Maximize Your Sales by Offering a Number of Payment Options...

If you’re serious about maximizing your sales, you’ve got to think about offering other online payment methods, including:

• PayPal, which has improved its service -- making it even easier for your customers to use, and
  

• Debit cards, which are poised to become the online fundraising vehicle of the future.

  Plus, it’s still important to provide traditional offline payment techniques such as 1-800 numbers, and order forms that can be printed out and faxed or mailed.

  It’s all about giving your customers choices -- and about capturing every sale you can. Web-based businesses that don’t offer payment alternatives to credit cards are shutting out millions of consumers who either don’t own credit cards or are nervous about using them online.

  According to a study by CyberSource Corp., web sites providing four or more payment methods other than credit cards have a sales conversion rate that is 12% higher than those offering just one payment option in addition to credit cards.

  Capture 85% more sales by accepting credit cards online

  The simple truth is that you must accept credit cards on your web site if you expect to stay in business. It’s been repeatedly proven that if you do NOT accept credit cards on your site, you will capture only about 15% of your potential sales.
  

Continued below.....

You have to make it easy for visitors to your web site to buy your products. Internet users expect instant access to information, goods, or services, and online customers can be very impatient.

If dial-up users have to log off of the Internet to clear up the phone line in order to call in their order, you can forget about doing a large volume of sales. This is too much work for most of your customers, who would be far more likely to find one of your competitors that accepts credit cards online.

Accepting credit cards will also...

• Give your business a degree of credibility,

• Allow you to capture the sales of impulse buyers, and

• Provide you with a fully-automated payment and tracking system.

But before you can start accepting credit cards at your web site, there are two important things you’ll have to do:

• Establish a secure server to process credit card transactions, and

• Set up a merchant account.

At this point you may be thinking, "How I am I going to do this? I don’t even know what secure servers or merchant accounts are!" Don’t worry -- the concepts are really simple. With just a little effort and patience, you’ll soon be accepting credit card payments on your web site and reaping huge rewards.

1) Online ordering via a secure server

For your site to be as professional as your customers expect it to be, it must feature a secure server that protects your customers’ confidential information and gives them the confidence to safely enter their credit card numbers.

A secure server is simply a computer server that can accept and transmit confidential information such as credit card numbers without the risk of someone intercepting the transmission and "stealing" the information. The data is kept secure through encryption, which only the oldest web browsers don’t support.

You can find out more about secure servers by contacting merchant account providers, which is the next step in getting your site ready to accept credit card payments.

2) Setting up your merchant account

You have a few different options when getting a merchant account. You can...

• Get your own merchant credit card accounts with a local bank
  
  If you have a good relationship with your bank -- and they don’t require a large security deposit -- it’s best to get your merchant credit card accounts through them.
  
  You may, however, have to go through two different banks to process the major cards -- Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover -- because some banks deal with only two out of the four.
  
  Another problem with local banks is that they often charge a very high "discount rate" or require a very large security deposit (between $5,000 and $10,000).
  
  For those of you who don’t know what a discount rate is, it’s not really a "discount" at all! It’s the percentage you pay on each transaction for the privilege of using credit card services, and it varies according to your credit rating, business history, and the amount of business your site is doing.
  
  For example, if you have a discount rate of 2.5% and you make a credit card sale for $100, you’ll only receive $97.50. The remaining $2.50 goes to the credit card company.
  
  
• Get merchant credit card accounts through a broker
  
  Getting your merchant credit card accounts through a broker is my personal preference for a number of reasons:
  
  

  a)	They are web-based specialists in getting credit card accounts for online businesses, and, as should be expected, you can apply over the Internet.
  b)	They have a higher approval rate than banks and should be able to get you a discount rate of 2% to 3% -- even if you’ve been bankrupt.
  c)	They are affordable and can often have you accepting credit card payments on your web site in as little as 48 hours.

  
  Finding a broker is not difficult. Besides searching online, you can find plenty of brokers in the back of DM (Direct Mail) magazine. But do some research, and make sure that the broker you choose has a good track record.
  
  There are lots of shady operators out there, so be careful of who you choose. 
  
• Hire a fulfillment house and use their credit card accounts
  
  If your company is doing only a few thousand dollars of business each month, a fulfillment house may be a good option for you.
  
  A fulfillment house is a company that will...
  
  a) Take your orders through a 1-800 number with live operators,
  
  b) Process credit cards,
  
  c) Provide some customer service,
  
  d) Ship orders, and
  
  e) Maintain your customer database.
  
  These companies will also let you use their merchant credit card accounts to process your orders for a fee. The downside is that the fee is usually a 5% discount rate instead of the 2% or 3% you would pay if you had your own accounts.
  
  Because of the high discount rate charged by fulfillment houses, I’d recommend that once your business grows larger, you get your own merchant accounts and save some money.
  
  A great place to find nearly 100 fulfillment houses is is Yahoo!’s Fulfillment Services Directory. To get there, just click on "Directory" at Yahoo!'s homepage and then search for "fulfillment houses."
  
  
• Use a "third party" merchant account provider
  
  Like fulfillment houses, companies such as iBill let you use their merchant accounts. The upside of third party providers is that they can get you up and running quickly, set up your order forms, and process your orders.
  
  The downside is that they charge you a processing fee of 11% to 15% of the selling price -- depending on the volume of business you are doing.
  
  While the discount rate offered by these companies is substantially higher than the other options I’ve been talking about, most do not require any setup fees, software, or security deposits, which make them a simple and convenient option for some.
  
  In addition to iBill, you could also check out:
  
  a) CC Bill,
  
  b) Authorize.Net, or
  
  c) CyberSource.
  

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