Working Online Means You Need A Way To Accept Credit Card Payments

Today Debbie Dragon will be sharing with us some of her expertise on accepting payments from your clients.

I've been watching Peter's blog with interest. As an online freelance writer for more than five years, it's always great to follow the journey of new people entering the world of online businesses and blogging for money.

Whenever you enter the industry of working online, though, it's important that you understand at some point – you'll need a way to accept credit card payments from your clients. Most people rely on paypal these days as their primary way to accept payment; but there may be instances when the client refuses to use paypal for one reason or another, and it's a good idea to have a back-up plan for accepting payments. If your business explodes, and you start receiving payments regularly from clients, you may also consider other ways to accept credit card payments to reduce the fees you pay.

In the past, it was really difficult for a small business to accept credit card payments. Not only was it expensive to get set up, but the fees per transaction were quite outrageous and the typical small business owner couldn't see the benefits of it when compared to the cost of it all. Now, thanks to e-commerce and the internet, small business owners and independent contractors can easily and affordably accept credit cards from their clients.

Third Party Providers for Credit Card Processing

Paypal is your typical third party provider. These providers handle the processing of the credit card and deposit the funds into an account that you can access online. Once the money (minus the provider's fees) are deposited, you can transfer it to your normal bank account (or in some cases, withdraw it from an ATM or shop with a debit card).

Merchant Accounts Through Banks

For people who have been in business for awhile, you might consider an actual merchant account through a bank. There are both positives and negatives associated with processing credit cards with a merchant account. Advantages include the security and dependability that coems from working through a bank, and the fees are quite low if you have good credit. If you are looking to accept credit cards from clients online, or have less than great credit, you may find it difficult to get approved for a standard merchant account, however.

Getting Your Money From Credit Card Payments

No matter which way you decide to process credit card payments from your clients, you can pretty much get the payments transferred from the processor to your own bank account within a few days. The processor takes their fees from the credit card payment before passing along the balance, so you'll want to consider that when setting your rates and just charge a few dollars more to help offset the fees.

Debbie Dragon is a writer for CreditorWeb.com, where she writes about credit cards, rewards programs, credit card processing and general personal finance.

Make Money Online With Craigslist

Craigslist.org is an advertising website reaching more than 450 different communities. You can post almost all type of ads on Craigslist free of charge. So, there is no reason not to post your goods or services for sale on Craigslist.

What are the benefits of using Craigslist to make money?

Free, Simple and Easy
Anyone can register for an ad posting account on Cragslist with an email address. The process of ad posting is simple. All you need to do is add a picture and write an effective ad copy. Anything that is legal for sale can be advertised on Cragslist (From services and items for sale, to real estate and automobiles). You can post an ad or promote a business offer at anytime you want. Internet auction sites and local newspaper will charge a fee for an ad posting, but in Craiglist it wouldn’t cost you a single cent unless you are doing job ad postings.

Earn Extra Bucks with Minimum Effort
Craiglist is a great place for earning extra income as it lets you sell off your old stuff and things that you no long want for profit. There is not much work involved. You only need to post your items for sale and wait for the interested buyers come to you. There are groups of people actually running their business using craigslist.org. Are you creative? Can you fix cars or motorcycles? The idea is to buy automobiles, fix them up, and then sell them for a profit. Creative people are selling goods made by themselves like quilts, crafts, and etc. Marketing and selling on Craiglist is free and can be fun sometimes.

Craigslist is Better than Yard Sale
If you run a yard sale, you have to be there all day to operate your yard sale. Bad weather could affect yard sale operation. By posting ads on craigslist.org, you can ask your potential customers to contact you via email. You decide who you want to deal with. Your personal email address will be hidden and there is an option to have all questions go through a craigslist.org email address that gets forwarded to you. It is important to protect your privacy and selling your stuff with Craigslist is more private than running a yard sale.

However, Craigslist isn’t perfect for business. If you are really using it to market your business, products or services, you will have to face with several drawbacks of Craigslist.

Limited Reach
Although, Craigslist is a popular ad website that has millions of visitors browsing it’s pages. But, all of those visitors are distributed among 450 locations. This is a disadvantage of Craigslist. You can’t advertise your business or products in more than one location at a time. If you are selling toys, and definitely you would prefer to market your toy products to people anywhere on the world. But craigslist.org is limiting you on this aspect.

No Seller Protection
Craigslist doesn’t offer protection of any sort to sellers. Unlike auction websites where they usually have a set of procedures to protect both the buyer and seller from dishonest individuals. When doing business in Craigslist, you make contact with your potential buyers and wish that they will not cheat or scam you. You will have not idea whether they are honest person who really want to do business with you or they are just a criminal that is dangerous to you. You will have to meet your buyers to deliver the product to them. You can ask them to come to your home or arrange to meet at a location. It is fine to meet someone if the item is small. But if you are delivering a big and heavy item, then it will be hard for your to bring the item to the meeting location.

You will Bear the Loss in Fraudulent Transaction
Craigslist.org does help seller to keep away from fraudulent transactions by posting notice explaining how to prevent these situations. Since Craigslist.org is free, they only manage to give advice to the sellers; they don’t take extra responsibility to help protect the sellers. Unlike the auction sites that charge listing fees, as you are paying for the listing fees, the auction sites provide an extra level of safety and security. On an auction website there is recourse if someone sends you a bad check or if someone sends your payment through PayPal and then reverses the payment. But in Cragislist.org, you only find the recourse through law enforcement for a bad payment like returned check or PayPal reverse. Your chances of getting back the product you sent out is not good. You probably suffer a loss for these fraudulent activities.

Conclusion
Now that you know both the pros and cons of using Craigslist.org to make money, you can decide whether it is worth using Craigslist. When reading the advantages, you will find that Craigslist is a great website that can you help you make money and want to give it a try. But when you review the drawbacks, you may have changed your mind. So, to decide whether you should use Craigslist for your business, you need to weight the pros again cons to see whether it is right for you to make money online.

Sell Photos Online

Return Potential: Hundreds yearly

Investment Estimate: $0 (minus fixed cost of camera of course, but it’s not worth doing if you don’t already have or plan on having a digital camera)

Effort requirement: Medium, then Low

Snap 'em then sell 'em.

Selling photos online is a quick, easy and potentially rewarding way of making money. Some websites will pay you every time a photo of yours is downloaded or sold. It is up to you to make the judgment on which route to take. If you are a photographer you would be best to go the pay per sale route. If you’ve just got a few shots which you think people might want to modify or hold onto, you should go with the pay per download route.

I am guessing that many people reading this will likely not have professional photography skills. In which case, try to gather up pictures which are rare, old, of some significance or of something famous. Keep in mind that if you’re taking photos with people in them, you get permission to put their picture on the internet. Some photo websites will require this.

This is a relatively simple and easy way to make money. It will likely not bring in high profits, but the effort it requires is low, thus I highly recommend it.

ShutterStock.com

This website will pay you every time someone downloads one of your photos.

PhotoStockPlus.com

This website will give you commission on the sale of your photos.

You may as well sign up for multiple websites to diversify your profits.