Lately I’ve been using Paypal integration for small business’ using Website Payments Standard. It’s actually quite easy to setup payments when you have a Paypal account and start selling online on your website. Website Payments Standard is free from Paypal and takes a few hours to customize and test.  Paypal takes a percentage of your payment and that’s how it makes money. It allows you to sell online, take donations and does not store credit card information on your website, reducing security requirements to setup. Paypal handles everything, and can quickly create HTML form code that can be embedded in your website or blog to accept payments. For simple small business needs and buyers on a budget this is a great solution to get started with e-commerce.  Paypal takes the order and the money is quickly available in your Paypal account. You can then proceed to ship the item they have purchased, or if it is a ticket, the receipt can be used to verify payment with the owner.

Paypal has its own shopping cart which offers a number of different options including customizing the look and feel of it to match your branding so the customer does not feel he has left your site. Paypal sends you a notification email once an order is complete and the details of the transactions are stored at Paypal for you to review. This is a great solution since most people have Paypal accounts already. For Non-Profits there are reduced rates available here to accept online donations.

Paypal is also trusted strongly by buyers and is well recognized in the online marketplace which is another reason to use their service. This is only really scratching the surface of E-commerce as there are much more sophisticated solutions, although this one will do the job for fairly simple requirements. If you have hundreds of items to sell, you need your checkout process to be highly customized or you never want the customer to leave your website there are solutions like NopCommerce that would be better suited to your needs.