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Your business can't survive without payment processors, as they are the means by which your customers will pay you online. It's first important to get a merchant account set up using one of these services.

What is a merchant account? It is a system on your website that will accept payments. This permits your buyers to pay conveniently online. It's important that you provide a payment method where buyers can pay for their purchases with a credit card. You have a wide choice of merchant accounts to choose from. It is savvy business practice to give your customers a choice of payment processors if you can.

Different fees There are a lot of various different types of payment systems. Some will charge you a fee each month, and others will charge you a set up fee and then a small fee per transaction. You should be sure to read the fine print on the agreements you enter into with these companies before doing so. Some of the companies offering these services will charge you fees that weren't made clear when you sign up. Six month or one year terms are common, so you might get locked in. Be aware of these factors, because you don't want to end up putting your business at risk.

What are the different processors to look into? If your business is online, Paypal, Clickbank and 2checkout are great on the pocketbook, easy to use and quite simple to set up on a regular HTML website. With these, you can set them up with no knowledge of code for web pages. These are all known as 3rd party payment systems.

What do they do? They will take your buyers to their secure page to buy your products and services. This means that it is not necessary for you to set up a secure page yourself. Here are some advantages when you use 3rd party processors.

1. They offer an easy way to purchase from you as they accept credit cards. Huge amounts of transactions occur online, and you need to be able to take advantage of that. 2. They all have tutorials and instructions on how to set them up, and you don't have to use just one, but can have a number of them. 3. These companies will also work with you and handle any situations with fraud, etc. 4. You can use your own bank account for receiving payment.

It's easy to set up a payment processor

Visit the home page of any of these payment processors and following their instructions, it will be easy to set them up. There are different tools offered.

Shopping carts: These are used when you have multiple product buying options. Shopping carts are a virtual grocery cart. Shopping carts are convenient and will encourage multiple buying. This system will work well for stores online and sites with multiple or bundled products.

There are pluses and minuses to all the above payment processors. Basically I prefer Paypal as the payment is immediately deposited into my account which I have access to.

If you are going to be offering an affiliate program, try ClickBank. It costs a bit to set up (around $50) but they pay every two weeks and are very reliable.

2Checkout has been used by many marketers. They have a very good reputation. All charge fees so do a little scouting for the best prices.