Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum How to Accept Debit/Credit Card Payments on your Website?

Hi guys,

This question is similar to my previous question about accepting auto drafts, but do you have any recommendations on how to accept credit/debit cards on your studio website?

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Paypal
google checkout (I use this)

You will need a merchant account and a payment gateway account. Authorize.net is very reliable as a gateway. Check out Midwest transaction group, very good rates and can get you all setup for e commerce payments.

I use Paypal on my website but I'm searching for an alternative as some people think they have to have a PP acct to use their service to pay me (which I think they don't).

Would love to hear other suggestions.

you'll need some software in order to process the payments. If you plan on taking credit/debit card right on your site you'll need like jsan said a merchant account and payment gateway. You can take just paypal if you would like to not do all that, alternatively paypal has a paypal pro method where you a pay a fee and you can have them checkout without leaving your site at all.
If you decide you need a merchant account, they will require your website to have an SSL (the security lockbox you see on your banks website)certificate installed on it before they approve your application.

Theres tons of free shopping cart software out there.

Personally if you wanted to make it easy, paypal is the way to do it. especially if you dont have your own web developer.

I am interested in this two ways. One, because having my own business I'd love to give credit card options. 1. Is there an expense involved with a merchant account? 2. Must you be a registered business?

Two, because during the time when my now-adult son was taking lessons, there were months that I was short on money when my customers were late paying me and business was still getting on its feet. If I had been able to use my credit card in those months, it would have been much easier. You can pay off your credit card in the middle of the month if you receive payment in the middle of the month, but you don't want to make your teacher wait until the middle of the month. As a student or parent, credit card options would have helped me.

To receive credit card in person (not on studio website), try
https://squareup.com/

eccp19, I have read your post, here:
Loc: United States
Hi guys,


This question is similar to my previous question about accepting auto drafts, but do you have any recommendations on how to accept credit/debit cards on your studio website?

Thanks and have a great weekend!

________________________________________________

Thank you for your awesome post.

I may over use the word "awesome" in this post.

The internet is awesome beyond description. I don't have a radio, television, just, a tiny shack with a 3 legged piano.

There are many reasons why I do not do business over the internet. When you are connected to the internet, there is know way of knowing who you are connected to, to what country you are connected to. It is awesome - but you know nothing. Why would anyone do business with someone whose name you don't know, you don't know what the person looks and you are going to give them money even though you don't know what country they are in, what business laws they are under or if or not they have a street address. If something went wrong, what country would you start a lawsuit in.

It is just an opener.

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and am currently in remission. At 59, I only knew that people went to hospitals to visit dying people and new babies - else I went to a doctor's office.

I went to a hospital and they diagnosed me as having cancer and gave me a prescription of some pills to take for the month. I picked them up at the hospital pharmacy and took them home. I eventually opened the bag and it said $3,000. I phoned the hospital and told them I didn't have 3,000 dollars for medications. They said that the meds were paid by the government healthcare.

Although I took all the meds for 9 months, they didn't work, the cancer was just the same. The doctors told me that I had to have a bmt - means bone marrow transplant. The meds for the rejection of the transplant cost 45,000 for a couple of months worth of meds. Again, I didn't have any money, I was just a simple office worker.

I looked up bmt on the internet and all I ever read were lots of people who had cancer like me, but the bmt costs 100,000 dollars for I don't know what because I was in hospital for a 30 days and saw doctors twice a week at the hospital outpatients for over a year. The meds I took daily cost 900 dollars for just one med and I was on many meds over the 6 years

I read on the awesome internet when I googled "bmt" that "lots" of people couldn't have the bmt's because their health insurance coverage wouldn't cover it because it was too expensive - 1 month in a hospital bed. And as I pointed out, the meds were thousands of dollars each month - sadly, I read that most of the people die because they can't afford the hospital bill, the doctor's bills, the med bills for the many meds they have to take for many years.

As a humble Canadian, I don't do business on the internet, but I go to the local retailer and pay what ever price is on the item because we all work and pay taxes and some the of taxes cover the costs for cancer meds for Canadians dying of cancer. Life is a priceless gift.

I don't do business over the internet for a million reasons, but I look the clerk in the eyes and say how much does this cost, and I pay whatever they say.

cheers,

yes, to take credit card payments directly on your website, there is typically a monthly fee. Usually its like 20$ a month + a % of all transactions... you can shop around for the best rates. square is great as well as you dont have to pay monthly fees, but its only for in person and you have to have a smart phone to use the scanner or enter in the card number. I used to build websites for people so thats how I know how this typically works.

Warning - what follows is shameless self-promotion!

I have created a website to help private teachers do just this and a lot more - Privio. You decide how to charge students - flat fee or per lesson (or any other type of calendar event) and create bills. Then students can log in and pay their bill through PayPal. Payments are automatically entered into Privio for you.

We are also working on a new feature, to be released very soon, that lets you take credit cards directly - and automatically (think: keep your customer's card on file and bill it each month) and which does not require a merchant account. If you've ever looked into taking credit cards online, you know how big of a hassle getting a merchant account can be.

Here's the page that talks about our billing system

Alright, I've got that out of my system. Thank you for bearing with me!

-Zach

Best wishes with this, Zack. It looks like a fine and helpful product! Also inexpensive.

Hi Zach:
Thank you for your promotion. It looks interesting.
If I am using the automatically credit card payment through your website, how much I am getting? 100% of what my student pay me or I have to give a certain percentage to the software?

Thanks

We don't add anything to the amount that the credit card processor charges. We use Stripe to do all of the processing (they actually store the credit card number and are completely PCI-DSS compliant) and they charge 2.9% + 30 cents for each transaction (no monthly fees), which by many standards is a very fair price for card processing. They also do a 7 day rolling bank account deposit, meaning you get your money 7 days after the card runs. Compared to other gateways this is a very short time to wait.

All of the features to make the system work are in place, we're just doing some final testing before releasing it.

Thanks for the interest!

-Zach

P.S. I have some coupon codes available for discounts if anyone here is interested.

I've used paypal for the last year or two and it works great. My clients do not have to have a paypal account, they simply enter their credit card information. It's well worth the small percentage that it costs.

Despite the fact that many assume they need to log into PayPal (they don't), it still seems to be one of the easier and most cost-effective shopping cart solutions out there.

You could add a small blurb on your website underneath the PayPal link button, that people don't need a PayPal account?

Most of the time PayPal is great, but you do need to be aware of their tarnished reputation, mostly stemming from their account freezing practices. It's happened to a lot of people in the past and it seems that the consensus is that you can't do a whole lot about it. Do a quick google search for 'paypal horror stories' and you'll get the idea.

I would recommend if you don't plan on using something like Privio and you want to set up your own payment system that you at least consider Stripe. It's actually really easy to set up payments on your website, it costs the same as PayPal Web Payments Standard, and lots of free/open source shopping cart software integrates with it nowadays. And the best part about Stripe is that I've never had a problem talking to an actual person there. And don't be put off by the fact that they call themselves 'payments for developers' - anyone can use it and their documentation is top-notch.

Of course, I'd like to save you all the trouble of setting it up yourself

-Zach

I'm sure your system is good, but are you supposed to be using the forums for advertising?

I figured it was ok since it's directly related to the discussion, I made a big disclaimer, and it's not the only reason I post on the forum. Sorry if it bugged you!

Well I don't have a problem with it... others have posted when they've published music books or select works. It's very different from people who register JUST to post ads.