[OBSOLETE] Why can't the customers pay online when they place their orders?

NOTE: This article is out of date! There is now a way to accept payment when they play their orders.

There are many reasons, but the biggest two are these:

You're taking orders for agricultural products that in most cases haven't even been harvested yet, and so there will necessarily be many adjustments that will need to be made between the time of order and the time of delivery. If you take credit card payments at the time of order (through PayPal or any other processor), you'll either have to make a bunch of refunds or place a hold and then go back and finalize the transactions after delivery. If you do the refunds, credit card processors hate that and will cancel your processing agreement. If you do the latter, you'll get get customers bouncing checks because of uncleared holds on debit cards, more work for you since you'll effectively have to double enter everything, and so on. The logistics of taking essentially a credit card deposit and then balancing that against the products that actually get delivered is not pretty.

The other reason is the software runs on my servers. Real time credit card processing would also have to be done through my servers, which means I'd have to get a single merchant account, which means the money would have to go through me and then I'd have to pay you on a regular schedule so that you can then pay the growers. I'm not interested in getting into the banking business, and you don't want to have to wait on me to get your money to you so that you can pay your growers.

So I have no plans on providing real-time credit card processing. It is possible to take pre-payments via PayPal or other means and credit the customer's account, so that they draw down on their balance. The system provides refunds and account adjustments automatically, so that takes care of the hassles of my first point. PayPal and other processors are getting better about giving hosted providers a way of passing keys through, so that I won't have to have the money route through my accounts, and so sometime in the not too distant future I should be able to make the second point go away. This would still only be for account pre-payments, not exact payments tied to a single order at checkout.

If exact payments at checkout is something you absolutely have to have, there are plenty of eCommerce solutions that do have real-time processing built in. Many you have to put on your own servers with your own accounts, but some are hosted solutions, like mine. None of them deal with the weirdnesses created when you pre-sell agricultural products, however.