This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
So if you want to get a new online business going, whether it's your first time starting a side hustle, an e-commerce business, a client business, product service, whatever it is, one of the most crucial components is setting up a reliable and secure payment system. How do you in fact get paid? Very simple, yet important step, and it's also something people sometimes get hung up on. And so part of what we want to do here with the podcast is to remove those barriers, make it easy for you to get started. So the listener question is specifically about accepting credit card payments.
We're going to talk about setting up a Stripe account. Stripe is probably the largest payment processing company in the world at this point. And it's super easy to use. This is not a sponsored episode, by the way. It's just I've been using Stripe a long time.
Lots of other people do. So if you want to accept credit cards for some means of payment, how do you do it? How do you integrate it with your online business? As I said, it's very simple, much easier than when I first set up a merchant account back in the dark ages, decades ago. You had to go through this very long convoluted process.
The bank that was in charge of such things could often just cancel your account for no reason. They would keep all the money. It was terrible. So these days it's not like that. So let's give you some steps.
How do you accept credit card payments in your business? A question and my answer coming up in just 30 seconds. Hi there, I'm considering starting up an online business and I keep hearing about the importance of setting up a Stripe account for processing payments. However, I'm not entirely sure where to begin or what steps are involved. Could you walk me through the process of setting up a Stripe account and integrating it with my website?
Lastly, are there any potential roadblocks or security measures I should be aware of? All right, so as I said, good news, it's actually much, much simpler than it used to be. So what do you need to do? Well, you go to the Stripe website, Stripe.com, again, this is not a sponsorship, I'm just telling people how to do this. I've used Stripe myself.
You click on the start now button and you basically fill out a form. There's some business and personal information that it needs to collect. You might have to verify your identity, sometimes you have to upload like a photo of your passport or driver's license or something. They're going to verify your bank account, sometimes it takes a couple of days. But again, very, very simple.
And then usually even before the verification is done, you can change some of the settings, start getting a dashboard set up to where you can set up invoices, you can set up different payment methods, what do you want to accept? You can customize your branding and email receipts. And then from there, you need to integrate Stripe with your website. Now, this is also pretty easy. If you're using a platform like Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, all these big ones, you can basically install the Stripe plugin or app.
And then there are set up instructions, it's usually plug and play, you copy over like a string of information, you put it there. And you might need some help with a developer, but most likely you can actually do it yourself. So that's great. Just be sure to then test your integration, like before actually launching your website to the world and telling everybody to come and give you money, test your Stripe integration thoroughly. There's always a test mode, where you can process sample transactions without real money.
I also, whenever I'm launching a new product or something, I will also turn off test mode at the end and do a real transaction, just to make sure that works. I'll purchase my own product and maybe I'll refund that later, maybe not, doesn't really matter, sort of make sure it's actually working in the real world. From there, there is more to learn, but that's really all you need to do to get going. And so it's not a holdup or it doesn't need to be a holdup. If it's been kind of a limitation, if you haven't figured out how to do it, I promise if you just spend 15, 20 minutes, let's say half an hour trying to get it set up with the system that you have, most likely you can do it or at least figure out what the next step is.
I encourage you to move forward, let's all move forward positively, let's try to take action on our goals, increase that side hustle income or diversify your revenue streams or whatever your goal is. And if I can help with something, sidehustleschool.com, you can ask questions, notes, pages for every episode. This was 2,731. And of course, new episodes every day, seven days a week, always free. My name is Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to Side Hustle School.
From the Onward Project.
