If you sell products or services online, you want to give your customer the ability to buy immediately. Don't turn your customer away by making him or her mail or fax an order form to you. We have listed reputable resources below that will enable you to accept credit cards, debit cards, and electronic checks over the web (and in some cases, by phone) within minutes.

An easy-to-use, global solution is PayPal, which offers a secure environment for processing credit cards, debit cards and electronic checks. PayPal has recently upgraded its services to "standard" and "pro" options that seamlessly integrate into your existing shopping cart or that will serve as a stand-alone shopping cart system. With the pro version, you can accept payments for phone, fax, and mail orders. The pro version includes "Virtual Terminal," which allows you to conveniently process payments for these types of transactions – and increase revenue. Both PayPal options provide a secure processing environment, and the transaction fees are relatively small. Your customers do not need to have PayPal accounts to purchase from you. You can keep your balance in your PayPal account to earn money market funds, or easily transfer funds to your banking account. PayPal is probably the easiest, fastest way to accept online payments -- and you do not need to go through a credit check to qualify for an account.

ProPay is another excellent online merchant account provider. With ProPay, you can process credit cards by Internet, telephone or email invoice. You can accept Visa, Discover, MasterCard and American Express through ProPay. There are no monthly minimums or contract commitments. Visit this link for an overview of ProPay's features and benefits.

A resource that you can set up in minutes is 2CheckOut, which accepts customer orders via online checks, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Dinners, JCB and debit cards with the Visa and MasterCard logo. There's only a one-time $49 setup fee.

Mal's E-Com is one of the best secure, online shopping cart solutions around -- and it's free. Add simple "Buy Now" buttons to your product pages and your customers can fill out an order while they browse your web site. You can configure the cart to collect card data and save it for processing later or link directly to a number of big name payment processors. Mal's makes it easy to customize the look and feel of your store. No scripts or applications are required. You can build as large an e-commerce site as you want and easily add an affiliate program.

• Access to SSL secure server
• Support for more than 20 languages and any currency
• Hook-up directly to PayPal, Verisign, Authorizenet and many, many, more
• Integrate your web sales with: Quickbooks, UPS, USPS