by Lucas Heijn

To be able to receive on site payments is relatively easy and painless. In fact there is a free way as well as some low cost methods. In order to be in business on the internet you must be able to receive payments for your products on line. Most of us don’t have a bottomless pit of money to throw around, so we need to look for cost effective, affordable and reliable methods.

Our focus in this article is:

Where to get free reliable and safe credit card processor.

How to place the payment button into the web page.

A free, secure and reliable payment processor is PayPal. The only cost with PayPal is a small charge for each sale that is made. You only pay out of your profit when a sale is made. Go to PayPal.com and open an account. You will be required to verify this account. PayPal will tell you how. You will be expected to supply your credit card details. This is quite safe with PayPal.

Before you begin to think about creating your payment buttons, there is one thing you will need.This is the URL of the download page. You will need this information as this is where PayPal sends your customer after payment has been completed.

Now to creating your payment button. Log into your PayPal account and look for “Merchant Tools”. This will open up a choice of “Shopping Cart”, “Pay Now Buttons” or “Subscriptions or recurring Payments”

You would choose the shopping cart if your site had a number of products available. The customer can pick and choose as you would in a super market. After choosing the items wanted the customer finalizes their sale by going to checkout and paying for the items in the cart.

Buy Now Buttons are used on sites where the sales page offers just one item. There are no choices to be made, only to buy the product on offer. This button will send the customer directly to PayPal to finalize the transaction.

As is the case with buy now button, the subscription and recurring payments button is for just one item. Payments continue to be made at intervals specified by you. These can be weekly, monthly, yearly or any period you specify. This payment system also allows for a trial period and then the payments at the specified intervals.

Once you fill in the details of the product, PayPal produces an encrypted script you will need to install on the site where you want the button to appear.

Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor, scroll down the page to where you want the button to appear. Now click your mouse here so that the cursor is blinking where the button is to appear. Create a table. Click your mouse inside the table, and change the view to code view. You should now see the cursor blinking in the code. Make sure you have copied the PayPal code to the clipboard of the computer. Click on “Edit” and then “Paste”. This will insert the PayPal code into your page. If you need to center it just use center as you would text.

Now go to browser view and check how it will look on line.

That’s it! You have set up a page to take payments.

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