Once you have learned the basic outline of presenting a design to a client in a contest, you will need to know what to do if you happen to win. You may not be so lucky at first, but if you do win, what do you do next? Well the most used payment processor in the world would be paypal. You can almost guarantee that your client will either have paypal, or be able to use it to pay you. There are other payment processors as well that you can look into such as, Google Check out, Alert Pay, and a few others. Paypal is probably the most used.

Payment processors are a way for your clients to pay you online. The client will go to the payment processor page, and send funds into your account on that payment processor, where you can later transfer those funds into your own bank account. Most payment processors accept all major credit cards, e-checks, and some other forms of payment as well.

The first thing you need to do is create an account at the payment processor of your choice. You will need a bank account to do this. Once you are completely set up, you may have to verify your account. Sometimes this is done by verifying a couple small deposits to your bank account made by the payment processor. When you identify the amounts, this verifies your bank account.

Now that your payment processor is all set up, you can begin to be paid for your services. There are several ways to collect your payment. Suppose we are going to use paypal for our payment processor. One way to collect your payment is to have the client log into their own paypal account and send the funds to you email address associated with your paypal account. This is pretty simple; however all of your clients may not have paypal accounts. In this case you have a couple other options. You can request money, by clicking the request money from the paypal website, and send a request to your clients email, where they will receive the email and it will direct them to the payment page, and they can use there credit card or other payment type. Or you can send them an invoice. This is good if you are charging them for multiple items or services as it allows you to list multiple items and prices. I also like to use the send invoice option, because it provides the client with some decent paper work to track there purchases. In my opinion this is the most professional way to handle payments. It's basically sending them a bill which gives them the option to pay using the paypal website. Then of course once you receive the payment in your paypal account, you can transfer it to your own bank account.

Depending on which type of account you have you may incur some small charges. I suggest using the business account, which adds a slight charge to each transaction, but it's worth it. Without the business account, your credit card transactions are limited, making it difficult to do business with many clients.

One thing you must remember is to never give out your payment processor account information. Never tell anyone your password, and be sure your password is a very complex one that would be hard to guess. There are also phishing websites that you need to be aware of. These are clone sites that look and act just like paypal or other payment processors, with the sole purpose of steeling your account information. The way they work is, you receive an email telling you have an unconfirmed charge on your account and asks you to click this link to log in. This link then takes you to a site which looks just like your payment processor page, but its not. It's a fake. It will ask you to log in and once you do your password and username or email will then be sent to an individual that plans on using your account to do their own bidding. I have received hundreds of phishing emails, sometimes they change it a bit here or there, but they always send you to this clone page, that asks you to log in. One way i have noticed to determine if it is a phishing site or not, is to look in the browsers url input box, and see what url is showing. Is it http://www.paypal.com? Or is it something like http://bobsfishhouse.com/eeerr/gt67.html? Either way, never trust an email asking you to log in. Always go directly to the paypal or other processor site, using your browser, by directly typing in the correct url.

Payment processors like paypal are a great and easy way to process all of your payments. Another option would be to look into actual merchant accounts using major credit cards directly on your site. I am not very familiar with how it works, so i won't go into too much detail. But using paypal, i can tell you this... I've never needed any merchant services.