Two Low-cost Ways to Accept Credit Cards On Your Website

If you’re not already accepting credit cards on your website, here’s a quick review of two reasonably-priced payment solutions.

Paypal Website Payments Standard

If you definitely want to take Paypal as well as credit cards and don’t mind customers going to the Paypal site to enter billing info, then go with Paypal Website Payments Standard. Your customers don’t need a Paypal account to pay, and there are no monthly fees or setup fees. Fees per transaction vary depending on the amount of purchasing traffic you have each month.

It’s very easy to create Paypal buttons to paste into your site (or blog) for individual products using Paypal’s button builder, plus many major website shopping carts support Paypal Website Payments Standard. Read more about this service here.

CDG Commerce + Quantum Gateway

Another option (which I’ve been using since 2007) is CDG Commerce. CDG is similar to Paypal in that it combines a payment gateway and merchant account in one – you don’t have to get a separate merchant account at your bank. CDG uses Quantum Gateway as its processing partner. It’s definitely not as common as Paypal or Authorize.net, so if you’re using or choosing a shopping cart, keep that in mind – you’ll need to look for one that supports Quantum Gateway.

You can also create an order form for your site, but will need a small amount of coding knowledge for that. However, CDG’s fees are very reasonable: $10/mo with no setup fee and rates are comparable to similar services. Learn more about CDG’s Internet payment option here.

Keep in mind that getting started with any payment gateway service generally takes several weeks of background checks and account setup.