Automated Secure Online Transactions
| Category: Online Payments | Date: 2002-05-14 |
For the small business owner, it just doesnt get any better than the Internet. Do you realize that with the right product - information or software for example - the time and money required to both process and fulfill your orders can literally approach zero?
Were not talking about a 100% profit margin, were talking about a product that costs you absolutely nothing at all to produce and deliver to your customers once youre all setup. And imagine being able to sell these products, which cost you nothing, all day long without having to do any paperwork, without having to talk to anyone, and without having to haul a bunch of packages to the post office. Wouldnt that be nice?
Consider the following, which is how it works here at IMC:
1. Customer fills out secure online order form at our site.
2. Customers credit card info is verified and processed.
3. Customers money is deposited into our bank account.
4. Customers order info is stored in our online databases.
5. Customers membership account is created immediately.
6. A receipt and welcome message is emailed to the customer.
7. A confirmation of the order is emailed to the IMC office.
All of that is done automatically, normally within thirty seconds, at a total cost of just a few dollars for the credit card processing fees. If we sell an IMC membership for $200, thats a profit margin of approximately 10,000%. And it takes us exactly zero seconds to process all of the days orders, whether we make one or one hundred sales. Over 95% of our orders are processed this way, eliminating hours of work daily.
Our close friends and relatives still dont believe it, but we really do make money 24 hours a day, every day, whether were working, sleeping, at the beach, or whatever. We dont say this to brag, but rather to give you an idea of whats possible. If youre still searching for that "perfect" product to sell, seriously consider one that fits the above model - one that can be delivered electronically at low or even no cost.
Even if your product or service cant be fulfilled electronically at zero cost like ours are, youll still benefit tremendously from accepting orders directly from your web site. For one thing, its guaranteed to increase your sales if implemented correctly - unless you sell a really high-ticket item or something that just isnt purchased "sight unseen."
Sure there are still some people who have reservations about buying things online, and security is still an issue, but its not nearly as bad as some would have you believe - and as each day passes the reluctance to purchase online is slowly disappearing.
If your product has to be mailed to a customer, theres a good chance that you can use a fulfillment center to automate most of the process. In fact, unless youre selling hundreds or thousands of items, we strongly suggest that you look into it. Generally speaking, a fulfillment center will simply keep a supply of your product or products on hand at their location - and send them out to your customers at your request.
Rather than you hauling a carload of packages to the post office every day, you would setup your web site to email the fulfillment center a copy of each order as its placed. Theyll ship all of your orders, and email or fax you a report at the end of each day.
If youre selling any type of product or service from your web site, you absolutely must automate the entire process from start to finish. Sure it might cost a few extra bucks to set it all up, but its well worth it. Remember, there are only 24 hours in a day and you need to spend as many of them as you can on marketing your business - not processing orders, filling out paperwork, or going to the post office.
The Secure Socket Layer Protocol
Before you can sell anything from your web site, youll need to reassure your visitors that its safe for them to purchase from you online - and you do this by implementing whats known as a "secure" order form or shopping cart at your web site.
The industry standard is SSL, which stands for Secure Socket Layer. In English, its just a secure protocol that uses encryption technology to ensure your customers financial information is safe from prying eyes as it travels through cyberspace.
Dont worry about the technical details because you dont really need to understand how it works. You just need to make use of it, either by enabling SSL on your web server or by using someone elses secure server to process your orders. By far its much better to make your own server secure, it just costs a little more upfront.
There are many web hosting companies which will host your secure order form or shopping cart for a low monthly fee, but we dont recommend it. If you go this route youll be giving up control of a very important part of your business - for no reason. Aside from the other minor inconveniences, if their system goes down you cant process any orders. It just opens the door to potential problems that you dont need.
For about the same amount of money, normally between an extra $0-20 per month, you can enable SSL on your own web server and have total control over everything. If you selected a quality web host, they can provide you with this service. The only thing youll need to do is get yourself a "digital certificate" and you get one of those from either VeriSign (http://www.verisign.com) or Thawte (http://www.thawte.com).
They are about the same, but Thawte is about half the price - and weve had no problems with them at all. Another reason to consider using Thawte is that their current certificates are "Y2K" ready, whereas VeriSign certificates expire in 2000 and users will need to update their browser to access these pages.
