I had the pleasure of setting up an online payment system that had the following goals

1. Point and click payments available by url
2. Not dealing with the complications of handling credit cards directly
3. Email invoicing
4. Lowest transaction and recurring fees possible

Add to this the very well known problems with the way Paypal does business, specifically with sellers, and I was left with only one good processor and a handful of related e-commerce packages.

Without further teasing, I will tell you now that my solution to these demands was implementing Google Checkout with E-Junkie e-commerce. Now I’ll tell you why.

First, I trust Google more than I do Paypal for internet transactions. I could talk about the soft reasons for this, but that would be kind of rambling and unfocused. Lets concentrate on rates.

Paypal has a sliding scale that passes higher fees on to smaller customers. This is, I suspect, in keeping with the pricing of normal settlement providers that hose the small business. Typical. Does anyone else do better? Actually yes.

Google Checkout does one better by combining their settlement service at a discount rate, with some fraud and chargeback protection, and it may even be free if you’re spending any money on AdWords. Free is pretty nice. In fact, all Google Checkout is still free until the end of the year.

Google has a list of supported integrators and shopping carts that can just plug into their API for settlement. Which to choose? I looked at many of them, and they are not even close to the same offerings. I liked E-Junkie and the open source shopping carts, Zen Cart and osCommerce, that may already be part of your hosting providers offering.

Zen Cart and osCommerce can be integrated into your existing web structure and has the benefit of being able to appear under your domain name. A major point worth considering and important that, unless you’re a web-geek and like to keep up with these things, someone else (like your web hosting people) maintain it for you.

Cool, but what about a quick and simple method to make a shopping cart without involving your domain directly? This is where I picked E-Junkie over the many many others. Mainly because they have a lot of features and they’re cheap. $5 a month cheap. Thats about half of most of the others setup fees alone. They integrate with a lot of other payment systems, including Paypal, as well, but

So thats my solution. E-Junkie for now, and likely osCommerce for later after some changes in my clients site management.