One of the many challenges that most new internet entrepreneurs face is receiving payments via their site. When starting out most of us don’t have a bottomless sack of money. How can you cheaply and securely receive payments? There are many payment processors on the internet. Some are cheaper than others. I’m going to highlight just one today. This one is free.

Our focus in this article is:

Where to go for reliable, secure and cost effective payments processors

How to install and position it in a web page.

A free, secure and reliable payment processor is PayPal. The only cost with PayPal is a small charge for each sale that is made. You only pay out of your profit when a sale is made. Go to PayPal.com and open an account. You will be required to verify this account. PayPal will tell you how. You will be expected to supply your credit card details. This is quite safe with PayPal.

The first thing you will need to do is set up your download page. You will need the URL of this page in setting up the payment button. This the URL that your customers will be sent to after a successful payment has been made.

Now to creating your payment button. Log into your PayPal account and look for “Merchant Tools”. This will open up a choice of “Shopping Cart”, “Pay Now Buttons” or “Subscriptions or recurring Payments”

The shopping cart allows for multiple purchases to be made before the customer goes to the checkout and pays.

Buy Now Buttons are used on sites where the sales page offers just one item. There are no choices to be made, only to buy the product on offer. This button will send the customer directly to PayPal to finalize the transaction.

As is the case with buy now button, the subscription and recurring payments button is for just one item. Payments continue to be made at intervals specified by you. These can be weekly, monthly, yearly or any period you specify. This payment system also allows for a trial period and then the payments at the specified intervals.

Once you fill in the details of the product, PayPal produces an encrypted script you will need to install on the site where you want the button to appear.

Using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor, scroll down the page to where you want the button to appear. Now click your mouse here so that the cursor is blinking where the button is to appear. Create a table. Click your mouse inside the table, and change the view to code view. You should now see the cursor blinking in the code. Make sure you have copied the PayPal code to the clipboard of the computer. Click on “Edit” and then “Paste”. This will insert the PayPal code into your page. If you need to center it just use center as you would text.

You can test it by switching to browser view and see how your page will display on the internet.

That’s it! You are now able to receive payments on your site.