There's a lot more options for accepting online payments for your business in 2016. Companies who offer their clients online payment portals, are finding their clients more and more likely to pay on time and without prompting, for the sheer fact that it's an easier process. When you remove barriers to payment, you remove reasons why your customers and clients can be late or unreliable, and an online portal is the simplest way to do that.
Beyond the ease of use, there's the fact that online payment portals are even easier to connect up to your record keeping or book keeping software, particularly when using products such as Xero or MYOB Cloud. By applying a simple, straight forward integration, you can now spend far less time reconciling payments to your system, and just let it all work automatically in an easy pipeline.
Setting up these portals isn't complicated either, it's mostly just a matter of providing the right kind of identification documents, linking them to your business' bank accounts, and pushing it out live. Your clients can see their invoices online and choose to pay it right in their browser or app, using credit cards. This removes the friction of cheques and payment complications, and lets you get onto the business of growing your business, rather than chasing people up or worrying about payment methods.
So what portals could you be using? The simplest three are PayPal (the one everyone knows), Square and Stripe. We'll cover off some more info on them here!
1. PayPal
PayPal is an option that has been around for a long time, and it does have a proven track record. It's simple to set up and use, and it does have a great history of being reliable in terms of its security. That's important for an online payment portal.
Beyond that, it can be relatively simple to take payments from overseas vendors or clients, and it's a portal that people are willing to trust, just because they recognise it and they've probably used it before.
2. Square
Square is a popular alternative, and it's growing more and more popular all the time. One of the best features is of course the fact that the whole payment system can work with a tiny dongle that you plug into your phone, tablet or computer, to take payments on the go and in person as well as online.
When you get started, you can even take advantage of free processing on up to $1,000 of invoices, which is a great way to test the product and measure whether or not it works for you.
3. Stripe
This is the option that is best used by mainly online businesses. If your customers pay on a regular monthly subscription, if you're selling digital products or if you're operating a market place or online service, Stripe is the best option. It's reliable and heavily integrated with options and products to match any need.
Stripe is the payment option that powers many tech companies, and as such it's right on the cutting edge of online payment systems!
There are more and more of these options popping up all the time, but in terms of reliability, functionality and security, these are the best choices. They'll serve most companies smoothly, and help you to take your business' payments to the next level...
