Website Owners and Credit Cards

Care About Getting Paid?

If you have a web-based business, like it or not, you are in the credit card business.  Here's a few important points for different stages of your business.

Keep the credit card payment system simple at the start.  You can avoid the whole area by just signing up with a vendor who deals with all of the payment processing for you. For instance, use Etsy and they include the credit card processing. Or just accept PayPal. These are easy and appropriate ways to start.  But, lets assume that your business is now thriving and going up to and through $100,000 a year. Now, you are beginning to have the motivation to look at your business and you'll probably find that it's not yet worth the hassle of changing.   But, if you can get to a $100K, you can probably get to $200K, then $400K and now it is time to think about your payment processing.

What's wrong with Etsy or Paypal or any of the other real simple solutions?
- Cost. Paypal can take 3% or 4% or 5% of your revenue. That's a lot. And their reports are really difficult.
- Credit card recovery. This is a really important question if you are built on a monthly recurring billing model. Basically, if you have a gym membership and have paid attention to your credit card, you might have noticed that even when you lose your credit card and get it replaced, the damn gym continues to bill you. How do they do that?  Go over to http://www.creditcardsonline101.com  to learn about it.

Paypal - How do you have payment categories?

We use paypal as one way that people can pay us. We have several types of revenue coming into paypal. To simplify our accounting, I would like to have a way to track which service the revenue is for. This can't be a problem unique to us but there doesn't seem to be a simple solution.

We could set up separate paypals but then we have a cash management problem. I think the less places that cash is kept, the better.

My current plan is I have different revenue streams being sent to different emails. We have money for Time4Learning coming in to a Time4Leanring email address, ditto for Time4Writing (our kids writing course services), and a third email being used for affiliate type email.

BUT, when you look at the tables and reports in Paypal, there is no indication of which email the money come in to. So our accountant needs to open each and every transaction to see which account to put it in.

Dear Paypal, this is very annoying.



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