payment options?

[Nikolas]

Hem...

I need some general opinions, please.

I'm about to launch the publishing house (read: 2-3 weeks hopefully), and I need to sort out ways for me to getting paid! One option is certainly  paypal, but I'm wondering if leaving alone that is enough...

Since it's a music publishing house, it's a little bit 'high profile', and I do not want it to look 'indie', or something like that. So getting the customers out to paypal website is a bit 'uh uh' for the customer I think (who are rather traditional in every sense of the way, although they do buy through the net).

What other options do I have to give the customer the opportunity to pay inside the website? any links? Any ideas? Any opinions why this is right/wrong?

[Darth Mandarb]

PayPal has an API you can use that will make it "invisible" to the end-user.  Meaning they won't visually see the payment being processed on another site.  It will appear that they are staying on your site.  I'm not sure how PayPal works on your side of the globe but I find it to be the best 'starting out' way to go.  In the states if you pay for a merchant account for a start-up company you often end up paying so much for the merchant account setup, then the SSL (secure server), etc and then each transaction rapes you so at the end of the day you make no money.

Short version; I'd recommend PayPal's API ... they aren't too complicated!

DISCLAIMER: I haven't used PayPal's APIs in years so my knowledge of them may be a tad out-dated!

[Darius Poyer]

I've seen a lot of indie devs using http://www.fastspring.com/ (VVVVVV for instance). It seems like a good and board service that would give people a lot of options in regards to how they want to pay for things.

[m0ds]

I agree with Darth, the API's aren't too bad at all. I use cubecart 3 (quite old now) and although that is effectively not my own website, it's attatched to it - and you effectively never leave it. You can set up a paypal payment method, or even just a direct payment from credit card to your bank, I think. But I use the paypal one because I couldn't get any of the others to work. That adds to a couple of downsides. 1 is that it WAS a pain to set up. Literally it took days of trawling through forum threads. It didn't even work to begin with, then suddenly, it started working one day. Which makes no sense to me. 2. The user, although they will never leave your website, will be required to "register" to your cubecart store. Which can put some people off. So I would recommend paypal API's sure but it's not exactly a walk in the park.

Professionally though, I think the reputation of PayPal has increased. A lot of online businesses seem to do trade using it. Good luck Nik!

PS. Don't forget to give gregjazz a buzz, he's good with that stuff and may even set you up a proper store if you ask nicely!

[tzachs]

There are a lot of ECommerce services (like FastSpring that Darius mentioned) that wrap around PayPal, and also add other methods of payment, which is an advantage. AFAIK, the famous ones are FastSprint, BMT Micro and Plimus.
Here's a thread discussing them.

[WHAM]

I can't really suggest anything better, but I would avoid PayPal like the plague.
I've been reading on indie game developers having their accounts frozen for extended periods of time without explanation, possibly due to "suspicious payment patterns" being automatically detected by their system. Their terms of service are quite troublesome if you get payments from all over the world.

[Nikolas]

Thank you all for the suggestions and ideas... I do agree that paypal can freeze your account, if something happens (usually it happens from reports of 'customers' who do not like what they get (usually due to e-bay problems), which probably won't be an issue for me, but I do think that paypal looks a little on the 'cheap' side, and this is why I'd like to avoid it, or at least not use it exclusively!

I'll give Greg a shout (I have him on AOL and all that), and at the same I'll keep bothering my web designer for that! thank you all! Keep them coming!

[freedy]

The more online payment for customers the better.

Aside from paypal, credit card processing and debit cards payment options.

To set up credit card processing on your website, (MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover), you need to get an Internet merchant account.

I also heard about Interac Online but I'm not really familiar with it though.

[Nikolas]

Sorry for bring this up again, but I need some tiny help...

I'm using paypal for payments, but I want to makeup the paypal output pages a little better. with a logo or something...

Now, paypal (rightfully so) suggests that the logos should be hosted on a secure website (https), but my own websites do not have SSL certificates (Too costly and too unimportant at this point), so I'm stuck.

Does anyone have a website which is secure and could offer hosting of some tiny jpg inages? (two images I think, both under 50 kbs of size)? Please? Pretty please?

Or argue on why I should get an SSL certificate. Because the only place that one could worry about security would be when I gather their address and info, which is NOT vastly important... Every payment is taking care outside my own website in paypal, so that's covered...

thanks