paypal

An Apology And Some Exciting Updates

I have some really exciting news to share.

(Well… I’m excited about it, you may not be.)

First a very public apology.

In the last few weeks and months:-

  • I’ve lost some full time staff that are now part time.
  • I’ve had to fire someone (which I felt dreadful about) because he was working “full time” for me and also “full time” for one of my friends. Yeah, we both fired him when we realised… I know this must go on a lot with remote workers, and there are some tell-tale signs.
  • I’ve had new staff start, do a week or two and leave.
  • I’ve advanced money to new staff who begged for it and had them disappear.
  • On top of this it’s just plain difficult and time consuming to find *any* staff, let alone good ones.

It’s been a rough ride. But I guess this is something that happens to a lot of people, and always looking for the positive, I’ve learned a lot about hiring good remote workers.

But this bumpy and frustrating journey I’ve been on has meant that a few things have slipped. I’m now TWO months (well, one month and a week) behind releasing the latest PLAhh material.

I sincerely apologise for that, and I WILL fix this.

I have some new staff. I have both June and July’s packages pretty much complete apart from a little bit of crucial work to sweeten them up. I could release June’s as it is and add the extras later, but I’d rather complete the package and then release.

I’m hoping that all the work will be complete by next Friday 15th and with any luck I’ll have already released the packages before then. Thank you for your patience and to the kind words from people I’ve already explained this to.

***

Now the exciting part.

A bit of background first though.

A couple of weeks ago when I ran a pre-order sale for Affiliate Click Pal (ACP – will be released this Monday coming), I had a couple of blog comments and a few emails that all said pretty the same thing…

“Will it be able to do PayPal too?”

Now that would be just great wouldn’t it? It’s certainly something I’d like to see in ACP, so yes I’ll get that done in a later version. It will probably take a couple of months to get there is my guess. We’ll see.

What I *have* done is made sure it has some integration in it for sites that use PayPal scripts and the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates.

This then got me thinking.

Something I’ve wanted to do for several *years* now is release a low cost, easy to use, feature rich PayPal script. The PayPal IPN system is awesome – clearly a lot of thought and planning went into its design to make it so very flexible.

So what I’ve done is I’ve hired a new guy just to work on this project. It’s been incredibly difficult finding the right person to do this for a whole raft of “attention-to-detail” reasons. But after 12 months of searching I found the guy and have him on board.

He believes he’ll have the first prototype for me to play with tomorrow. And phase one will be complete by the end of next week.

There’ll then be another load of work to add in all the “feature rich” parts I mentioned above. But this shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks is my estimate.

Once you find the right people, it’s amazing what you can get done in a very short space of time. Ideas have never been a problem for me, but finding good people to implement them is an ongoing struggle that I’m finally getting the hang of. 😉

This brand new script will use the ?e=PayPalEmailAddress method for affiliates I mentioned above, and be totally focussed on PayPal and the flow of traffic both through your site and onto other sites.

It will make it easy to get a sales page type site up quickly and easily and with a built in affiliate scheme. This is something I’ve struggled with myself, so you’ll probably appreciate this as much as I do!

Amongst many things, it’s been designed in such a way as to make it easy to:-

  • Install and setup.
  • Promote your other (and other product owners) sites.
  • Get traffic for free.
  • Get new affiliates on board (every customer automatically becomes an affiliate).
  • Build your mailing list.
  • Administer your sales.
  • Do secure digital delivery.

I’ve seen a number of missed opportunities in some similar scripts over the last few years.

Every time I’ve seen one or realised something that would work really well, I’ve written it down in my notes.

I now have a *lot* of notes…

This new script will perfectly complement ACP. I eventually see the two of them working hand in hand together, with ACP being the “step up” to the next level when someone is ready.

It’s my intention that both scripts should talk to each other with this new PayPal script passing customer, sales and affiliate information back to your central ACP site where you can administer everything if you choose.

So my vision is a low cost entry into the world of product sales with this new PayPal script, and then upgrade to the more expensive ACP when it all starts to take off.

If you’re feeling a little bit excited now, then you should be.

