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What Payment Processor Should I Use For My Membership Sites?

Believe it or not, you can’t simply create a webpage and magically take credit card payments when you want somebody to join your one time or recurring membership site. You have to use an additional service that will take credit card payments for you and tell your membership software that you need to let somebody into your site. But which one should you use? It seems like there are hundreds and there are new payment processors popping up everyday so which one should you use?

I prefer to use PayPal for simple payments, ClickBank for affiliate payments and 1ShoppingCart if I wanted to have a merchant account. Let’s talk about each of the three.

In my opinion, PayPal is one of the easiest payment processors to use because you don’t have to go through a lot of hoops just to get established. You do need to create a PayPal account that people can click a button and either pay you through their PayPal account or enter in their credit card details. PayPal processes the transaction and puts the money into your account. Then it’s up to you to figure out how to get paid if you want to get paid from a check or direct deposit but the money goes through PayPal.

You do not actually have to create a merchant account, they do it for you. You can create a payment plan on a moments notice and you are not restricted about what kind of things you sell. For example, when you create a merchant account you have to establish what type of business you have.

If you want to have a seminar business, you have to say in your merchant account that you are a seminar offline business. Then if you want to take payments for e-books, guess what? You need to create a different merchant account – kind of inconvenient, right? But with PayPal, you simply take payments.

The only flaw with PayPal is that they do not have an affiliate program. For this, I use ClickBank. ClickBank has a built in affiliate program so if you sell something using the ClickBank payment processor, anybody else can sign up as an affiliate, refer people and get paid a commission. The great thing about ClickBank is that they get paid and they pay out affiliates before you even get paid so they deal with all the tax issues that is completely out of your hair.

The only downside of ClickBank is they are very generous with their refund policy. Therefore, I only take some payments on ClickBank, only those when I want to have some affiliate sales.

If your membership business really takes off and you want to have lower fees, more controls and advanced features such as one-click upsells or email lead tagging then I recommend 1ShoppingCart. 1ShoppingCart is great because they combine an autoresponder with a shopping cart so you can run basically your whole business from one central location.

That’s the payment processor you should use for your membership site. Just starting off, use PayPal for your membership site. If you want to have an affiliate program then create a ClickBank account as well and in the future if your business really takes off, use the 1ShoppingCart service.