Xavier Media®

In this Sunday series we're continuing our trip back to 2001.

Payments

In 2001 Paypal had already seen the daylight, however they where so far not widely spread so not everyone used them. So to accept payments you would have to use a company to accept credit cards, receive a check for your monthly payments, cash it in and then use your own credit card to pay hosting fees etc. Today I can't even remember how we could live like that

I think Clickbank was the number 1 popular company to accept payments online and I got my first account with them in 2001. At that time they didn't accept multiple currencies, couldn't work with subscriptions and you had to wait for your pay-check to arrive by snail mail . Today they've evolved in a good way. They can work with several currencies, subscriptions are possible, you don't have to wait for a check any more since you can get paid by wire transfer. Since they also accept Paypal transfers today I have to say that they are prefect (not everyone like Paypal so by using Clickbank you can offer direct credit card payments with out going thru PayPal).

The best thing with Clickbank is that they actually offer wire transfers so you no longer have to wait for your check, since checks can get lost in the mail and you have to wait longer before you actually got the money in your hand. So I actually love the development where more and more companies are offering ACH or wire transfers to pay affiliate commissions etc.

PayPal existed, but they didn't have many of the features they got today . In the beginning they only accepted users from US, which meant that you couldn't send or receive money outside US. They didn't have that many currencies you could charge your customers in (only USD ). I got my PayPal account in 2002 so I guess they started accepting non-US account holders in the end 2001 or beginning 2002.

Did you by the way know that PayPal was actually called X.com in the beginning?

So the summary of 2001 is that it was hard to send payments online and it was almost completely impossible to send micro-payments.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.