One of the greatest things about the Internet is that has brought people closer. With closeness came commerce and with it the possibility to accept payments online. Although at first its use wasn’t widespread, it started to gain adepts as the technology got stronger and cheaper. Electronic money has now become a reality and not a theme for science fiction books.
What Is It Exactly?
An online payment is a method used by companies for receiving money from the customers who have acquired their products or services. This process has speeded up commercial transactions in such a way that nowadays electronic commerce represents, approximately, US$ 5 trillion worldwide. Compare that to the US$ 50 billion of 1998. Impressive, isn’t it? And it has to be considered that only a small part of the world has internet access and it still has a lot to grow. Only in the USA 14 million homes still don’t have internet.
Are There Many Types?
Actually, lots of them. One of the most common ones is echecks. An echeck is the online version of a standard paper check. In other means, you send checks through the internetThe only thing you need to do is provide the account of your checking account. You will receive an electronic receipt for your transaction (usually by email). So, if a problem occurs, you have that electronic document to validate your money transfer. There are two advantages for this process. The first one is that when you pay by echeck, the money is automatically transferred. The second one is that you don’t have to spend time filling a paper check and sending it by regular mail to the seller.
Of course, it has two disadvantages. One of them is the possibility that your provider doesn’t accept echecks. The other one is that you may require more than one firm to send the check.
Internet checks should be considered within this category since they are the same thing, but with another name. And, if you find yourself wondering what e cheques are about, don’t worry, they are the same as echecks. The only difference is that cheques are the Spanish translation of checks. No wonder that this word has spread among the industry since 40 millions Hispanics and Hispanics descendants live in the USA.
Other type of online payment is the common credit card. Doesn’t matter if you have a Visa, Master Card or American Express. Almost all of the big sites in the Internet accept payments online. You only need to subscribe to the webpage, input some basic data about your card (name, number, expiration date) and that’s it! If everything is ok they will dispatch your order instantaneously.