A big decision when you start selling your crafts online is how you’re going to take your customers’ money. It needs to be fast and it needs to be easy. If you start making your customer jump through hoops just as they’re about to pay they’ll simply abandon their cart.

What’s more, they won’t be back. You didn’t just lose a sale, you lost a customer - for life.

I’ll look at actual shopping cart software and other methods in another article. Today I’m going to look at payment processors - the people who actually take your customer’s credit card details and then pay you.

Because it’s something you will never want to do yourself. The whole point of selling your crafts on the internet is that it doesn’t matter what the time is where you are, your customer can still place their order and pay for it.

So you use a credit card processing company. They deal with all the encryption, security and all that jazz, they take a few percent off the top for themselves and then they put the rest in your account. Simple. Let them worry about it while you get on with running your business.

The biggest name online is Paypal, who you’ve probably already heard of. They’re not the only game in town though and before you set up how you’re going to sell crafts online you should probably investigate several options.

It’s an important decision, because changing payment processors down the line would be an absolute nightmare.

I don’t want to come over sounding like a sales rep for Paypal but they are my personal choice - and I would suggest a Business Account. I’ve been using them for about six years now. I can’t say I’ve never had a problem with them - when you deal with anyone for that length of time there are bound to be glitches - but I would say that problems have been dealt with quickly and efficiently and I’m still happy to recommend them.

Paypal’s biggest advantage is probably that they’re so widely known and trusted. Few customers give using Paypal a second thought. There’s also a huge number of shopping carts and other online selling systems which work with Paypal. Just look at the partner services section.

However, there are other quite a few other solutions for selling your crafts online, including some who offer complete systems. I’ve added a little list here of those I know about. They’re in no particular order and there are probably others, these are just here to help you investigate further.

Alertpay.com
Worldpay.com
Google Checkout
1shoppingcart.com
2checkout.com

As always, if you’ve got any questions just click here and ask!

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