Once your customers create a cart full of your finest farm products, they need a way to pay you and complete the order. We have a number of options depending on your ordering needs.

Your checkout options:

• Invoice-only
  No money changes hands online in an invoice-only transaction; you are not hooking up with a credit card processor in this case. This is preferable in cases where the customer has pre-paid for the items (ie CSA), you want to bill by mail (restaurants perhaps), or you simply don't want 2% of your profits going to credit card processing. You can create reports and bill these customers however you like later.
  When an invoice-only order is completed, an email will be generated to you and the buyer with order details.
  
  
• Authorize.net
  Authorize.net is the most widely-used payment gateway provider on the Internet. Your customers will be able to pay for their purchases with whatever credit cards you are set up to process. In order to use Authorize.net, you will have to set up a merchant account and also make your website securely encrypted. Small Farm Central will help you through this setup. Click here for a price comparison between Authorize.net and PayPal.
  
  In addition, Authorize.net can be set up to include eCheck functionality which is a way for customers to pay with a check online. These transactions result in lower transaction rates of around 0.75%.
  
• PayPal
  PayPal is a widely accepted credit card processor and payment system. If you are using this option, you need to create a PayPal account and integrate it into your site. Click here for a price comparison between Authorizenet and PayPal.
  
  
• Invoice-only or Authorizenet
  Give the customer a choice between Invoice-only checkout and Authorizenet.
  
  
• Invoice-only or PayPal
  Give the customer a choice between Invoice-only and PayPal checkout
  
  

Warning! Mixing Checkout Settings

Checkout settings are set “per department” so you may have different checkout settings for different departments. For example, you may want to send wholesale customers to Invoice-only while you want to send your retail customers to PayPal.

This is fine, but once a user has started a shopping cart from a department with a particular checkout setting, they cannot add an item from another department with a different checkout setting. In other words, different checkout settings cannot be mixed in a single shopping cart.

If you are careful to set-up your ecommerce in a sensible way that does not lead a user to want to mix checkout settings, this should not be a problem.