Can anyone else make an online payment for me?
Your relative in the US could buy a pre-paid Visa (aka Visa gift card) and give you the numbers on that to pay.  They're available for purchase at many grocery/convenience stores.  In most (all??) cases there'll be a fee of a several dollars charged in addition to the face value of the card. The biggest headache I can think of would be that pre-paid cards are generally only available in $25/50/100 increments; unless the current SAT price matches one of the standard increments they'll have to buy the next card size up and then get the remaining money off it in a separate transaction.  A grocery store would be one of the easier places for your relative to do this because cashiers there are used to splitting transactions across multiple payment sources (something not true at most other types of business) due to regularly processing transactions partially paid for via welfare benefits.
If you are regularly taking payments of $10,000 I'm very surprised you aren't already set up to accept credit card payments. If you are going to be doing this much in the future it would be a good thing to investigate. Some other options might be: Ask your bank or credit union. Mine will let me issue recurring payments to anyone, electronically if they can, if not a check gets mailed and (I presume) I get billed for the postage. Hence why I pay bill by bill and don't authorize automatic withdrawals. Are you telling me your online banking and/or utility company don't allow you to make non automatic payments online?  If so I guess thats the answer to OP's question... Very difficult to pay a credit card bill on a one off payment. Once you have selected HSBC card and used the secure key to confirm bill payment, in my experience it comes up error.mafter 3 attempts i was locked out of the account. Mush easier to use an account from another bank to pay the bill. "I made this mistake and tried calling Paypal...the first time I have ever been unhappy with their service.  The girl gave me some number but didn't make it clear whether it was an order reference number or a reference phone number for the company I ordered from.  I called within 10 minutes of placing my order and they were unable to cancel or change the payment method.  I did find however, that even though you can't pay paypal with your credit card, some banks will let you.  I went into my account and ""paid"" my account the amount needed using my credit card from the same bank that I had intended to use in the first place...hopefully it went through quickly enough to not get a service fee from Paypal" Goddady.com will gladly accept payment from your personal account. They don't really care, as long as you approve the charge, whose name the account is in. I'm not sure PayPal even check the names on the invoice and the account to match, they just want you to login. However, depending on your local laws, you may be required to have a separate business account. In the US, for example, corporations must have their own accounts. For other entities with limited liability (like LLC or LLP) it is advised to have a separate account to avoid piercing corporate veil. Also, if your business name is not your personal name - clients may want to verify that the checks/transfers are deposited under your business name. In some countries checks written out to X cannot be endorsed by X to be transferred to Y. That may affect your decision as well. You'll have to get a proper legal advice valid in your jurisdiction to know the answer to your question. "&gt;You could say the same about any public utility. (except the one largest one, technically)  There are literally thousands and thousands of processors, which is not the case with utilities. Additionally, processors don't need to have any kind of office or presence anywhere near the business they're serving, which means being able to choose without geographical restrictions. Also, PayPal is not a utility. This is not a relevant comparison.  &gt;Are you saying they are unable, both contractually and technically, to affect the consumer side?  They'd have to revoke their partnerships with banks who issue cards, which they aren't going to do, because consumers using cards is how they make money. Banks could choose not to issue cards, but they're already free to do that. (There's no right to a credit card.)  &gt;But also by selectively quoting me you are (deliberately?) side-stepping what actually happened in the WikiLeaks case, to focus on the consumer side.  Visa and Mastercard prohibited payments to Wikileaks on the basis of WL allegedly facilitating illegal activity. How is that relevant to what PayPal's doing?   &gt;You must buy things in different corners of the Internet than I do. The customer experience (to me) is that there is ""the store"" or you can pay with PayPal. Yes, ""the store"" is actually a payment processor but this is a quick slippery slope to ""what? You can just set up your own payment processor once they've all blocked your legal business"".  What are you talking about? You acknowledge that the store has its own processing but somehow that's not enough because someday they might not have processing and have to go through PayPal?  