Day Three – Accepting Credit Cards

The ability to accept credit cards is a vital part to running your ebook business.  The majority of customers using the internet will want to pay by credit card.  After making their payment by credit card, the customer will expect to be able to download their purchase immediately.

Companies unable to provide facilities for their customers to pay by credit card not only risk losing a large amount of customers uninterested in waiting for cheques to clear but there is also a stigma that suggests that a company that cannot provide credit card facilities must not be very professional or successful, so why should I buy from them?  Another example of the perceived risk you need to reduce.

There are a couple of ways for companies to accept credit card payments.  The first is to apply to the bank to get a merchant number.  Banks can be quite choosy about who they provide merchant numbers to and you can also expect an annual charge ranging from £200 - £400 per year for the service, as well as the transaction charges.

Another way is to go down to the PayPal route.  If you are unfamiliar with this, PayPal allows people to make payments to each other online.  The only drawback is that both parties must be members of PayPal and it doesn’t really present the most professional image.  This sort of service is far better suited for people buying and selling goods at online auctions.

Perhaps the most suitable way to take online payments without needing a merchant number is to use a company called ClickBank.  To set up an account with ClickBank requires a one off payment of less than $50.  With this ClickBank will provide you with the ability to accept both Mastercard and Visa.  They handle your sales transaction for you, which means that once a customer has decided to purchase your product, they will be taken onto ClickBank's secure server and having made their payment, they will be able to download from that secure page.

The benefits of this are that the customer does not have to be a member of ClickBank to make the payment, ClickBank's secure page means that people cannot locate and download your product for free and most importantly the ClickBank brand name and security features will give people peace of mind whilst making their purchase – Again reducing their perceived risk.

The other really good feature of ClickBank, is that once you become a member, your product will be made available to the massive army of ClickBank affiliates, who if they like your product will help in the marketing of it and you get to choose the commission level they receive.  I will go into further detail about making the most of this resource on Day Five.

Continue to Day Four