If youre selling anything online, youll need to be able to accept online payments.

There are many ways you can do this, but lets simplify it down to the hard way and the easy way.

The hard way requires you set up a merchant bank account and then sign up, at quite some considerable expense, to accept online payments on your account. Not only will you have to pay a percentage of each payment you receive, but there is often a monthly charge for running the account too. If you start getting into big figures, you may even find that the bank holds back a sum of money due to you for chargebacks.

A chargeback is where a buyer asks for their money back either due to fraud or because they are unhappy with the product you have supplied. There are stories of some companies holding back large sums of money to cover the cost of chargebacks.

Thats the hard way!

Now for the easy way.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past five years, you'll have heard of Paypal. It's easy to set up and account to take payment for goods, downloadable Ebooks and subscriptions without the need to set up a merchant account.

This online payment system is the quickest and easiest way to accept payment online with cards such as Visa, Mastercard and Maestro on your site. It's easy to open a Paypal account and start accepting payment online immediately.