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I'd like to sell my software on the 'net but am not sure how to do the whole Merchant setup. I have access to Commerce Server 2009, and I want to seem professional so a plain old PayPal account is out.

What do I need to know/do to sell a few things using ASP.NET, accept credit cards, and what not?

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4 Answers

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Definately use a 3rd party vendor at first. There's a lot of shareware and software sales services that will handle the whole process of purchase and download. Then once you get sales going and have an idea of what type of revenue you are generating, you might look at implementing a store of your own on your site. What you dont want to do is bite off too much to chew at one time. Releasing a new product is tough enough, you dont want to compound that by having to learn all about credit card processing & sales/vat taxes, and maintaining your own store. Nor do you want to invest a large amount of time up front doing all that if it turns out no one is buying your software.

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I deleted my answer, I think it would be better to add this link to this answer, to complete it: pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-payment-processors – Klaim Jun 26 '12 at 7:44
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You can use a simple checkout service like 2checkout.com, paypal, or Google Checkout.

Or you can use a service which has an affiliate network like regnow. This will get your product onto hundreds and hundreds of sites, but it is extremely rare to ever have a sale on any of those sites. In my experience 99.999% of sales came directly from my own company website.

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R Bondy Would you know which one of those accepts credit cards? – makerofthings7 Sep 5 '10 at 20:59
All of them do, even paypal, you don't need a paypal account. – Brian R. Bondy Sep 5 '10 at 20:59
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Personally, I'd just use a payment processor such as WorldPay if it's a small business. You would have to pay them a commission for processing payments on your behalf, but you don't have to worry too much about security on your end, and the liability for security (IANAL, make sure you read the T&Cs carefully) gets shifted to them.

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What about tax paying? You have to crate a company? – Lorenzo Sep 5 '10 at 18:01
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No idea whatsoever. It would change substantially depending on where in the world you were. – Chinmay Kanchi Sep 5 '10 at 19:52
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well, at least in Italy there's so much bureaucracy and silly taxes to pay for selling anything, that's not worth unless you'll have somehow high revenues. This is why there are so few Italian shareware vendors... and just another reason to move away from Italy! – Lorenzo Sep 5 '10 at 21:22
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I've been using Share-it since 2002. http://www.shareit.com/

It works out to about 12%. They handle all of the product delivery and credit card transactions.

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