Are there any viable alternatives to Paypal for a small site?
I found out about Google checkout today, it looks like it may meet my needs, but I'd still be interested to find out about other options. While I've never used the service, there's also Amazon Flexible Payments Services (AFPS): (emphasis below is mine) Amazon Flexible Payments ServiceTM   (Amazon FPS) is the first payments   service designed from the ground up   for developers. It is built on top of   Amazon’s reliable and scalable   payments infrastructure and provides   developers with a convenient way to   charge Amazon’s tens of millions of   customers (with their permission, of   course!). Amazon customers can pay   using the same login credentials,   shipping address and payment   information they already have on file   with Amazon. [...] Considering Amazon.com is an e-commerce heavyweight, it might be worth a look.
You can have a way for people to pay, i.e. some kind of payment gateway. Run as Business: Best create a company and get the funds there. This would be treated as income of the website and would be taxed accordingly. One can deduct expenses for running the website, etc. Run as Charity: Register as one, however the cause should be considered as charitable one by the tax authorities. Only then the donations would be tax free. "Bitcoin payments involve by far the lowest fees.  For pure bitcoin-to-bitcoin transfers you have the option of not paying any fee at all, while if you want to avoid the risk (currently very small) of miners ignoring your transaction you can pay a small transaction fee.  Currently no more than 0.0005 BTC is ever required ($0.01 at $20/BTC). Bitcoin also does not support ""chargebacks"", which is an advantage for the merchant (no risk that Paypal will freeze your account, as it did in with a Burning Man nonprofit), but more risk for the consumer. Popular sites for exchanging bitcoins with other currencies charge rates of 0.65% or less.  The primary barrier is that it typically takes a few days to get funds into your account from bank accounts etc.  Given the volatility of the bitcoin exchange rate you may want to treat bitcoin like cash, and only keep a small amount on-hand. A variety of shopping cart interfaces are supported. The obvious downside is that only a small fraction of users would be likely to go through the steps to use this option since bitcoin is new and immature, so your investment in adding support may be hard to pay off.  On the other hand, just advertising that you accept bitcoin payments would give you a bit of free advertising. Another downside is the risk of government intervention.  In NPR's 2011 story a law professor said it was ""legal for now"" in the US, but that could change. I'd say that given the sizable current fees and other barriers to international commerce and micro-payments, if bitcoin doesn't succeed, something else will." PayPal does charge a premium, both for sending and receiving. Here's how you find their rates: Three ideas: PayPal is probably the best/cheapest way to transfer small/medium amounts of money overseas. You could of course request payment in EUR or USD, maybe keep a PayPal account and just leave the funds in PayPal unless you need to withdraw the money in local currency? Either currency would be fine because the problem you are trying to overcome is the instability in the ruble. EUR and USD both accomplish that. If you can get local clients to pay in EUR or USD (again, PayPal seems like an easy way to accomplish that) you avoid the ruble, but at the risk that your services become more expensive to local clients because they have to convert a weaker currency to a stronger one. You should also solicit some international clients! You are obviously perfectly fluent in English and that's a significant advantage. And they'll be happy to pay in dollars and euros. KB served lends itself to optimization in a bad way (serving content as large as one can get away with).  Personally I think models that work well for monetization without ads are those that start with free content and later donations (e.g. Patreon, reddit gold) or those that start with free content and ask for payment for more similar content later (e.g. first album is free but later albums by the same artist cost money). They keep the supplier honest because people can tell if the content is crap before they pay. Of course those who want to sell crappy content will resist any such model. I'm just a sole trader who doesn't have much money which is why I'm looking at budget stuff.  It's not like I'm a big business just being really tight.   I need advice on this, not to get down-voted.  I need one that is cheap or free but I would prefer that I can upload my own files and I would like to connect my own domain to it. I think you need to have paypal for eBay selling, just for one reason: people will avoid buying from you if they can't pay by paypal. It decreases significantly your selling. Payoneer and PayPal both allow you to connect your bank account to withdraw funds, that is likely your best option The fees for the services are displayed on the PayPal website at https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees-outside Is there anything else you were looking for. Yodlee's Moneycenter is the system that powered Mint.com before Intuit bought them.  It works great for managing accounts in a similar fashion to Mint.  They have a development platform that might be worth checking out. I can only imagine the regulatory difficulty you're going through, and for that I empathize. First, bankers everywhere mostly do not know if a bank policy is due to regulation or internal rules.  Other banks may be more flexible, but only the most reputable should be used. Re Paypal, they first deposit 1 USD and then withdraw it, but things may be different in Cyprus.  Also, Paypal now has debit cards, so if Paypal is permitted to issue cards in Russia then it could presumably be used in Cyprus.  Again, local regulation notwithstanding.  Paypal now has phone support at the very back of their site, so I suggest a call to them. In countries that permit, Western Union can be used to wire money into an account from cash. The Bitcoin route should be used as a last resort.  You could wake up tomorrow losting 25% easy.  The regulations are a distant second compared to this problem. With all of the above methods, there will be varying delays from days to weeks. The workaround that I use in a recent time is very simple, effective and it is spreading very quickly - Payoneer. What you will need is http://www.payoneer.com/USPService.aspx which will get you US bank account that you can link to your paypal account. I found this page at CNN Money, that lists 5 viable alternatives to Paypal, namely: I would suggest looking for unbiased sources like CNN rather than searching for alternatives and happening upon the merchant's sites themselves. Hope this helps! You are thinking of something similar to [Patreon](www.patreon.com) then but more automated? I don't quite think automation works for this because you might not want to give every site you visit money, even if you visit it often in a short period of time (e.g. while doing research into cults you might not want to give the WBC money).