You can take payments online in a number of ways.

The first is PayPal – this an inexpensive way to start taking payments quickly, especially if you don’t have a merchant account. With PayPal, your visitors can pay you with a credit card or by sending a payment from their checking account (echeck). PayPal provides a shopping cart and many other free services that are helpful to sites that are starting out. The downsides are that PayPal is not a very customizable solution, and it can have a “start-up” feel. However, this is changing and many mainstream sites are now accepting PayPal as more and more people have PayPal accounts. PayPal is inexpensive as there are no merchant accounts of payment gateway fees. It also saves cost because PayPal provides a very easy way to integrate their shopping cart into your site, which reduces development time.

There is the option of creating a full e-commerce solution. This involves many different components – a merchant account from a bank, a payment gateway service that allows you to accept payments into your merchant account from your web site (this is often bundled with the merchant account), a shopping cart or payment script that integrates with your payment gateway, and certain elements of the server environment like having an SSL certificate and a static IP. A custom payment script can be developed that exactly matches your needs. Full e-commerce is much more expensive and time-consuming to develop than PayPal, but it can be integrated into your site for a truly seamless payment experience. It can also save you money in the long run if you are doing a high volume of sales.