Mel,

While I think PayPal is an excellent alternative means, for the merchant (and also for the customer) PayPal as the primary choice is not a good one. Managing PayPal accounts is a lot more involved than dealing with typical merchant providers. The process of payment through PayPal also is not very clean for a Web site. While you can do this (actually wrote this up here), it's still messy and looks very unprofessional IMHO.

That said I think it's a good idea to provide this option for those that don't want to pay by credit card. Providing both is probably the best way to present this. Having done that on my Web Site I can tell you though that only a tiny fraction of people - especially businesses - will use PayPal to make payments. Out of the orders that come into the West Wind site I'd say less than 1% go through PayPal...

+++ Rick ---


>Hi Terry,
>
>You might want to check out PayPal. I ended up using them instead of authorize.net, etc.
>
>At first I thought a PayPal account was required for the buyer, which is not the case. Also, there is no startup fees, no monthly fees, and their regular per ticket fees are not bad and less than some others.
>
>Looks like a lot of 'big guys' on the web are now using PayPal as well.
>
>Mel Cummings