You still find it hard to believe, but after that recent trip to the mountains, something that you thought was dead has been reborn! The creative spark! Yes, it's back, that tingly urge to craft, build, and endlessly modify, that very special feeling you thought had vanished for good after you failed "Art 101: Drawing and Sketching." And now, after weeks locked in your studio — the light-deprived cube that your friends still refer to as your bedroom — you have created a small but appealing collection of objects de art (maybe sculpture, maybe music, maybe both!). Next step? Find a way to sell your fiery ingots of love.

With local galleries too narrow-minded (obviously!) to appreciate your work, you turn the Internet, really the best and most far-reaching distribution network out there. You take all the obvious steps: Build a site, take some photos, write descriptions, ZIP your files, encode your songs into MP3 and ready them for download. But what happens when somebody visits your site, likes what they see and hear, and wants to purchase one of your creations? Are you ready to dip your toe into the chilly waters of e-biz?

Whether you're selling jewelry or you're just a programmer out to make some spending money on the side, the transfer of funds from them to you is a big step. And that's our topic for today — getting paid.

Of course, there are several different ways to receive funds online. Of course you can travel down the time-consuming-yet-intellectually-rewarding path of building your own shopping cart. Use Perl, ColdFusion, or transactional databases in MySQL, and you're quite literally in business. But if you don't have programming muscles to flex, let alone the time to build something yourself, why not set up shop with a Web storefront service? When moving currency from one party to another is involved, options are never hard to come by, and the time, money, and craftiness you need to implement them varies.

But what if you're short on resources? Or you don't have actual tangible items to sell? Maybe you want to accept donations for a free content service, collect payments for downloaded MP3s, or set up a payment system for a piece of software or Web-based application. Since no hard goods are exchanged — no shipping costs or taxes to calculate, no inventory being moved — simple cash payments may be the best answer.

If you do have actual trinkets to sell, hosting a third-party shopping cart on your site is also an option. Third-party shopping cart solutions are easy to put into action just by filling out a few forms and plugging in a credit card number (yours). However, since your users actually have go log in to a different and unfamiliar site when they want to purchase something, third-party shopping carts don't provide your customers with a seamless shopping experience. Also, many of these systems require you to set up a merchant account. Merchant accounts, which we'll look at in depth later, are tied to major financial institutions, so there are fees involved. The fees you pay for these all-inclusive systems will dramatically increase your overhead if you're strictly small-scale. So if you're still in mom-and-pop land, cash payments are the most economical and the easiest.

Cash payments on the Internet involve the transfer of funds from one person's bank or credit card account to another person's account. It's the same basic idea as sending a check through the mail, except a Web payment is faster, easily trackable, and more secure. These types of low-level e-commerce, different from the more complex world of shopping carts and inventory management, are sometimes called "e-cash payments." Several companies have developed payment systems that you can use either on a one-off basis, as a subscriber, or as a full-fledged credit merchant. Each service has its advantages and hang-ups, which is just what we'll be looking at as we examine a variety of services in the pages that follow.

In addition to cash payment services, we'll be cracking open e-wallet systems, as well as the aforementioned third-party shopping cart and merchant account services. I've rated all of these services based not only on their usability and coolness factors, but also on whether their sites clearly offered all the vital bits of info (security statements, fee schedules, and terms of use statements) — it's difficult to trust a company that doesn't provide all the facts right up front. Note that the list of services I chose to profile is by no means comprehensive. If you plan to use cash payments, I encourage you to follow up what you learn today with some research of your own before committing to a choice.

Let's start with simple cash payments. There's a company which I'm sure many of you are familiar with that handles millions of dollars in transactions per day. It's called PayPal.