payment system?

[definitive]

i'm in the process of setting up a website for a client which will be offering paid services (fitness related) through their website, and would like some advice on what would be the best, and possibly cheapest way (for the client) to do this in order to accept payments for different services.

should i use a shopping cart based system? would they need some special certificate/license to accept credit cards?

paypal or google checkout?

i also need it to send some kind of a receipt to the customer which would give a very detailed description of what they're getting, how much it costs, etc. i've browsed around through different sites and found one that utilized paypal where it had a drop down menu where you could pick one option and then you could click pay now button, and it would allow you to pay for that. is the drop down menu something that's generated in paypal itself?

also looking for some way to implement an agreement checkbox, so that when a user clicks the agree to terms checkbox, they can then press submit button to accept the terms of service, etc.

sorry i'm being vague, because i'm still not 100% sure of how i'll be doing this myself.

 

[blaster_boy]

You might want to start by reading this and googling a bit more around to get up to speed about this.

I'm only a beginner in these things, but accepting creditcards of your own, you do need to be PCI DSS compliant methinks.

Paypal or Google ? Why not both ?

IMHO you would be best developing the website with a payment gateway, and let the thirdparty take care of processing the creditcards / paypal / google checkout.

Especially if you are not yet clear about the whole setup and how it will work.

From what I read in your post, setting up the website, using a shopping cart, linking in to the payment gateway and generating the receipts : that seems like a big piece of work if you develop that yourself - to me it sounds like magento or another e-commerce solution could do most of what you need.

 

[baypharm]

There is no special license required to accept credit cards. Most larger vendors require successfully passing a personal credit check. Doesn't matter about the business credit - they want to check your personal credit. Intuit is one such vendor. I have my clients use Square. It is simple to set up, doesn't require invasive personal credit checks (which many people feel is discriminatory) and is easy to use. It does have its pitfalls however. And those pitfalls may make or break a business from using Square.

A cart system would be efficient in this case but I hesitate to recommend using PayPal. You can do your own research on the horrors of PayPal but I can tell from first hand experience PayPal was a good thing in the 90's but they have morphed into a beast of horrors. They are notorious for shutting down your account and hold funds for 180 days or longer. The only explanation is that your are considered high risk.

I have set up many payment systems for clients but would never ever use PayPal. But it's your choice. I am sure there are PayPal fans here on the forum that will scratch their back. Not me.

Hope this helps.