You've got a hot product and proven sales copy. That's not enough to sell online yet. You have to streamline the whole sales process to take orders.
Today, you will learn:
• How to process credit card payment
• Order fulfillment
• Traffic analysis and ads tracking
• Opt-in mailing list
• Build up your sales force
How To Process Credit Card Payment
90% of all Internet payments are made by credit card, you should get yourself set up with this payment option as quickly as possible. Online businesses can increase sales by as much as 400% right after they gave their buyers this convenient way to pay.
The entire mentality of the Internet is instant access to information, products, and services. If your potential buyers have to stop surfing and free up their phone lines, call in their orders or, even more time-consuming, hunt around for their checkbooks, envelopes, and stamps... your order process will discourage all but the most hardy shoppers.
Accepting credit cards can build credibility to your business in the minds of potential buyers, which is of the utmost importance if you want to close the sale. That credibility stems from the fact that people believe that you have to be a real and reputable company in order to accept credit cards.
And shoppers feel safer buying this way, as credit card companies only hold consumers liable for the first $50 if fraud occurs.You have two options to accept credit card payment:
• Acquire your own Merchant Account
• Use a Third Party Credit Card Processor
A Merchant Account is an account at a financial institution that allows you to accept credit cards.
Again, you have two ways to acquire your own merchant account. The first way is to apply from Direct Processors, normally banks, who offer direct access to the credit card processing centers. You may find that you can acquire a merchant account directly from your local bank.
However, banks, in general, are cautious about granting credit card merchant status to any business that does not have the large majority of transaction slips personally signed by the cardholders. That’s why many banks will charge a hefty deposit of several thousand dollars in addition to a minimum monthly fee, whether you have any sales that month or not.
The second way is to apply through a Merchant Account Provider, a company that helps set you up with the proper merchant account, and provides the software and hardware you need to accept credit card payments right at your web site. They may also provide other payment acceptance services, such as debit card and online checks.
A merchant account provider acts as an intermediary between you and the direct processors. I recommend using a merchant account provider to match your needs and situation to the right supplier. There are providers who have 98% approval rate for online businesses, even for applicants who have been bankrupt or reside outside the United States.
The merchant account provider will open an account for you at a financial institution, a bank with whom they're partnered, that can handle Internet transactions, and approves your credit history. Be aware that there are a lot of merchant account providers out there who aren't reputable, so make sure you check them out before you commit to one. Avoid all the hype and terminology, and don’t pay more than a $100 processing fee to get the account.
When it comes to deciding which merchant account provider you wish to deal with, the one factor that influences most people is the cost. It can be expensive, so make sure you compare different providers to get the best deal. And read all the fine print too - you may find some "hidden" charges here that are not mentioned elsewhere.
Here's a basic outline of the approximate rates and fees associated with merchant accounts:• Application/Setup: $0-100 (one time fee)
• Hardware/Software: Purchase: $99+, Lease: $20+ per month
• Discount Rate: 1.49-4% per transaction
• Transaction: $0.10-0.50 per transaction
• Address Verification System (AVS): $0-0.05 per transaction
• Monthly Minimum: $20-25 per month
• Gateway Access: $0-25+ per month
• Monthly Statement: $10-15 per month
• Chargeback: $5-25 per instance
• Reserve: Fees vary, ask specific providers for details
You can go to any search engine and search for "merchant account", hundreds of providers will come out. Or, if you don't bother to check them out one by one, I highly recommend this reputable company Merchant Express.
NOTE: If you live outside the US, you will encounter quite a few problems obtaining a merchant account, not least of which will be the cost of the account itself. For more information on international merchant account, read this article at my site: http://www.working-at-home-business.com/articles/foreign.shtml
Now let's move on to third party credit card processor.You can use third party processors if:
• You sell a limited number of products
• Your product/service or credit history is not qualified for a merchant account
• You live outside of US (like me;-)
• You have little cash on hand
• You want to get it done with little effort
Instead of waiting for replies, paying setup fees, transaction fees, statement fees, discount fees and the like, you can simply sign up for a third party credit card processor and pay 10-15% of the sale price of each product.
