Ecommerce

Accept credit cards on your site.

Stripe.com

Our favorite payment gateway is Stripe.com. They charge 30c plus 2.9% on each transaction and are nicely compatible with shopping carts such as Woocommerce and Ubercart, as well as easy to deploy for donation buttons, etc. We don’t have a relationship with them except being happy customers ourselves.

PayPal

Another pay-as-you-go setup that has no monthly fees is PayPal. Typically the site visitor is taken to the PayPal site for payment and then returned to your website once payment is complete. If you sign up for PayPal’s free business account and use Web Payments Standard, you can:

  • Easily create Buy Now and Donate buttons
  • Create recurring subscription buttons
  • Have a fully fledged WordPress or Drupal cart that uses PayPal for the order processing
  • No need for your own SSL certificate (but it is a good idea for SEO purposes)

Other Systems

Over the years we have used many different ecommerce platforms. Some of the more common ones are:

Authorize.net: similar to stripe.com, but they have a monthly fee for processing. WordPress carts also need to buy a premium plugin to make it work. Drupal carts work seemlessly with Authorize.net.

Squareup.com: also similar to stripe.com and easy to integrate with Woocommerce. Some folks like this because they are already using Squareup card readers for their non-web transactions.

Mal’s Ecommerce: Mals is a good service for accepting credit cards online without needing your own SSL certificate. It’s a simple setup, but the transaction takes place away from your site and there is some manual processing required to run the credit cards.