This is rapidly becoming a major purpose and area of vigorous growth on the web and for many sales-oriented applications, has become relatively easy to use and impliment on your website! The most important concern your visitors and their credit card companies have is how secure the connection between them and the agency doing the billing is. The 900 phone system is also an excellent alternative for those who don't have credit cards, or don't wish to use them for online payments and of course there's always good old mail-in to fall back on.

At Webdisplays, we can unreservedly recommend web pioneers Internet Billing Co. as the oldest, safest and most reliable and efficient providers of online cashflow available. You can get detailed information on implimenting online payments into your site from them on their comprehensive site. Of course, there are also other comparable services, who'll accept payments for you in exchange for a small transaction fee percentage.

You should make sure that any such provider is established and reputable, and that they use secure servers (who's URL prefixes are https://) that use the web browsers 'secure encrypted lock' capability to scramble the data streams being carried during the submission of sensitive credit card information, for the security of you and your customers.

Such third party solutions as the one above are available in a variety of other forms as well, and are well suited to subscription controlled access, magazine type websites, but a bit more troublesome to impliment for dynamic, full scale retail merchandising, or large numbers of one of a kind items.

An alternative for retailing is to locate your site in an online mall, a sort of site hosting arrangement where the provider also offers you use of their own online commerce interface, which will process payments for items you define using their servers already-installed program interfaces. Such arrangements are gaining favour, but you can expect to pay a premium for this sort of hosting service, which may have 'visibility' consequences, or other hidden costs (site maintenance) and other more onerous portability problems or restrictions.

Before we get much deeper into this subject, let's examine some of the nuts and bolts of the "web interface".

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