New simple solution for e-payments: SmartCommerce
From time to time I receive questions about electronic payments. Two simple cases:
- You want to sell products and/or services online
- You want to receive donations
Perhaps you have setup a simple website and you want to integrate a simple way of receive payments. The creation of a proper e-Commerce solution would probably be a case of over-engineering.
There are many solutions available of course, and every day a new one comes to market. Recently I came across a service developed by PostFinance and called SmartCommerce.
To try it I registered on https://www.smartcommerce.ch/landingpage/microsite_de.html. Ok, I did all the registration and following setup in German but the service is multi-language.
As a result I got my own payment page https://mypage.smartcommerce.ch/de/?tid=1 where “mypage” could be your domain-name. After that I created 1 new product and for each product or service you have a different payment page, like this https://mypage.smartcommerce.ch/de/pay?pid=2. The service has a clear help online and how-to videos, so I am not publishing here any screenshot.
From what I understand of this service, you have then 2 options:
- from your website you show the payment link, which would then open a new page (within SmartCommerce) with the payment option. This is rather easy step.
- You could integrate the payment page of SmartCommerce within your existing website, but in this case you need https (this is a PostFinance requirement). For this step you need to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain, costs around 100chf per year.
If you want to be online in very short time, I would probably go for option 1.
SmartCommerce offers then payments from different kinds of credit cards. The available online information concerning Paypal are not very clear but I would not hesitate contacting PostFinance helpdesk. I have been dealing with PostFinance in the past and they were always very helpful.
Of course if you have a modern website, for example based on WordPress, you have other alternatives: there is plenty of plugins for e-Payment and donations.
Comparing SmartCommerce to a self-developed solution, I would have the following pros and cons:
+ you have more payment options
+ payments are safe because are managed by Postfinance
– you have extra costs
– all payment information are part of the SmartCommerce page. If you move out of Postfinance for some reason, you loose that data.
A decision should be taken considering:
- how many different products/services are you going to sell
- how long will you be selling, in what quantities
- what kind of IT skills you have available and at what cost
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