I am looking for a good PP system to invoice my offline marketing consulting clients. I do not need a shopping cart or anything like that. I have used PayPal in the past but when I send a client a PayPal invoice they assume they need a PayPal account. Even though there is another button to pay direct with their credit card. What other options do I have?
check out www.2checkout.com though their fees are bit high but so far they are very good. I myself am looking for an alternative but the only reason for that is to have a backup payment processor
'Offline consulting' sounds borderline for an online processor. You might be limited to Paypal/moneybooker type processors depending on what all offline consulting entails.
We are marketing/advertising consultants and commercial printing. I invoice customers for hourly time of consultants to help develop campaigns, graphic designers for design hours, and actual printing services. We do not have a "store front" so they cannot come in and swipe their card. More and more, clients are asking to pay with Amex and other cards. We used to just invoice and get checks in mail. The volume is rather low in that we typically bill monthly and many of the customers still just mail checks. We are probably only talking 3 - 5 credit card transactions a month. Most less than $2,000.
Have you considered looking into a merchant account? It sounds like that might be a good fit for your business.
No no, not like Paypal, a merchant account is different from a third party processor. A merchant account is a contract with a bank or merchant account provider that lets you process credit cards. With a merchant account the options on what you can process are a lot less restrictive, you have a lot more control, but it's also a bare bones system, you'd need a gateway to use on top of it, something like Authorize.net. Though a few merchant account providers have their own gateways, for example: http://www.ecsuite.com/merchant-account.php