When you sign up with a third party service provider, the payments your buyers make are actually being processed through the service provider’s merchant account. In other words, you do not have to qualify for merchant status on your own.
These services are getting more and more popular with small online businesses, especially those just starting out. The transaction fees are usually higher than owning a merchant account, but there is no minimum monthly charge and no hefty deposit requirement so you are only charged on sales you have made.
Also, third party processors often provide some extras such as check payments option, free affiliate program, etc.Some webmasters just want to do it in the simplest way: sign up with a third party processor, insert several lines of HTML code, and that's it! The service provider will take care of the rest.
However, with a third party processor, you may end up paying more processing fees in the long run.Choosing whether to go for a merchant account or a third party processor primarily depends on your monthly sales volume.
As a very general guideline, if your monthly sales are under $1,000, and you don't want to pay for a merchant account, then a third party processor will probably best suit your needs.
Once you've reached $1,000 a month in sales, you may want to acquire a merchant account that offers a lower discount rate.
ClickBank
For a complete comparison, read this article at my site: http://www.working-at-home-business.com/articles/thirdparty.shtml
------------------------ Order Fulfillment
Once the credit card payment is approved, the customer will get a notification that their credit card has been charged. The order information will be sent to you as well so that you can deliver the products.
Product fulfillment on the Internet is a dream if you have a digital product - software, information, e-books, member-only web sites. Delivery takes place by download, and is completely hands free for the merchant.
Basically, there are three ways to deliver digital products:* Method #1
After credit card payment is approved, the customer will be redirected to a download page automatically. You assign the download URL when you set up your vendor account.
ClickBank merchants use this method.There's a major disadvantage using this method: the private download URL can be given to someone else, who then may post it anywhere on the Internet. Anyone who knows this URL can download your product for free!
You can't avoid this problem 100%. But you can reduce the possibilities.First make the URL hard to guess. Never name it as download.html or thankyou.html.
Secondly, change the download page regularly. At least once a month.
* Method #2
After payment is made, the customer will receive an instant notification email with information on how to download the product.
Some credit card processors, DigiBuy for example, will generate a random download link for each buyer. And the link will expire in a number of days. This way, the buyers don't see the real URL pointing to the product.
Or, the buyer will receive a unique username/password in order to download the product or access the members-only site. To do this, you have to be able to customize the notification email sent to buyers to insert the username/password.
This is the preferred way to deliver digital products since it provides more protection.* Method #3
Do not make the product available instantly. Once you receive payment confirmation email, send the product to customers as email attachment.
The problem with this method is that, your customers won't like it.
You see, the chief difficulty with digitally delivered products is that they are subject to fraud. Whatever you do to protect your hard work, there is a way to steal it if someone really wants to. The eBook file itself or password can always be passed on to others. (Physical books can be passed on as well. So Internet is not to blame.)
Luckily, few people will do that!If you are to publish eBooks, you should take a serious look at eBook Pro. By far eBook Pro is the best authoring software providing the highest protection to your eBook: eBooks produced by eBook Pro can only be viewed from one computer! The eBook file can be transferred to another machine but it cannot be opened.
If you are to sell tangible goods, you will have more works to do.You have three options to deliver tangible goods.
* Drop-shipping
Drop-shipping has some very strong advantages and a few disadvantages.
There's no inventory costs. Also, you don't have to pick, pull, pack, and ship the products. The distributor or manufacturer will take all these costs and responsibilities.
Most of drop-shippers can use your own labels so that their package looks like it is from you. Your customer probably won't know that your hands never touched the product. However, drop-shipping also means lower margins. Expect to see 10% or so off your margins. The difference between making money and losing it may be only a few percent. So choose your drop-shipper carefully.
Crippled customer service is another disadvantage. Drop-shipping may handicap your ability to provide excellent customer service. And without excellent customer service you'll lose your best customers to your competitors.
* Keep inventoryOrder an item from the manufacturer or distributor and keep it in stock until you receive an order.
