While credit cards and PayPal payments are probably the easiest and most convenient for a customer to use, not everyone will trust the Internet with their payment details and will instead prefer to use more old-fashioned methods. Ironically, a higher percentage of fraud is associated with check payments than with credit cards from online sales, but there you go.
Be careful with checks and money orders. Some banks will clear the funds in your account immediately when you deposit a check into your account. Acting on good faith, you then promptly deliver the product, only to find that the bank has removed the funds from your account once the check bounced and the customer has either maliciously or unwittingly left you out of pocket. Ouch!!
If you feel that your sales will be adversely affected due to the lack of other payment methods, then by all means, read on...
This module is about as easy as it comes to set up. Simply go along to the Payments section and click install. Then, edit it appropriately (the settings are self explanatory, or have already been covered several times), and away you go. Obviously, you would not change the status of the order until you received the check or the money order, and you certainly would not want to release your products or make them available till you are in possession of the funds.
Another issue you will need to research is whether or not the form of payment is valid for you. Money orders may not be redeemable if you are not based in the US. Apart from doing a bit of background research on the niceties of each form of payment, there are no real concerns about security on the site because no sensitive information is passed between the customer and the store. This makes it easy for you to implement, but an exercise in patience for the customer as they wait for you to receive and process the payments.
If you are going to be delivering the products you sell, then the Cash on Delivery module is probably worth installing. Again, there is nothing complex about this module, and editing should present no problem for you. The only things worth mentioning here are that:
- The chances being fairly high that you only deliver within a single zone, the Payment Zone option becomes far more important because you can enable this option for only your locality.
- Merchants can ship CoD using UPS, but there are extra costs involved. See the UPS site at http://www.ups.com for more details.