Receiving Customer Payments - Payment Options

First of all there is one piece of advice which I find myself giving rather often - and it is a great stumbling block to those of you putting your toe in the water of e-commerce for the very first time.

In fact it is almost the first problem that you need to answer right from the beginning. How are you going to collect money from your customers who want to purchase from your web-shop? This decision has knock-on effects you see!

You will soon recognise you are not going to be very popular with your customers if they cannot pay you easily, unless they are existing customers with whom you already have a relationship and they are prepared to send you a cheque. Normally the last thing anyone who is purchasing on the web is prepared to do is write down or print out the order, find, address and stamp an envelope, and then send you a cheque - that is a trip to the post box - does not go with internet shopping!

You will soon discover that in order to process credit cards you have to have a merchant account. If you have a long standing relationship with your bank, then you may find it will not take too long to set this up. But in some cases the bank will not do this for you unless you have been trading successfully for at least one year - the old catch-22 trap!

Supposing they are willing however. The next problem is do you want to pay a bank at least £200 to set up a merchant account and a further £20/30 per month never mind the percentage of the transaction which will probably be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5%. All before you even have an order?! I suspect not! It may take you a while to fine-tune your website, search engine optimisation (a service we can offer you) and so on before that historic moment when someone finds you on the internet and places an order! Believe you me that is an exhilarating moment!

I really feel the banks are not being at all helpful to first timers. I am therefore much in favour of using PayPal who you may already know, the credit card processing side of E-Bay. They have a facility which allows you to set up a credit card processing account within minutes. The money collected is then paid into any bank account you specify and the only charges that are made are on each transaction. So what you do not use you do not pay for! In fact they have made it even easier to apply more recently. So check them out!

That bit of advice also reminds me that I have met a number of businesses who tested the market by selling on E-Bay first. What a great way to cut your teeth with minimum expense. Only when you have really found what products sell and whether there is a market even - do you go down the road of having your own domain name and web-shop!

I can see another subject already on the horizon - domain names!

Domain Names

I recall being tickled pink that I could get 'www.dundonnell-salmon.com' as a domain name for my first website. Little did I realise that 'Dundonnell' has about six possible different mis-spellings! So not a lot of people found us!

The next effort was to try and get 'www.smoked-salmon.co.uk' or variations on that theme. Well those more clever than I had got there, hadn't they?! However we came up with a compromise which actually was even more clever than we realised at the time! 'www.smokedsalmon.uk.com' - Smoked salmon was the product and if you put that into a search engine you would get 4986 results - so a searcher recognised they needed to reduce that so they often put in UK to reduce it and then what happened - we popped up first! I even got 'www.smoked-Scottish-salmon.co.uk'.

Right you may well feel equally pleased if you can get your company name/personal name but this is all about being found - unless you are a household name like Nescafé or Hoover which means everything to those searching - I fear you really need to concentrate on the product(s) you are going to sell from this domain!

Now of course the WWW has been around for a few years and yes, you are right, most of the best domain names may well have gone! So you have to be a bit imaginative now. There are plenty of places on the internet where you can go and play with what you hope will be your domain name and it will come up with alternative endings to help you.

Ideally you should use '-' in between words because that is easier for the search engines to pick out the seperate bits of your domain. Eighteen months ago I met a man who had spent £10,000 on a website with help from his local Enterprise company and after 7 months he had only had one enquiry. I asked him what he was selling - 'Scottish Gifts' was the response...... I resented that our money had been put into producing something which was doomed to failure from the start.

He may well have been selling Scottish gifts, but he needed to excite the imagination a bit by offering something more special which we could see in our minds' eye. Then, when you get there, you find that he does indeed have a much wider selection of gifts e.g. www.miniature-bagpipes.co.uk, www.heather-perfumes.co.uk. etc.

Domain endings - of course there are numerous ones now but often you are saying something with your ending. '.co.uk' means you are within the UK and you may not be prepared to do business with the rest of the world. Whereas '.com' says boldly you are trading with the rest of the world.

It may be that you can find several suitably named domains and you cannot make up your mind which to have - they are so cheap you might as well get two or three if you really think they are good ones.

For instance www.newbroomsoftware.com is not very helpful but there again what we do (mail order management) has already been taken up by others. Our new product is called TOPS - 'the Order Processing Solution' so we have 'www.TOPS-software.co.uk' because it is easier to type in but we also have 'www.the-order-processing-solution.co.uk' not so easy to type in but it describes exactly what we do and is therefore very search engine friendly! We have also added a "bookmark this page" facility to these pages which assists the user in adding the pages to their Internet Explorer favourites menu, so that they don't have to remember the long URL next time.

So head scratching time?