You can ship immediately by keeping your own inventory. The faster you can deliver the order, the more impressed your customer will be, and the better chance you have of getting him back the next time.
You can provide excellent customer service. In case of a problem, you will have all the records at your fingertips to trace the order and make a correction.Obviously, when you own the inventory, you also own the risk. If a product doesn't sell, you're stuck with disposing of it at pennies on the dollar.
* Use fulfillment house
A fulfillment house will handle some or all of the aspects of getting the product to your customer. They will maintain inventory, order new product, assemble, pick, pull, pack, and ship, all according to your specifications and with your labels.
They can also handle order taking, shopping cart, and provide an ordering and customer service call center if you need. In other words, you can run an entirely virtual business, outsourcing everything to the fulfillment house, if you like.
Of course, they take their pound of flesh.
Which model should you use? It depends on your needs and how much profit you are willing to cut in order to save your time. No one can make that decision for you. But armed with the pros and cons, you'll be able to make a thoughtful choice that will leverage the advantages and minimize the disadvantages.
You will still have a long way to go after the product is delivered: you have to provide first class customer service!If providing quality customer service is important offline (And it is!), then it is doubly so online!
On the Internet, customers rarely catch a glimpse of whom they are giving their personal information and hard earned cash to, so online relationships are very dependant on trust and good faith. This is why it is absolutely essential that you make customer service one of your top priorities.
If your customers are happy with you, they will come back to you again and again. You will build good reputation through word-of-mouth and get more traffic and sales.
Make sure that your customers feel happy all the time! Reply their emails in a timely and professional manner. Let your customers know that you appreciate their business by thanking them or even giving extra gifts.
And the great thing is, while improving your customer service doesn't have to cost you a penny, it will be what sets you apart from the pack.------------------------
Traffic Analysis And Ads Tracking
One of the best ways to improve your marketing effort is to analyze the traffic to your site.
Traffic analysis will tell you:
• Which pages are most popular, which are least seen
• Who is visiting your web site and from where
• What browsers they are using
• Which search engines are most useful to you
• Which banner ads are bringing the most visitors
• Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your web pages
• and more
• Add in more content your visitors are looking for
• Add in content tailored for your visitors
• Optimize your pages for the most used browser
• Optimize your pages for search engines who bring serious traffic
• Keep spending on ads that is most effective
• Fix your mistakes
Once your site has been promoted with the right mix of advertising, PR, and search engine marketing, you'll want to measure performance to see how your marketing effort is doing.
A good way to measure returns is to examine the data in your web logs, analyzing your traffic for clues to user behavior. By analyzing behavioral data, you can fine-tune your site to serve customers better and improve your own profitability.
It's important to know where your visitors go and to notice what they like or don't like.
* Use server side statistical package
Your web host keeps log files that record every single hit on your web site. (If your host doesn't provide access to raw log file or statistical feature, just walk away.)
The log file tells you a great deal about how and from where people are getting to your site, and what they do when they get there.
Your host is quite likely to have installed a freeware version of a popular statistical analysis package. There are several very good ones such as Analog, Getstats, Webalizer.
Normally your host will post the stats in an easy-to-navigate web page where you can view the interesting information.If you know how to install CGI, you can download and install any server side traffic analysis script you like.
Analog (free)
Webalizer (free)
* Purchase web traffic analysis software
These software provide more detailed analysis of web traffic right on your desktop computer. To perform an analysis, you download the raw logs from your host to your own computer. The analysis software will interpret the raw log file line by line, and place the various elements into separate fields in a relational database.
These software will give you more clues about your traffic and visitors such as how long they stay at your site, their path and behavior.A good example is WebTrends.
You can learn more about tracking visitors' behavior in this article at my site: http://www.working-at-home-business.com/articles/salestracking.shtml
Another thing you must do is to track your marketing efforts. Any ad, including free ones, you place without tracking is wasted time and money! Without proper tracking, you won't know how your marketing methods are doing, which ones are making money for you and you should keep doing, how much you can afford on advertising, whether you should improve your sales copy or ad...
