Many business owners looking to sell their products online have little knowledge about receiving payments online. This will guide them of way to receive online payments.

First of all, you should setup your website listing your products/services that you want to sell.

You should either have your own merchant account. For this, you have to apply for it through companies/banks offering merchant account services. Merchant accounts offer you a vast features and services. Merchant account is normally recommended (varying on your country) only for very large businesses going for big setups and investments.

In case you are a small business and want to accept payments, third party payment handlers are the best choice to go with. There are a number of very famous payment handlers who can handle online payments. This include paypal, 2checkout, google checkout etc. Most of these gateways are secure. Each handler has its own terms and charges, some charge on per transaction basis and others on subscription basis.

Next step, you need to integrate the payment gateway with your website. For this, handlers like paypal, 2checkout etc offer their own APIs (Application Programming Interface) for the programmers. Using these APIs, the person having knowledge of web development can easily handle the integration portion.

You might need the services of web design company for handling this task.

Once the website is setup, as the customer selects your product and clicks on checkout, he is redirected to the website of payment handler.  Most of these handlers have secured payment handling through SSL (secure socket layer) and thus are secured.  The payment handler will accept the information like postal and contact info, payment info including credit card information and then confirms the order.

As soon as order is placed, you will be intimated through email that the transaction has taken place alongwith detailed invoice.