Remember when I posted about using affiliate links to drive up secondary revenues? Well this is an extension of that. Did you know that with a few simple phone calls and a contract or two YOU can be your own paypal? Yes you can get a piece of every card transaction that flows through your web page AND through their brick and mortar POS (Point Of Sale system aka cash register)? The best part of this is you get a monthly check for a long time afterward further compensating you for your time.

Lets get into a bit on how that works. First off you have your MSP (merchant services provider), that is who you get a reseller agreement with. Your client for our purposes here is called the merchant, the customer is the person buying the product from the merchant. The credit card fees are usually somewhere between 1% and 4% of the total bill. You are paid a portion of each transaction usually about 25% of the fees collected.

If you’ve ever made an e-commerce site before you know that you interface the site with the gateway which actually processes the transactions. In a future article I will cover e-commerce basics. But this is exactly the same, you have to either code calls to an API or use some kind of plugin. For liability reasons I usually recommend the client source a premade plugin. Sometimes I credit their first year off the bill. Which in the case of wordpress/woocommerce you can get a commission on that to. (See my affiliate marketing article for more info) .

So now that we understand the fee structure and the technological side, I will show you some examples about how I implemented it in live deals. I found I could install a base wordpress package pretty easily using automation scripts like Softaculous. It takes a total of roughly an hour and a half for me to get a basic site up and running and ready for them to input their products and create their pages. With that in mind I bill $125/hr so my investment is about $200 in the site. For our example the client is a small/medium sized business which does about $225,000 in revenue annually. Assuming its an online business and 100% credit card usage the total fees from the business is $4500. Of that your yearly commission is $$1125 so you will get for that client $93.75. That means in a few short months if you charged them nothing your investment would be paid back. After that initial period you will be riding a fat residual check that requires little to no time commitment from yourself. Assuming you get that average client a few more times that quickly becomes a few extra hundred dollars a month with no added effort. It also allows you to much more readily low ball others when submitting bids for projects.

Hope this helped leave a comment below if you have any questions!