How To Start Accepting Payments Online

Today, I’m going to talk to you about how you can easily start accepting payments online. First off, let’s cover what not to do.

It’s 2020! Stop accepting checks and start taking online payments. Checks, nowadays, are inconvenient for your customer. Your customer has to get out their checkbook and then mail out the check or worse, they have to drop it off in-person. It’s also inconvenient for you, the business owner. Checks can take a long time to come by mail and they can even get lost. Online payment just provides a better user experience for everyone overall. Customers can easily pull up your payment page, put in their credit card information and move forward. Now, let’s talk about how to get you online.

You’ll want to ensure that however you’re accepting credit card information online, it is 100% secure. Do not use a normal website form to get your customer’s credit card information. If you are just accepting credit card information on a regular, not secured form, it is very dangerous for you and your clients. Someone could try to hack your site and steal that information.

Services like Venmo are meant for money transfers between people you trust, not for business transactions. These services can’t be held liable for business transactions. This actually happened to my fiancée a couple of years back. He was doing a business type of deal online. Somebody actually stole hundreds of dollars from him and he could not get it back, because the personal money transfer service he used did not have the measures in place to protect business transactions.

Let’s talk about the three best options that we would recommend for you to use when accepting payments online. The first one is QuickBooks then we have PayPal and then Stripe.

With QuickBooks, this can be a great option if you’re already utilizing QuickBooks for your accounting. You can easily just accept payments by sending out an email to someone. They can click a button that says pay now and then they can easily input their credit card information and pay your invoice. However, if you are not using QuickBooks for all the accounting features and different things of that nature, it might not be worth it for you. It might be an extra added expense that you don’t really need to pay for. In that case I would recommend using a payment processor like PayPal or Stripe.

You will connect these with whatever web page you’re using to promote your product or service, then when somebody goes to put in their credit card information, it will not get stored on your website. Instead, it will get stored within PayPal or Stripe.

Having it this way makes it a lot less of a security issue for you because you’re not actually storing that information yourself. If anyone were to hack your site, they would not be able to access that credit card information because it’s not stored on your server. I would definitely recommend getting a program like PayPal or Stripe as my top picks.

Let’s talk a little bit about the differences between the two. They’re actually very similar. They’re pretty much direct competitors. It really depends on what’s best for you and best for your business. We prefer Stripe but basically both have similarities in terms of the fee structure. They both charge a 2.9% fee plus 30 cents on each transaction. However, we love Stripe for its simplicity. Stripe allows you to use a payment form on your website checkout page while PayPal, on its lower-price tiers, requires customers to leave your website and go to their gateway in order to process payments.

If you have your own website already on website builders like SquareSpace or Wix, a lot of times they already have a payment gateway integration within the platform, so you can easily integrate PayPal or Stripe to that system. If you have WordPress, you can get the WP forms plugin which integrates directly with PayPal or Stripe.  Additionally you can get some type of e-commerce solution like Woocommerce where it’ll make it super easy to select your products or your services and then check out using PayPal or Stripe.

If you don’t have a site or just want to get this up very quickly, I would highly suggest your check out our 30-day free trial of our academy. In there, you can get access to our Automation Hub. We give you prebuilt pages with forms already on them and walk you through exactly how to connect your Stripe account to the form in minutes so you can start accepting payments ASAP. Additionally, we have ways where you can accept payments when someone books an appointment on your calendar. So, it makes everything incredibly easy and user friendly for your customer. If you are interested in that, go ahead and claim a free trial of our finally visible academy by going to finallyvisible.com.