Without these information, how can you expect your marketing effort to be successful? Especially when it's a paid ad?
If you have your own affiliate software, tracking all your ads is very easy. Just assign a unique affiliate ID to each ad and you will know the total hits, conversion rate and profit generated from any particular ads.
AdTrackZ: a simple, easy to use cgi script.
RoiBot: a collection of web based tools including ad tracking, autoresponder, that will help you to increase your ROI - Return on Investment.
AdMinder: a very handy web based ads tracking service.
hyperTracker, automated, easy-to-use tracking management tool.
By tracking and testing your ads and expanding into more and more marketing vehicles, you could quickly start reaching thousands of people and earning an income to match.
------------------------ Opt-in Mailing List
After researching your niche market, you develop a great product. You hire someone to design a professional web site. You follow every tip on how to write a sales copy. You put everything up and start advertising campaign. Search engine, banner ads, classified ads, link exchange, even press release. Now you have hundreds of visitors daily.
One further problem presents itself: you are not making any sales!95% of people who reach this point give up and declare "people just don't buy online".
This is when most people bury their Internet businesses. Even though they are in different industries and markets, almost every marketer seems to come to this crossroad in their online business.
In order to make money online, you have to keep in mind of this: real money comes from opt-in list, not your web site!About 95% of visitors will not buy on their first visit to your web site. The truth is, most of your customers will have to see your message 7 times before they buy.
Many people believe that their main marketing tool is their web site. In fact, your main marketing tool is your opt-in mailing list. A web site is just a way of building your mailing list - by collecting the email addresses of your visitors.
If you want to be successful online, you must collect visitors' email addresses to follow up!
This one aspect of online business is so important that it divides up who has been successful online and who hasn't. The successful marketers are constantly developing new ways of collecting information about their prospects or customers.
Web sites do not make many sales. Email follow-up makes sales. Ask any marketer online and you will find that their conversion rate from web site is horribly low. Most web sites get between 0.05-1% sales rate from their visitors.
Once you constantly follow up by email though to the same prospects, you can get those same percentages up to 0.5-10% conversion rate.A mailing list program will help you do that exactly. It allows you to send out messages to everyone on the list. It should also take care of subscription and un-subscription automatically. Some more sophisticated programs have other useful features such as invalid or bounce-back email address handling, HTML or plain text message option, customization capabilities, etc.
Typically, you set up a subscription form at your site, a visitor fills up the form and presses "send", the mailing list service provider or a mailing list CGI program at your own site will handle the subscription request automatically. You can log into the list management area to send out messages whenever you want to.
"Opt-in" means the subscribers choose, or opt-in, to be included in the list and therefore give you permission to send them messages. And they can opt-out anytime if they don't want to receive your messages any more.
As I said, the best way to make money on the Internet is to build your own opt-in list. This way you can build relationship and creditability with thousands of potential customers all over the world.
Once you have built a list, you can make money through it by selling advertising, doing joint venture deals, recommending your backend affiliate programs, and first of all, selling your main front end products. There are dozens of ways to make money from your opt-in list once you know how to do it.
You have two options to manage a mailing list: online services who provide mailing list management or a CGI script running at your own site. Either could be free.* Online mailing list service provider
The easiest way to manage a mailing list is to use an online service. You don't have to install any script or learn the technical stuff. All you have to do is signing up for an account and inserting several lines of html code into your subscription pages. Everything can be then nicely done via your web browser.
You can log into your account and view subscribers, add subscribers manually, export or download subscribers list, and of course, send messages.Free online mailing list services:
Topica
Both Yahoo Groups and Topica are advertising supported - every e-mail sent out includes an ad after the message. They both provide excellent services for online businesses to publish ezines and newsletters.
Yahoo Groups is by far the largest free service.Paid online mailing list services:
BambooBizOnline : Formerly known as Postmaster Online, gives you 50 autoresponders that automatically follow-up and a complete integrated email solution for a very low monthly price.
GetResponse : Provides free, feature-packed, automated, personalizable follow up autoresponder. The paid version