I’m all but doing backflips. 😉

And that’s because I finally have the right people doing the right jobs.

The world has been waiting for this.

***

Okay, that’s enough excitement for today. (Or is it?)

Just a final note to say that tomorrow I’ll be running a couple of low cost sales for a couple of plugins that you may have missed in the last 12 months if you’re new here.

The first is for a plugin I use all the time, in fact I’ll be using it for the sales tomorrow.

It’s called the “Content Replacement” plugin and enables you to schedule small snippets of content in and out of your blog. I use it to display payment buttons at the appropriate time, and then later remove them when the sale is over.

That way I can be out and about and not have to worry about the sale going ahead. It just works.

Very useful.

The second related plugin is called “Subscribers Only” and which allows you to hide content on your blog from non-subscribers.

If a visitor to your blog isn’t a WP blog subscriber, then instead of seeing all of an article, you can withhold small but crucial parts of it. So they don’t see the bit you’ve hidden, instead they see a little padlock symbol and a message saying the content is for subscribers only with link where they can go subscribe.

Cool huh?

Both sales will start the same time tomorrow at 6.00pm and will continue over the weekend until Monday morning when the Content Replacement plugin will automatically remove the buy buttons. 😉

More info about the sale tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business, software

Running SmartDD v3 From A Single Site

Going on from my previous post, I realised I had a few things to say about SmartDD that maybe aren’t as obvious as I thought they were from the new videos. Somebody asked me a question the other day that made me wonder and then my memory was jogged while writing that last post.

So here we go.

You’ve always been able to run all your sites from a single installation of SmartDD if you wanted to. But it’s also fine if you want to install it on each site, and that’s what I tended to do myself so I suppose things weren’t quite right for using it on a single site and managing all your other sites through it.

But with v3 we’ve made it so that it’s really to your advantage to do so. Now you can keep all your customer details and all your order details in one big database, and easily export the data into a spreadsheet to do some analysis. (Well, just customers for now, but I’ve made a note to add orders too.)

There’s now not one but FOUR ways to get customers and orders into SmartDD.

#1 – PayPal
#2 – ClickBank
#3 – Free sign up to a mailing list
#4 – Manually

That means you can have one site (or eBay) selling goods by PayPal, another by ClickBank, and another where you can give products away in return for an email address. (You ALWAYS use double opt-in right? Let’s be responsible folks.)

It also means you can easily give your products to your Joint Venture partners *securely* by manually creating an order. It takes about 30 seconds or less to add a customer (depending on how fast you can type or copy and paste), and then a few seconds more to create an order and tell SmartDD to send out an email to them.

You also have a choice of two different affiliate schemes you can run.

#1 – PayPal email address
#2 – ClickBank

Up until the introduction of the PayPal email address method with the release of the 7 Dollar Script, I’d only ever seen something called “split pay” using PayPal. The split pay method is a nightmare and involved your customer making TWO payments, one to your affiliate and one to you before they got your product. There were too many things that could go wrong (refunds – erk!), and needless to say, no-one was happy with that and it wasn’t long before PayPal said no more.

But the 7 Dollar Method was a good ‘un and works on the principle of rotating the full amount of the payment between the site owner and the affiliate. It all averages out over a few sales.

Your affiliates simply create a URL that looks like this:-

http://www.domain.com/?e=PayPalEmailAddress

and then depending on the percentage commission being paid, they get some of the sales paid directly into their PayPal account. If a refund is required and it happens to be the affiliate who received that payment, it’s tough, but they’re the ones who have to refund it – PayPal is quite definite about that. They’re not going to chase someone who hasn’t received any money, they’re going to chase the person who did.

Since then there have been a few scripts that use this method, and we introduced it into SmartDD v3, with a slight modification. Even if the commission payment is set to 100%, the admin gets all of the first payment, and the affiliate gets all the rest. We did that to stop people from getting a product for free by buying from their own business account with their personal account.

Using ClickBank is even easier. First you copy and paste the return code from SmartDD into your ClickBank sellers account(s).