Once a signing authority such as VeriSign or Thawte issues your digital certificate, you simply give it to your web host and they will install it for you - and youre ready to go. Youll then be able to make any of your web pages secure simply by using https instead of http in the URL. Visit our order form for an example.
Of course, for your secure online ordering system to do any good youll need the ability to accept credit cards. The overwhelming majority of online purchases are made with a major credit card, and to be perfectly honest with you, you wont sell squat if you dont accept them - Visa and MasterCard at the very least.
If your credit isnt perfect and your bank wont give you a merchant account, there are many firms which specialize in establishing them for Internet-only businesses or those with so-so or even bad credit. We are researching them now and will post an update just as soon as we can. In the meantime, be sure to perform your due diligence when selecting one because there are a lot of shady deals out there.
One last thing. Dont even waste your time adding an order form or shopping cart to your site if it isnt secure. 95% of your visitors wont use it. And youll be doing a real disservice to the 5% who do. Besides, silently telling a potential customer that you really dont care if their credit card information gets stolen is not a very good idea.
Order Processing
Once youve implemented a secure environment for online ordering, you need a way to actually process the orders - and the more you can automate the process the better. This is one of those times when CGI scripts prove to be real handy.
As far as processing the credit cards, you have a decision to make. You can either collect the customers information and process their credit card manually, or you can get setup with a real-time processing company and it can be done automatically.
We use and recommend Anacom (http://www.anacom.com). At $25 per month and 25 cents per transaction, its well worth it considering that itll take you at least five minutes per order to do by hand. 12 orders a day and you just saved yourself another 30 hours of work per month.
There are many companies thatll do this for you. CCNow (http://www.ccnow.com) and Cybercash (http://cybercash.com) are also quite popular. Just be sure to read the fine print.
Once payment information is collected and processed, all thats left to do is ... well thats really up to you. Using CGI scripts you can simply store the customers order information on your server so you can retrieve it all at the end of the day. Or maybe youd like everything emailed to you. Or better yet, you can design a fully automated system like ours. Or anything in between. It really depends on you, your business, your products and services, and your chosen method of fulfillment.
About the author:
Derek Gehl is the CEO of Internet Marketing Challenge.
webmaster@marketingchallenge.com
http://www.marketingchallenge.com/
Were not talking about a 100% profit margin, were talking about a product that costs you absolutely nothing at all to produce and deliver to your customers once youre all setup. And imagine being able to sell these products, which cost you nothing, all day long without having to do any paperwork, without having to talk to anyone, and without having to haul a bunch of packages to the post office. Wouldnt that be nice?
Consider the following, which is how it works here at IMC:
1. Customer fills out secure online order form at our site.
2. Customers credit card info is verified and processed.
3. Customers money is deposited into our bank account.
4. Customers order info is stored in our online databases.
5. Customers membership account is created immediately.
6. A receipt and welcome message is emailed to the customer.
7. A confirmation of the order is emailed to the IMC office.
All of that is done automatically, normally within thirty seconds, at a total cost of just a few dollars for the credit card processing fees. If we sell an IMC membership for $200, thats a profit margin of approximately 10,000%. And it takes us exactly zero seconds to process all of the days orders, whether we make one or one hundred sales. Over 95% of our orders are processed this way, eliminating hours of work daily.
Our close friends and relatives still dont believe it, but we really do make money 24 hours a day, every day, whether were working, sleeping, at the beach, or whatever. We dont say this to brag, but rather to give you an idea of whats possible. If youre still searching for that "perfect" product to sell, seriously consider one that fits the above model - one that can be delivered electronically at low or even no cost.
Even if your product or service cant be fulfilled electronically at zero cost like ours are, youll still benefit tremendously from accepting orders directly from your web site. For one thing, its guaranteed to increase your sales if implemented correctly - unless you sell a really high-ticket item or something that just isnt purchased "sight unseen."
Sure there are still some people who have reservations about buying things online, and security is still an issue, but its not nearly as bad as some would have you believe - and as each day passes the reluctance to purchase online is slowly disappearing.
If your product has to be mailed to a customer, theres a good chance that you can use a fulfillment center to automate most of the process. In fact, unless youre selling hundreds or thousands of items, we strongly suggest that you look into it. Generally speaking, a fulfillment center will simply keep a supply of your product or products on hand at their location - and send them out to your customers at your request.
