Believe it or not, you can’t simply create a webpage and magically take credit card payments when you want somebody should join your one time or recurring membership site. You have to use an additional service that will take credit card payments for you and tell your membership software that you need to let somebody into your site. But which one should you use it seems like there are a hundreds and there are new payment processors popping up everyday so which ones should you use?
I prefer to use Paypal for simple payments, clickbank for affiliate payments and one shopping cart if I wanted to have a merchant account. Let us talk about each of 3, in my opinion Paypal is one of the easier payment processors to use because you don’t have to go through a lot of hoops just to get established. You do need to create a paypal account but people can click a button and can either pay you through their Paypal account or enter in their credit card details. Paypal processes the transaction and puts the money into your account and then it is unto you to figure out how to get paid and if you want to get paid from a cheque or direct deposit but the money goes through paypal. You do not actually have to create a merchant account, they do it for you.
And you can create a payment on a moment’s notice and you’re not restricted about what kind of things you sell; for example when you create a merchant account, you have to establish what type of business you have, if you want to have a seminar business you have to say in your merchant account that you are a seminar offline business and then if you want to take payments for ebooks. Guess what you need to create a different merchant account kind of inconvenient right?
With Paypal we simply take payments, the only fault with Paypal is that you do not have an affiliate program for this I use ClickBank, ClickBank has a built in affiliate program, so if you sell something using a click bank payment processor. Anybody else can sign up as an affiliate refer people and get paid a commission the great thing about ClickBank is that, they get paid and they pay out affiliates before you even get paid so they deal with all the tax issues that is completely out of your hair. The only downside to ClickBank is they are very generous with their refund policy therefore I only take some payments on ClickBank only those when I want to have some affiliates. If your membership business really takes off and you want to have lower fees, more controls and advanced features, such as One Click upsets or email lead tagging then I recommend One Shopping Cart. One Shopping Cart is great because they combine an auto responder with a shopping cart so you can run basically your business from one central location. And that is the payment processor you should use for your membership site just starting off use PayPal for your membership site. If you want to have an affiliate program then create a ClickBank account as well then in the future, if your business really takes off. Use the One Shopping Cart service.
Now that you know how take payments, Let us go setup the rest of the membership site, just enter your name and email address below.