to first establish a merchant account with an FDIC-insured merchant bank. Be warned: This is a bureaucratic process, and a costly one. Between account set-up fees, processing fees, and transaction fees, you'll pay quite a bit for the privilege of accepting credit cards. So smaller merchants sometimes use cash-payment services like PayPal. online cash Online cash isn't exactly cash. These services like PayPal and Yahoo! PayDirect play the middleman, letting you transfer money directly from one person to another, while ensuring that it actually gets where it's going (and taking a cut for themselves, of course). "You'll be happy to know I just invested in a company which is developing technology which will allow me to wirelessly beam e-dollars to you, but to answer your question: Sorry dude, no change."
PayPal is the best known e-cash service, commonly used on auction sites like eBay, where individuals are selling to each other. It's a simple system. Users set up a PayPal account by transferring money from a bank account, charging it to their credit card, or sending a personal check. They can then buy online using this account. When someone buys from you, the amount is transferred from their account to yours (with roughly a 3% commission). micropayments Micropayments allow users to pay tiny amounts of money a few pennies, say, or less for a service they use online. This approach would be perfect for content sites of all sizes: The tiny payments would mean little to any individual consumer Why not pay a penny for an article, so long as it's easy to do so? but it could add up to significant revenues for the site. The trick, then, is making it easy. And that's the missing piece in this puzzle. Although several early players attempted to put such a system in place, none gained critical mass and they all died trying. File this idea lovely as it is under "someday."
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