Processors *already* deny service to legal businesses. Notably, anything considered ""high risk"" - which includes travel services, pharmaceuticals, firearms, adult entertainment, telemarketing, debt collection, tobacco, and more - but also for businesses with poor credit, high chargebacks, business practices they don't agree with, lots of international transactions, etc.   It literally happens all the time. And, there are so many processors (tens of thousands) that there's another processor willing to step in.   Tons of websites don't even use PayPal anymore, and the ones that do often layer it on top of a different payment option. (PayPal is trying hard to increase their presence in stores because of the competition in the internet space.) No one is unable to accept payments if they're barred from PayPal. PayPal actually cuts off accounts all the time because people use it for things against PayPal's TOS.   Amazon payments, Shopify, and Stripe are the ones that most people know off the tops of their heads for online processing, but there are literally thousands. No one is somehow unable to conduct business if they can't use PayPal.   The only time that businesses can't really get processing is if they do something like rack up chargebacks and disappear or commit fraud against a processor. In those cases, the processor can put that business on the Terminated Merchant File (or MATCH list) and other processors will see that there's been a problem with that customer and not take them on. Even in those cases, businesses can rectify the issue and get off the MATCH list or they can look for processors that will serve them anyway and expect to pay a premium for it." There are two separate cases here that people are not separating. Any card will allow you to pay an amount not exceeding the actually posted charges.  Some cards will allow you to pay more than this, some will not.  My parents have deliberately overpaid as a means of having a higher credit limit, I've been denied (different card) when trying to do the same thing and the website wouldn't even allow me to pay temporary charges that hadn't yet become real.  (A human operator would allow paying those, though.) I paid with my Visa credit card. Generally on credit cards, the holds / authorizations are valid for a month on single transactions. So if you haven't been charged on your card, it seems that there was some technical error with the online market place. They were not able to trace this. Is there an expiration date on these kind of online purchases? Should I expect the money to be withdrawn at any time? There are 2 different aspects, one is do you still owe them money and can they ask you; It would be yes, I don't know the timelines. This would depend on establishing a contract etc. They can contact you for unpaid invoice. Can they again charge the credit card automatically ... generally No. Can a third party deposit to my account? (Say I'm selling something and I ask him/her to just deposit the payment to my account? No, but PayPal. "Many people do not know that bank online bill paying services are not provided directly by the bank. Banks often ""farm out"" this task to third party providers of bill paying services. These services in turn may farm out the customer service function to agents in foreign countries. These customer service agents have access to your account number, social security number, and your balance. This means that people have your personal information in countries where you have no rights and where security is not good and where enemies of your nation can easily access that information." A majority of people in whichever country they reside, use the internet and make payment online. Using online services is indeed another technological advancement that allows you to complete your payments sitting at home at any time round the clock. "Why do online services ask for all those CVV codes and expiration date information, if, whenever you poke the card out of your wallet, all of its information becomes visible to everyone in the close area? What can I do to secure myself? I'd guess that's to protect the card company, not you.  The number of the card is guessable, but each other bit of information makes it much harder to guess (the CVV code makes it ~1000 times harder, the expiration date makes it about 50-100 times harder).  Since you wouldn't be responsible for the payment anyway, adding security for online transactions provides the company with less liability. As for the security of your information online, that's trickier. It depends entirely on the site you're using whether they've implemented the appropriate security measures or not (and, given the SSL attacks we've seen, even that might not help).  (source: I'm a web developer, and have worked on payments systems before that implemented the security mandated by the cards).  At the very least never, ever type in your information on a non-https site (there's normally a little ""lock"" icon that will display if you're on HTTPS instead of HTTP)." Why wouldn't one of the existing crowdsourcing systems meet your needs? Yes, they charge a commission, but they have already addressed the issues you raise and specifically they provide the third-party accounting you want. I suppose but it's probably all handled by the individual payment operators, not ck Louis. For instance, several online merchants I go to have their own payment system PLUS PayPal PLUS google checkout, and sometimes even instructions for check payment or something. I can imagine dwolla fitting in the list.