In this article, we’ll be reviewing my top 10 online payment systems for accepting payments on the Web. While many of the companies on this list have been available to online merchants for years, many are also now getting into new areas of online payments such as social commerce and in-store online card reader systems.
The following payment systems are included: Authorize.net, Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, Dwolla, Stripe, Braintree, FeeFighter’s Samurai, WePay, and 2Checkout.
Web development and free and open source software (FOSS) have gone hand in hand since the beginning of the web. Popular scripting languages and web development frameworks such as PHP, Rails and Python are all open source, and many of the most popular platforms built on top of them, like WordPress and Drupal, are too.
Open source has leveled the playing field by reducing the costs of creating software and web services, as well as nurturing innovation and sharing in the web development community.
However, even though the languages and platforms are free — and infrastructure to host them on are getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute thanks to cloud services and affordable hosting solutions like virtual private servers — a booming economy has evolved around the development of products and services for use with open source software.
In this article, we’ll be looking at ways that designer toys and their related characters are being promoted using the internet, social media, and content-sharing tools.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with what designer toys are, they are basically sculptural art pieces that are sold in limited editions. The designer toy world is an almost entirely character-based industry, and the web is used as the prominent source of marketing.