Credit Card Payments on your Website

PayPal on your website vs traditional credit card swipe

Regular credit card (merchant) accounts have the benefit of:

  • being familiar to patients
  • funds usually go directly into your bank account in a day or two.

Downsides are:

  • Often a monthly transaction minimum
  • Often a monthly account and/or statement fee
  • Often an annual compliance fee
  • They quote fairly low transaction fees (like 1.69% plus $0.25 transaction fee), but you can’t tell which cards will get those rates, and some charge rates up to 6%
  • They don’t include American Express, without extra (separate) contracting, and monthly fees
  • Card swipers/printers are surprisingly expensive to own or lease

The benefits of a PayPal payment option on your website:

  • No monthly charges or minimums
  • No statement charges
  • Includes American Express at the same rate
  • Rates are about 3% for all cards
  • No swiper to own or lease
  • Your patients can pay from home, or you can use their credit card information (that you have on file via your financial agreement) to enter it into your payment site yourself.  After the first time, all the fields will be prepopulated by paypal (except the cc numbers).
  • If you use staff for collecting payment, they can easily do this either with the patient standing over them, or later (if you have an authorization to bill visits on file).

Downsides:

  • You can now have paypal automatically transfer received funds to your bank account (you used to have to move your money from PayPal to your bank account manually), but it takes up to 3 days. Square and some other merchant services transfer same-day or next-day, but their online options don’t yet offer the flexibility for accepting payments for services, which tend to be unfixed amounts.
  • You have to open a (free) business account with them, verify the account, connect a bank account (where money will be transferred) and create a payment page on your site and create some PayPal buttons (they have a tool for this).
  • Most people have us make the payment page from the buttons they create.

“Pay Now” button on your website
Here’s how to create a new “Pay Now” button:
1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click Merchant Services near the top of the page.
3. Click “Buy Now Button.”
4. Enter the item name
5. You can leave the PRICE BOX empty if you want your clients to enter their own payment amount.
6. Customize your button by clicking on Customize text or appearance (optional) (change it to “PAY NOW.”)
7. Then select “Pay Now” from Select button text drop down
8. Then click Create Button.
9. Click Select Code to create HTML code for your button.
10. Copy and paste the button code onto your Payment page by clicking “text” (next to visual at the top of the WordPress edit page). After pasting, go back to “visual” and you should see your payment button and any text you wrote.