This part of the system facilitates the transfer of funds from customer to your business.
Back in the day if a person wanted to accept payment for something, they had to apply for a merchant account or use PayPal. I had one and it was expensive out the box. If I remember correctly, it was something like $600 at the time. If a lot of people had to do that, it might put a damper on how many people were actually able to apply to take payments.
Now, with all the “Integrations” and plugins that you can plug into WordPress, there are multiple ways to accept payment online, but some are more popular than others.
Paypal has been around for a long time. It has name recognition and is very flexible, which gives it mass appeal. It’s easy to use and adapt to different situations that you may have come up. You can set a fixed price for a product and charge the same thing for everything or you can set it up to make it your last step in the checkout process in order to charge the full price for whatever is in the customer’s shopping cart.
After a while later when WordPress and online marketing became more prevalent, the competition kept catching up and provided more options to compete with Paypal. One of the more popular Integrations is a piece of software called Stripe, which allows you to take payment online which can then be transferred to your bank account.
Stripe has the extra added benefit of being able to accept currencies from 30+ countries as of the writing of this article. This allows you to offer your products or services in more places around the world, depending on what your offer is.
So if you are considering opening an online store where you will accept payments online, these are just a couple of the more popular options people tend to start out with because of the amount of information, tutorials and support. If, later down the line, you wanted to make a change, if necessary (who knows what changes will come) you’ll have more options to take into consideration.
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