Accepting Credit Cards as Payment

[prarie_nerd]

I had a buyer last night who was wanting to pay with thier visa debit as a credit card but since I didnt accept credit cards they had to use PayPal & transfer the money from thier bank.
I had never thought about accepting credit cards since I just assumed buyers would use PayPal to pay with one. Is anyone here familair with accepting them? Is this a way that many buyers use?

[pjcdn2005]

Buyers can use their credit card through Paypal so if a retailer with a cc merchant account was able to take the card, Paypal should have been able to take it as well.

I don't think many here have their merchant accounts. It can be fairly expensive, especially for lower volume retailers. Plus, most buyers do not want to give their credit card numbers to a random seller on ebay and as far as I know, there is no way for it to be set up  so that it can be done electronically for any seller with a merchant account. I could be wrong on that though..

[reallynicestamps]

Even though our (now closed) business was well known in our field for over 30 years, our eBay customers and many of our other online customers mostly preferred to use PP rather than to give us their numbers directly.

Since we did not keep customer numbers on file, they had to type in the whole number every time which might have been a factor.

And yes it is expensive. There is a reason why convenience stores for example will not take debit or cc payments under a certain amount, usually $5 or so.

The rate you pay the CC company is partly based on how much your average sale is. The smaller the payment, the higher the interest rates.