Online Payments allow your customers to pay you directly online even if you don't have a web shop.
Similar to Quick Order Forms, online payments sit within your website and allow you to take a payment directly and instantly online of any value.
Online payment forms may have a box for the customer to fill in the value of the amount they're paying - although this is open to abuse (i.e. part payment).
Fortunately, form details can change dynamically depending the the link used to open then, so you can send a link to a customer requesting a specific value and have the form pre-filled and fixed to request payment for that value.
The trick to a good form is to keep it simple and only ask the user to fill in the bare minimum of details in order to complete the transaction
- Z Name
- Z Email/Contact Details
- Z Payment Value (may be pre-filled)
- Z Card Details
- Z Terms / Data Processing Agreements
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Just as you can pre-fill in payment value, you can also pre-fill other information which may not be shown to the customer, but is still submitted as part of the form details. It's a good idea to include some kind of customer or transaction reference number as it's quite possible the payee details may be different from the customer details you're expecting.
Ultimately, online payments make it easy for customers to pay you making your website useful to them and bringing value (and revenue!) into your business.
Be sure to choose your payment gateway carefully depending on the number of transactions and monthly total payment total being passed through the gateway.
If you're not sure, start with something simple like Stripe before looking into other providers like FIS (WorldPay)
