Unless your website is just a hobby, you probably expect it to bring in some revenue. And while it is possible to use your site as an advertising vehicle, it is way more profitable to actually accept credit card payments for your products and services while your visitors are there.

Until recently, your only option was to open a merchant account with a bank. Even now, this is not the easiest task for a new online venture. Fortunately, there are a number of third-party solutions targeted to the home business online entrepreneur:

Clickbank - Process Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Euro card, and Visa-Debit, MasterCard-Debit, and Novus cards from your site. They will handle all fraud screening, customer billing, billing inquiries and bank inquiries. They charge $49.95 to activate your account, plus $1+ 7.5% per sale.

This is not the cheapest solution, but it's EASY. Plus, your Clickbank account allows you to connect your website to their network of 100,000 affiliate sites - any of whom could help sell your products for a commission you designate.

http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?donna1001

The only drawback I've found of using Clickbank is that they only work with web based products and services. If you use it to sell advertising in your ezine, or an e-book that can be downloaded from your site, they are a perfect solution. But they won't process orders for businesses that must ship their products to the customers. If that describes you, check into CCNow:

http://www.ccnow.com/

This is a full-service ecommerce solution, complete with shopping cart to encourage your customers to buy more. The drawback is its cost: $9.95 per month PLUS 9% of your total sales if they exceed $100. You do get a 30-day trial period to try it out for free.

Another option is to use an electronic payment service. The biggest is PayPal, which is essentially an online bank.

http://www.paypal.com

You open an account with them using your credit card, link it to a bank account and you're ready to go. PayPal gives you the option of selling single items or multiple products via a shopping cart function - it's easy and reliable. Electronic transfers from your PayPal account show up in your linked bank account within a couple of business days - and from my personal experience, there is no easier way to make an online payment. Revenue from my advertising sales accumulate in my PayPal account and I use them to pay for other services I utilize for my website. It has worked out nicely.

PayPal is free to set up - in fact, once you have established an account with them and linked it to a bank account, they will pay YOU a bonus of five dollars! However, they do charge a transaction fee of $0.30 plus 2.9% (still quite a bit less than some of the other services we are surveying).

One drawback of PayPal is that it only processes payments from PayPal customers - which means that you must encourage your customer to join PayPal in order to use the service. That's why many webmasters prefer a service called ProPay:

http://www.propay.com

This is very similar to PayPal in that it allows you to accept credit cards on your site simply and easily. However, your customers do not have to join in order to use the service.

A ProPay account will cost you $35.00 to start. Each credit card transaction is $0.35 plus 3.5%. You also must pay $0.35 to transfer the funds into your bank account.

ProPay does not include a shopping cart function - but our friends over at WAHMservices http://www.wahmservices.com swear by one called Mals -- which is absolutely FREE:

http://www.mals-e.com/

Mal Stewart's system will accept your customer's payments on his secure server. It is then up to you to process those payments, either through a merchant account or a service like ProPay.

"Anyone can use the service, you don't even have to have a business," says Mal, who adds that he especially welcomes non-profit making organizations. "Many clubs, schools and charities have a range of items they sell to raise funds," he points out.

The shopping cart system is complicated, so it might take you a couple of hours to understand how it's done, but Mal has plenty of clear documentation - and once you understand the steps to setting it up, it's just a matter of cutting and pasting some HTML code onto your sales pages.

By utilizing one or more of these services, your site is ready for e-Commerce. For more information, check out the following free eBook in the ParentPreneur Club Library:

All About Merchant Accounts

In Part 6 we look at a low-cost strategy to boost your ranking in the search engines, plus methods for measuring your success.