Then all you need do is create the publisher name in SmartDD and add the secret key that ClickBank supply you with. Next, go to the saleable items panel in SmartDD and create or amend an item, select the publisher and enter the number of the product you’re selling via ClickBank – usually number 1.

Lastly, go to the code generator for that item, and generate the code to add to your sales button on your sales page.

Easy.

Your affiliates then use a normal CB hoplink and get paid by ClickBank as usual a couple of weeks after the sale.

At sale time, ClickBank sends SmartDD the transaction details and SmartDD generates an order. On your customers return from ClickBank (via the return code you pasted into your sellers account), SmartDD redirects them to the download page and also sends them an email with the transaction details and a link to the download page for future reference.

Job done.

The download pages in all cases can be on your single site installation of SmartDD, with the payment buttons etc being on all your satellite sites. The download pages themselves are all held within the SmartDD database, and can be created to look just like your original sales page on the satellite site.

All you need to do is create the download page with an HTML editor (I prefer Dreamweaver) using your satellite site template and make sure that all the links to objects such as graphics and CSS files are direct URLs rather than relative one. So you *wouldn’t* use:-

/images/header.jpg

to refer to your header graphic, you’d use:-

http://www.satellite-domain.com/images/header.jpg

That way the main site with SmartDD installed on it would be able to display the graphics correctly from your satellite site. And of course the same applies for the CSS files.

Once that download template is created in SmartDD, it doesn’t matter where the order has come from, the generated download page will work perfectly.

As you can see, we’ve put a lot of thought into making SmartDD as flexible as possible, and we’ve got some more goodies to come.

Let’s not forget the existing eBay functionality too, and of course Kunaki integration.

The next minor release of SmartDD will contain membership abilities and subscriptions support.

Then we’ll be able to truly say that SmartDD is a cross between the Butterfly Marketing script, JV Manager / Fantasos, the 7 Dollar Script, RAPS, Auction Acrobat and Disc Mojo all rolled into one, and all usable from a single site.

Is that good value for money or what?

Is it? Then go promote it as such. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

How Does PayPal IPN Work?

I’ve had lots of questions recently about PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification), both from SmartDD and Nickel Script customers. The recurring theme is how can IPN work on several sites?

If you’ve looked at the activation method for IPN, you’ll know that it’s by entering a default IPN URL into your PayPal profile. PayPal’s logic must be that if you want to use IPN, then you must have at least one site with a script that uses it.

I think this then is why the confusion arises, and I too was confused a few years ago when I first used an IPN script and wanted to accept PayPal payments on several sites. I thought that if there was only one IPN URL, then I could only use PayPal with one site.

Seemed logical to me, and I think to most other people too judging by the questions asked.

The truth is, as I mentioned above, it’s just a default URL and not the only one you can use.

When you have two sites that you want to use IPN with, just choose one and use that scripts IPN URL. Then when a payment comes in on the other site, the default IPN URL gets temporarily overridden by that second sites IPN settings.

It works by a setting sent in the POST message sent to PayPal. Inside there is the IPN URL that PayPal is to use for that transaction only. When payment is complete, PayPal sends the transaction data back to the site that initiated the transaction, and not to the default site.

Okay?

So why does SmartDD require that you use the SmartDD IPN URL as the default one? Well the truth is it doesn’t, you can use any IPN URL for any script on any site you have.

The problem has always arisen though that if you’re using an auction site like eBay and selling goods on there (SmartDD v2 and above supports physical goods too), there’s no way to tell SmartDD how to handle the PayPal payment and transaction.

By setting the default IPN URL to point to your SmartDD installation, PayPal will send all the transaction data to SmartDD. As long as you have the title of your eBay listing also identically matched within SmartDD, that will trigger the SmartDD process and automatically send emails to your customer, and record all details of the transaction and your new customer within the SmartDD database.

And with the soon to be released version 3, you can also have CDs or DVDs created and automatically shipped to your customer without you having to do a thing. UPDATE – v3 is now out and supports the sale of physical goods as well as Kunaki.com to have your CDs and DVDs drop shipped to your customers.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business