Weekend Projects - Count Down to Christmas
Posted on September 7th, 2008
One week down and only 15 weeks until Christmas. Last week we talked about what we are going to sell. If you did not pick a product be sure to do so now. This week it is time to move on and choose a payment processor and get a site online.
Step 2 - Choosing a Payment Processor
This can be one of the hardest choices you can make. There are literally 100’s of payment processors that you can choose from. Some people make their choice based on costs where others like to have flexibility in a payment processor. Here is a list of some of the providers I have used…
| Processor | Advantage | Disadvantage | ||
| PayPal | Inexpensive and easy to setup. No setup fee. | Customers who are not familiar with PayPal may trust the sign-up site. | ||
| 2CheckOut | Inexpensive and flexible payment options. | You receive payouts when a limit is reached and by cheque. There is a small sign-up fee. | ||
| Internet Secure | Flexible payment options and payouts biweekly through auto deposit. You are provided a full merchant account. | Expensive per transaction fee’s and small sign-up fee. | ||
| PSIGate | Flexible payment options and payouts biweekly through auto deposit. You are provided a full merchant account. | Expensive per transaction fee’s and small sign-up fee. | ||
| WorldPay | Flexible payment options and payouts biweekly through auto deposit. You are provided a full merchant account. | Expensive per transaction fee’s and expensive sign-up fee. |
For the purpose of our project I am going to use PayPal. It is free to sign-up which means little to no risk. Also because we are shipping products PayPal provides both the seller and buyer a good process to avoid fraud.
Step 3 - Getting a site online
Getting a site online involves choosing a domain, buying hosting and designing a site.
If you do not have a domain already for your product I suggest finding one that has your product name in it. Try also to niche your domain to a target market. So for example we are selling Vado’s to a target market of Canadians. The obvious domain to purchase would be vadocanada.com or vadocanada.ca.
If you already have hosting with us you can create your new site as an add-on domain at no extra cost for hosting. If you do not have hosting then you should choose one of our do it yourself or managed blog hosting accounts.
The last step is getting your site designed. You can hard code the site yourself which will take days. You could pay a designer to make a site for you. Instead we are going to use a premade CMS and set it up to fit our site needs. There are many great CMS options to choose from. As I am more familiar with what is available to WordPress for this project I am going to use it to design the site. Using WordPress I was able to get a site online and how I wanted it in several hours. You can see the site and what it looks like at vadocanada.com.
Next steps?
Next week we will go over choosing a shopping cart and discuss affiliates.
If you are interested in participating post a comment on what product you are choosing and we will contact you for updates as we go through to see how your doing. This will also allow me to customize the examples to help you with what your selling.
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2 Comments
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This is very helpful information. I added it to my research since I’ll be making similar decisions soon. By the way, have you considered Google Checkout?
The reason I picked PayPal and not Google Checkout is a lot of the shopping carts do not support Google Checkout yet.