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In general, there are three ways to turn your web site into a place of business where your customers can buy products or services from you.

One way to do this is to get a merchant account and set up a professional private shopping cart. This method makes sense if you do consumer shows and need to take credit card orders, or if you otherwise have situations where you take credit card orders in person. On the other hand, if you are predominantly Web-based, you probably don't need to do this. Installing a shopping cart requires some serious elbow grease and some technical savvy. You also need to get a signed security certificate. In addition, the list of things that will wrong with the shopping cart is long and somewhat arduous.

Another way to do this is to use a payment transaction service. There are several, although the most recognizable is arguably PayPal. StormPay is a good secondary service. With a payment transaction service, the service basically runs the shopping cart for you, which means your customers will probably be more comfortable using the shopping cart function. Although these services do charge a small percentage of each transaction as a fee, it's pretty close to what you'd pay with a merchant account, with much less hassle. Many of these places will also let you accrue interest on any balance sitting in your account, so that's another benefit of using a payment transaction service.

A major drawback to the third party payment transaction services comes in the form of regulations. Because they are not banks, they also do not have bank regulations. This means that they can and do seize accounts or close them if transactions are in dispute. And make no mistake; they have no qualms to do so. You've probably heard many woeful tales about PayPal in particular, because of consumers who got accounts seized and closed, or hacked into. This can be generally avoided by making sure you have good customer service and that you e-mail your customers regularly. Make sure as well that you ship products, as applicable, as quickly as possible. In addition, make sure that you provide a tracking number so that customers can keep track of their shipments.

A third way to do this is to get an eBay shop or an Amazon.com shop. Downloadable electronic products like e-books also have other sources. A PayPal transaction will cost you, in general, to 2 to 3% of the purchase price. However, these shops will take anywhere from 10 to 25%. On the other hand, they also calculate shipping for you and provide something very important to you: they get you exposure.

Amazon.com and eBay are both very well known businesses. No tiny business web site will get exposure like Amazon.com or eBay can. You can also create your own web site and use Amazon shops or eBay shops to make a combined multidimensional sales process.

In short, all of these techniques work in specific situations. Most will take at least a little bit of homework to figure out how best to set them up. Although we can't go into detail here because they change so often, you can do your homework regularly, to keep up with them.