Part Three: Selecting a Payment Provider

You have your website, and all your items are listed on it but how do you take money? Well you need a payment provider as a way of receiving that money.

Most payment providers today will provide you with Payment processing and with a Merchant Bank Account (you need one of these to accept money from a Credit or Debit card).

If you go down this route you are looking as a startup cost of around £20 per month and then a small amount on each transaction. To find out more about costs of receiving online payments visit a payment provider’s website such as Sagepay (formally protex) or RBS worldpay.

The other option is to take money using Google Checkout; Google can provide a shopping cart, payment provider and merchant account all for free! At least for the setup, it is becoming an increasingly popular way of processing payments because of the exceptionally low startup costs and the trust associated with Google.

Google will however charge you for each transaction it processes and its costs break down as follows:

After signing up and setting up a payment provider your shop is now complete, now all you need to do is market it which we will go over tomorrow.