Accept Mastercard, Visa, Discover & American Express Cards!
One of the problems that contest organizers faced in the past was that of arranging for credit card acceptance. They wanted to offer potential contest entrants the convenience of paying entry fees by credit card, but didn't want the hassle of setting up a commercial merchant account with a local bank. Some banks wouldn't accept an account for an essay contest, either because they thought the contests were illegal, or they just weren't interested in an enterprise that would only exist for six months or so. And if they did agree to set up the account, there were high set-up fees, terminal rental fees, and then they took a large percentage of each and every transaction.
Well now, that's no longer a problem. You can now accept contest entry fees charged to Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express at little cost to you and NO cost to the contest entrant! It's all done through a service called PayPal.
PayPal was established several years ago as a virtual merchant account for folks buying and selling items through online auctions such as eBay, Amazon.com, Haggle Online, etc. As long as each party had an email address, monies could be transferred in minutes over the Internet. After handling millions of transactions, PayPal has expanded and now accepts credit card transactions for just about any purposes.
Buyers like PayPal because with PayPal acting as the intermediary "bank", a seller never knows the buyer's credit card numbers or other financial information - a real concern in these times of identity theft!
Sellers like PayPal because the transaction is completed quicker and at less cost than most merchant accounts, so the products can be shipped immediately to the buyers.
Here's all you have to do to get set up. If you are a seller, click on the link above to go to the PayPal secure website for businesses. If you are a buyer, click on the link below. Once at the website, you'll be able to read more about PayPal and fill out the registration form. Once they verify the information, your account will be established. There is NO SETUP FEE, and NO MONTHLY SERVICE CHARGE.
Once you have established your PayPal account, you'll want to put a PayPal link on your contest website so that folks can enter your contest.
I hope that you've found this information useful!
Mark!
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Copyright 2003 by Mark Samwick, Wilmington, NC. All rights reserved.virtually
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