Thank you page – this is the page where people will be directed to after they complete the payment process. If you are selling digital access or download, this would a page where you tell people how to access the secured content or where and how they can download the item they just purchased. If you are selling physical goods, this is the place where you tell people what to expect next. E.g. when do you typically ship the product, where do they go for help or if they have questions.

Merchant account – a merchant account allows you to take credit card payments. You don’t always need a merchant account to start selling which I’ll get into a little later under payment processor.

SSL – stands for Secure Sockets Layer – basically, it is technology that allows data passed between a user’s browser and your web host be encrypted and secure. A user knows the page is secured when a lock appears on the bottom right corner of their browser. Something we have all been taught to look out for. To get that lock on your web page, you need to purchase an SSL certificate. They are purchased yearly. Depending on what you use to process the payment, you may not need it. However, because buyers are conditioned to look for the lock symbols, it can help boost confidence.

Payment processor – these are the people who takes the information from the customer, e.g. credit card information, submits and does whatever needs to be done with the credit card companies to deduct the money and deposits it into your bank account. Examples are, PayPal, Clickbank, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, Worldpay. Some of these payment processors do more than others. For example with PayPal, Clickbank and 2Checkout, you don’t need a merchant account to take payments. Basically, they use their merchant connections to process the payment on your behalf. Because of that, they often cost more per transaction.

PCI compliance – this is a guideline set up by the major credit card companies to help business create and maintain more secure payment processes and methods of storing data. The ultimate objective is to protect credit card holders. If you process your payments entirely through 3rd party systems like PayPal, 2Checkout or Clickbank, you are automatically compliant otherwise, you may need to at least complete a self assessment or quarterly scan. For more PCI compliance information…

Now that we’ve clarified that, let’s see what the common questions are.

Do I need a shopping cart to start selling?

No. It depends. If you are selling physical products. If you have a lot of different types of products or you have only one product , say, T-shirts but in varying colors/sizes/designs, then I’d definitely recommend a shopping cart because it makes it easier for people to order, and for both of you to track the items ordered, store order history and so on.

I have PayPal and they have add to cart buttons that work well. Do I still need a shopping cart?

PayPal buttons are so simple and easy to use. I love them. The biggest down side to it is, once the payment is processed, your customer information is trapped in PayPal and PayPal is not the best place to trace the history of what a customer has purchased. It can’t effectively give you insightful reports like how many people purchased a particular item, which item is most popular this month and a myriad of other information. There is also no easy way to contact all your customers at once via PayPal which means if you decide to offer a coupon to customers only you can’t. Also, if you want to start an affiliate program, a shopping cart system with affiliate capabilities is definitely a plus because PayPal does not offer that.

While you don’t need it, but having one means you can do a lot more marketing that ultimately grow your business.

How do I set up my website so someone can pay and download a book instantly?

A lot of this really depends what you are using to process your payments and your shopping cart system. Here is a general overview of the process and what you have to do. First, create a thank you page. You can link to the download directly from this page if you want or, you can create a list just for customers of this product and tell people to sign up to it to receive the download link in an email. If your shopping cart allows you to upload the product directly to their site that’s even better because what happens is, the shopping cart system will create a private thank you page with the download link. This way, those who have not paid for your product, won’t be able to get to that download.

Then, you create a checkout button from within your shopping cart. Tell the cart where the thank you page is OR upload the product to the cart. Complete the information necessary e.g. price, affiliate commissions etc. The cart should then have a button or link ready for you to pick up. This is the link where people will click to start the payment process. You put this link or button on your web site or page where you have more information about the product, like a sales page or product description page.

Some carts are more involved than others because they have more features so you may find gaps in the overview above. However, that should give you a big picture of the steps involved. This concludes the Back to Basics mini series. I hope throughout the week, it has helped clarify a few things for you. Remember, we all started out as newbies so don’t be afraid to ask.

Image by sanja gjenero

My only question is, I wonder if it can be done for Fan pages as well for those of us who would rather use Fan pages for business related stuff rather than our personal stream. That’s one of my frustrations with Fan pages – though I’ll tell you I find Facebook navigation very frustrating overall. I do have a fan page and while it is more or less there, I still find many things you can’t do on a fan page because the tools are kinda buggy compared to your personal profile.

Now that is smart use of data and technology for their marketing. This technology is known as Recommendation Engines. Of late, I’ve been deeply interested in recommendation engines and took time to research what solutions are available to small, home based businesses like ours. Recommendation engines are technically complex and you need a lot of data so the results can be accurate.

With almost non-existent technical resources plus small data pool compared to Amazon, can we take advantage of recommendation engines? Here’s what I found.

Content Publishers

I was very excited to find the WP Recommender plugin. It works in two ways. First, it tries to match relevant content you have already written to recommend to readers. I already do this with another plugin on my blog but that’s not all. WP Recommender also calculates the user’s browsing history and aggregates that information. Over time, the recommendations are fine tuned based on what people actually read which is more relevant than keyword matching with other posts. This should keep readers on your site longer or at least expose them to more of your great content. The nice thing about it, you can use Google Analytics to measure how recommendations influence your content consumption.

For e-stores

I found MyBuys which looked really interesting. It integrates into your shopping cart and makes recommendations based on purchase history, web site activity and shopper preferences. As for setup, you only need to copy and paste some simple code to your web site templates.

Paul Rosenblum, MyBuy’s VP of Products and Strategy says, “[MyBuy] is a pay-for-performance service. That means that online merchants have no upfront fees — no licensing fees, no consulting fees, no set up fees.  We get paid for the performance we generate for them.  This is a nice low risk proposition for the merchant — they only pay for revenue we actually drive for them.” Now that sounds sweet. Something that I’d definitely look in to if I had an e-store.

Recommendation engines have been receiving a lot of attention in 2009 alone and it’s only March. Fueled by the slow economy, it makes sense for marketers to use this technology to dig deeper into user preferences and behavior to increase orders and sales amount per order.