Many great sites lose customers because they do not offer means to pay online. With so many people prepared to purchase goods over the Internet, it is critical that they can complete their order by paying online.

The UK is currently Europe's largest ecommerce economy with two-thirds of consumers having shopped online, so accepting electronic payments is essential to modern business.

You don't have to be big to take online payments. For many small businesses, selling online provides some major benefits. Customers increasingly expect this type of facility and it can improve your cash flow significantly.

It's easy to accept cheques or invoices for your online sales and to process payments in the traditional way. However, because buyers often use the Internet for a speedy service, most sales are paid for with credit and debit cards.

The standard route to taking payments online is to use an Internet Merchant Service (IMS) with a Payment Service Provider (PSP):

• IMS - is basically an ID given to you by your bank that allows you to take payments over the internet.
• PSP - in the virtual world you do not have a swipe machine to read card details so a PSP provides you with software to collect the card information and pass it to your bank for processing.

Not all businesses have dealt with Merchant Services before so don’t worry if this is new to you. There are other ways of taking online payments and they are all explored in the Set-Up section.