There are a great many resources online helping you to make money on the internet. What they don’t always help you with is taking money on the internet. This post is an overview of some of the ways you can charge customers money via their credit card on your web site.

I can remember clearly the first time I implemented a credit card payment system online. It was 2000 (lord, 10 years ago) for our internet business Arts Hub. Back then PayPal was in its infancy. No banks in Australia offered a customer facing online credit card system. After a little research I came across a Melbourne-based company called eFirst who had built an interface to the Camtech payment gateway, which these days is called payments.com.au (I still have several clients who use them). To implement a Camtech solution required a fair amount of technical expertise, and I seem to remember, may not even have been available to tiny little businesses like us. The eFirst system required installation of software on our web server, althbough that later changed to become an XML-based system, making life an awful lot easier. But I’ll spare you the geek stuff, this article is intended as a primer for web site businesses, not programmers. Read More→