You used to be able to create a sale item that clients could buy as a deposit, but now you can only use sales for physical items that can be mailed. You could do it by setting up a phone or webcam booking which doesn't actually happen, though.

I mostly use amazon for my deposits. I get them to send me a gift certificate and just have the credit in my account for whenever I need to buy something online, since they sell almost everything. It's not actual cash of course, but it's safe, quick and fee-free.

We'd talked about other ways to take deposits, so search if you're interested.

You just tell them to send a gift certificate to your email address. You get an email that usually arrives very quickly but sometimes takes a couple of hours, and then you sign into amazon and enter the code into your gift certificate account (you can find it by following the gift certificate link). Make sure you tell them to use the right site (eg .co.uk), as you can only use the credit on the site it was bought from.

western union and moneygram helps for deposits, but make sure they have your REAL name or else they wont allow you to take it, and then...your client will have to call from his home phone (or whatever number that was given) to change it.

Actually Joey's right, Miss J. I've had two deposits sent to me via WU in the last couple of months and they both needed my real name (and I needed theirs).  My name had to be spelled exactly the same as the name on my ID.

I think it's the case that a security question used to be ok, but I assume it's been tightened up due to recent money laundering/ anti - terrorist legislation or something of that ilk.