Rather than you hauling a carload of packages to the post office every day, you would setup your web site to email the fulfillment center a copy of each order as its placed. Theyll ship all of your orders, and email or fax you a report at the end of each day.
If youre selling any type of product or service from your web site, you absolutely must automate the entire process from start to finish. Sure it might cost a few extra bucks to set it all up, but its well worth it. Remember, there are only 24 hours in a day and you need to spend as many of them as you can on marketing your business - not processing orders, filling out paperwork, or going to the post office.
The Secure Socket Layer Protocol
Before you can sell anything from your web site, youll need to reassure your visitors that its safe for them to purchase from you online - and you do this by implementing whats known as a "secure" order form or shopping cart at your web site.
The industry standard is SSL, which stands for Secure Socket Layer. In English, its just a secure protocol that uses encryption technology to ensure your customers financial information is safe from prying eyes as it travels through cyberspace.
Dont worry about the technical details because you dont really need to understand how it works. You just need to make use of it, either by enabling SSL on your web server or by using someone elses secure server to process your orders. By far its much better to make your own server secure, it just costs a little more upfront.
There are many web hosting companies which will host your secure order form or shopping cart for a low monthly fee, but we dont recommend it. If you go this route youll be giving up control of a very important part of your business - for no reason. Aside from the other minor inconveniences, if their system goes down you cant process any orders. It just opens the door to potential problems that you dont need.
For about the same amount of money, normally between an extra $0-20 per month, you can enable SSL on your own web server and have total control over everything. If you selected a quality web host, they can provide you with this service. The only thing youll need to do is get yourself a "digital certificate" and you get one of those from either VeriSign (http://www.verisign.com) or Thawte (http://www.thawte.com).
They are about the same, but Thawte is about half the price - and weve had no problems with them at all. Another reason to consider using Thawte is that their current certificates are "Y2K" ready, whereas VeriSign certificates expire in 2000 and users will need to update their browser to access these pages.
Once a signing authority such as VeriSign or Thawte issues your digital certificate, you simply give it to your web host and they will install it for you - and youre ready to go. Youll then be able to make any of your web pages secure simply by using https instead of http in the URL. Visit our order form for an example.
Of course, for your secure online ordering system to do any good youll need the ability to accept credit cards. The overwhelming majority of online purchases are made with a major credit card, and to be perfectly honest with you, you wont sell squat if you dont accept them - Visa and MasterCard at the very least.
If your credit isnt perfect and your bank wont give you a merchant account, there are many firms which specialize in establishing them for Internet-only businesses or those with so-so or even bad credit. We are researching them now and will post an update just as soon as we can. In the meantime, be sure to perform your due diligence when selecting one because there are a lot of shady deals out there.
One last thing. Dont even waste your time adding an order form or shopping cart to your site if it isnt secure. 95% of your visitors wont use it. And youll be doing a real disservice to the 5% who do. Besides, silently telling a potential customer that you really dont care if their credit card information gets stolen is not a very good idea.
Order Processing
Once youve implemented a secure environment for online ordering, you need a way to actually process the orders - and the more you can automate the process the better. This is one of those times when CGI scripts prove to be real handy.
As far as processing the credit cards, you have a decision to make. You can either collect the customers information and process their credit card manually, or you can get setup with a real-time processing company and it can be done automatically.
We use and recommend Anacom (http://www.anacom.com). At $25 per month and 25 cents per transaction, its well worth it considering that itll take you at least five minutes per order to do by hand. 12 orders a day and you just saved yourself another 30 hours of work per month.
There are many companies thatll do this for you. CCNow (http://www.ccnow.com) and Cybercash (http://cybercash.com) are also quite popular. Just be sure to read the fine print.
Once payment information is collected and processed, all thats left to do is ... well thats really up to you. Using CGI scripts you can simply store the customers order information on your server so you can retrieve it all at the end of the day. Or maybe youd like everything emailed to you. Or better yet, you can design a fully automated system like ours. Or anything in between. It really depends on you, your business, your products and services, and your chosen method of fulfillment.
About the author:
Derek Gehl is the CEO of Internet Marketing Challenge.
webmaster@marketingchallenge.com
http://www.marketingchallenge.com/
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