When you sell online with Lightspeed eCom, customers add products to the cart on your site and head to checkout to pay for their order. There, they can choose any of the payment methods you've added to your online store. 

On the Online tab in Retail POS, you can add different payment methods:

• Online payments: Lightspeed Payments, PayPal, cryptocurrency, Apple Pay and Google Pay, etc.
• Manual (offline) payments: Cash on delivery, phone order, checks, etc.

There is no limit to how many payment methods you can set up, but two or three methods should suffice and don’t distract shoppers from finishing their purchase. The checkout page may look like this:

Getting paid online: Lightspeed Payments, PayPal, etc.

If you want to accept credit or debit cards in your online store, you have to connect a payment provider. This provider is a company that handles the payments for you: processes the payment, puts that money into your merchant account, and then, depending on the provider you’ve used, it either sends money automatically into your bank account or you have to manually log on to that provider’s website and withdraw the funds. 

Lightspeed eCom integrates with dozens of third-party payment systems around the world. You can access a full list of available payment processors from the Online tab > Settings > Payments page in Retail POS. 

The easiest option would be to connect Lightspeed Payments to your online store. If you already use it in your brick-and-mortar stores, you can connect it with one click when activating eCom. Optionally, you can always connect Lightspeed Payments later from the Online > Settings > Payments page.

After you connect an online payment provider, the steps from when your customer submits their card details to when you receive the money go roughly like this:

1. Your customer comes to your website, puts products in the cart, and proceeds to checkout.
2. Then the customer buys an item in your online store with a credit or debit card by filling in the fields that the payment provider has asked for: credit card information, last name, address details, etc.
3. The payment provider processes that payment. They check the legitimacy of the transaction, make sure that there is enough credit in an account, etc. The entire transaction approval process usually takes seconds.
4. The funds are being transferred to the merchant's account. That’s not your bank account, that’s a virtual account, such as a PayPal merchant account. Such accounts are necessary to maintain the chain of approval from when your customer submits their card details to when you receive the money.
5. Then, after that money has landed in your merchant account, it can be sent to your personal bank account. Depending on what payment processor you are using, this can happen automatically or manually.
6. The funds are available to you.

A processing period from the point the customers enter their card details to the point you get the money to your bank account typically takes a couple of days for the payment provider to process your payment.

Different payment providers can take processing fees. This is a percentage of the sale you made that the payment provider is going to take and keep for themselves to cover the cost of handling that payment for you.

Getting paid offline: Cash on delivery, bank deposit, invoice, etc.

For customers who pick up their orders in person or don't want to pay online using a credit card, you can offer manual payment methods: cash on delivery, phone order, bank transfer, invoice, etc. That allows you to accept online orders with payment made outside your store’s online checkout.

With offline payment methods, no actual payment is collected during the order placement. When the customer places their order, they will be shown the information and instructions you provide. The order will be placed in the Awaiting Payment status in your eCom admin and in the Unpaid status in Retail POS. When you receive the payment, you can manually set the order to Paid.

You can add as many offline payment methods as you need and supply them with how-to payment instructions so that shoppers can see them at checkout and follow them to pay.

What’s next?