Do you need full ecommerce?

Many sites that I work with need to collect money from their visitors but don’t need a complete shopping cart and checkout system. Collecting donations, payment for services, selling tickets to events and online document sales are just a few examples. Especially when there are no physical goods involved, simpler can be better.

There are a few requirements, no matter what you’re selling:

• A payment gateway, that can take payment information from the customer and deliver the funds to your bank account.
• A notification system that lets you know when a sale has been made, who made the purchase and what they bought (the customer should also be notified that their purchase was successful).
• A delivery mechanism, if digital goods are being sold.
• A security certificate for the website. This is not strictly required, if payment takes place on another site (like PayPal) but it will go a long way toward boosting customer confidence in making the purchase in the first place.

Payment Gateways

The days of needing a merchant account to accept credit card payments are over. There are several online services that will handle the process for a percentage of the transaction cost, with no monthly fee or setup charges. PayPal is the oldest and best known but newcomers Stripe and Square are giving them a run for their money. With any system, you will create a free account and provide them with your bank account information. Once the banking information has been verified, funds collected through the gateway can be transferred to your bank. The gateway also provides notification whenever funds arrive in your account.

PayPal requires that you transfer funds to your bank manually, while Stripe and Square sweep them in automatically. With any system, plan on it taking at least a couple of days from the time your customer’s credit card is charged until the funds are available in your bank account.

All of the gateways provide code to add their interface to a web page, whether it’s a button or form. This can be an issue with WordPress sites, which don’t allow arbitrary code to be added to pages for security reasons. There are many plugins available to enable payment gateways on WordPress, you just won’t be able to use the code directly.

Simple Payments

If all you need is to collect funds and know who they came from, the solution can be as simple as adding a PayPal button to your site. However in my experience, nothing is ever simple with PayPal. There are a variety of button types to choose from and you’ll need to read their descriptions carefully to choose the right one. For example, the “Donate” button is the only one that allows recurring charges. It’s intended for charitable organizations but if you collect less than $10,000 they don’t require any type of certification. I also recommend using a “hosted” PayPal button, which prevents anyone from messing with the data sent from your website to the PayPal servers.

Stripe also has a simple payment collection process, which has the advantage of taking place entirely on your site, using a pop-up window. It works with all major credit cards and is very easy to implement if you have a WordPress site. If not, there’s some programming involved.

Payments Plus Information

If you need to collect non-payment information from your customer, you’ll have to add payment processing to a form. When the form is submitted, you’ll receive all of the information gathered, plus the gateway will handle the payment. There are two well known WordPress plugins that can handle this process: NinjaForms and GravityForms. Both of them charge extra for the add-on to the payment gateway. These packages are very flexible and can be used to create complex order forms, which in some cases are preferable to a shopping cart ordering system.

Payments Plus Digital Downloads

This application is specialized enough that unless you have a large budget, I wouldn’t recommend building it into a plain HTML site. WordPress with a plugin is a better way to go. Plugins such as Easy Digital Downloads will handle the secure delivery of downloads to your customers, in addition to collecting payment. Depending on what you intend to sell and the options you want to offer, selling digital downloads can become quite complex. EDD is extensible enough to allow for most digital selling scenarios. You can also check the WordPress Plugin Repository for other alternatives.

Meeting Customer Expectations

While there is some time and expense involved in adding the ability to accept payments to a website, many customers will find it the most convenient way to pay you. Online payments can set you apart from other small businesses and organizations, along with giving your customers a good reason to visit your website, where they can learn more about your offerings. Everyone wins and you get paid.

Until next week.