Buying goods and services online has become popular and every year we read about the increase in ecommerce transactions. As people become more comfortable using the internet, it means they need to know how to pay online for their purchases. As you can imagine, there are a multitude of online payment methods and choosing the correct one for your situation can save you money and time.
Following are a few of the methods, both old and new, that can still be used to pay for things online. Not all these are available to everyone and you also have to take into account what methods are accepted by the seller as they usually have costs associated with these and are not in a position to accept all the ways to transfer money.
- Send a check
- Bank transfer
- Send money order
- Money by email
- Debit card
- Credit card
- Gift card
As you can see, some of these have been around for a long time. The benefits of using the electronic methods such as sending money by email, debit cards and credit cards is that the funds are transferred almost immediately. This means that the goods or services will be supplied much faster because there is no waiting for the payment to arrive in the mail, the check to clear and other delays. If ecommerce stores are to compete with bricks and mortar shops then they have to supply the goods quickly as well as offer competitive prices.
Sometimes your options are limited by what payment methods the store accepts and other times it is dependent on your country of residence, bank or other factor. This means that you should probably have a couple of ways to pay online so when you decide to buy something online, you don’t then have to start a new online payment method. Pick a couple of methods and make sure that at least one of them is a popular one, such as PayPal and your life will be a lot less stressful.
Knowing how to transfer money online is becoming a universally necessary skill and understanding the best times to use each particular method will save you time and money. For example, the foreign exchange fees on one method might be much lower so that’s a good one to use for foreign purchases.