Review of the Paypal Online Payments Processor

www.paypal.com

Credit card, bank and check/cheque online payments management system to receive and send money through the web.


Let me start by saying that my personal experience to date with Paypal has been 100% satisfactory. I have never had a complaint and besides a sometimes difficult to navigate website the system has always done what I wanted it to do. I’ve processed over $20,000 worth of transactions and never had trouble accessing my money.

An online payment processor is one of the most important parts of an online business. Without the ability to receive money online you can’t really run an Internet business. Sure you could work only with offline payment methods such as money orders, cheques in the mail or cash, but all of these methods are slow and you will definitely be losing potential customers if you don’t offer some form of instant payment method that handles credit cards.


Paypal’s Bad Reputation

When I first hunted for a payments processor, which at the time was for a web hosting business I was planning, I came across Paypal. That was about seven years ago and I’d say my story is a pretty common one since Paypal was one of the first providers of “email currency”, a system where you could send money via email and there were not many options particularly for Australians back then.

As usual I conducted extensive due diligence before deciding to use Paypal. As I read forums and surfed around the web I quickly came to realize that Paypal had a terrible reputation, so bad that some of its detractors had set up a website called PaypalSucks.com, which still functions today.

As someone who has been hit several times by credit card fraud I’m particularly wary of chargebacks from customers who use Paypal to buy things from me with a credit card. To be honest I have very little confidence in Paypal to protect me from chargebacks, but that is more because of the way online transactions work - protecting the buyer, especially when no signature is present (as in all online transactions) - rather than the seller. The best chance I have, and this is where I would expect services like Paypal to protect me, is to stop fraudulent transactions before they occur.

Once the payment is made and the service or product is provided then it’s too late. Chargebacks hurt the bottom line of your business and chances are you won’t be able to beat a chargeback claim as an online merchant with no signature. However if a payment provider can stop a suspect payment using historical data and other fraud detection methods then I will not send the product or provide the service hence eliminating my exposure to loss from chargebacks.

I’ve written extensively about why I’ve recommended Paymate.com.au, an Aussie Paypal-style service, over Paypal in the past, and most of my justification was based on Paymate’s superior fraud prevention. I’ve since changed my mind during the last two years because Paypal has performed well for me and their fees are a good 30% or so cheaper than Paymate and now offer Australian-centric services. I still offer both services to my customers but prefer when they choose Paypal because it’s cheaper for me.

I’ve read the book Paypal Wars which gives a good explanation for why Paypal has such a bad reputation. In a nutshell there were times in the company’s past where it was the target of all kinds of criminal action and it suffered millions of dollars worth of losses. As part of the retaliation against these criminals many honest customers were affected, losing access to their accounts and later resulting in the class action lawsuit which cost Paypal $9.25 million dollars.

Paypal also suffered because of it’s tremendous growth rate. The managers of Paypal are largely to blame since they were focused on customer acquisition above all else during the growth phase of the business. This resulted in a company that simply could not handle the amount of customers it had to deal with and hence the poor customer service reputation.

Despite all the negative history Paypal managed to grow and maintain it’s de facto standard as the leader in online payments. The grumblings from users seems to have reduced in the last few years and my feeling is that the company turned a corner and now has systems in place to deal with fraud and customer support that are far superior to what they had in the late nineties and early two thousands. Paypal has matured through it’s growing pains, and while no doubt there are still issues, the bad stories just aren’t quite as frequent as they used to be (of course this could be because the publicity has been spun in a more positive light, but lets not be skeptical).


The Bad

The fact is there are some pretty bad horror stories of people booted from Paypal for no good reason, having their funds locked away (sometimes thousands of dollars lost) and many tales of poor customer service. I read many negative stories while researching Paypal and became very paranoid. In the end though, I still signed up to be a Paypal user because it had become the standard method of sending money online, which is tantamount to how strong their business model was despite all the negative stories floating around - you couldn’t afford not to use them. I had to offer this method of payment to my customers because I wanted to keep resistance to buy as low as possible, even if it meant risking being the next victim of a Paypal horror story.

Seven years later and happily I have no horror stories to tell. However since this is a review and I always like to discuss both the good and the bad I will tell you what I do and don’t like about Paypal in terms of my experience with it.

The customer service isn’t great. The website attempts it’s hardest to give you answers so you don’t have to query Paypal customer support via email, or heaven forbid, via the phone. Once I have tried to ask a question of their phone support but I gave up, it was just too time consuming. The email support is okay, but often has trouble answering your specific question and tends to send you preformatted template responses, which, if you are lucky, answer about half your question. Mind you the last time I required support was about two years ago and the service has likely improved. It had greatly improved over the previous two years when I last tried customer service so I think they were on the way up and may even be reasonable today.

The website is simply-complicated. Yes the design is simple, which I like, but often you can’t find the answer you want. If all you want to do is use the core functions then the Paypal website is a breeze. In my case I receive credit card payments regularly and spend money from my Paypal balance on auction items and other online purchases. Paypal is perfect for this. The more complicated your needs the more difficulty you are going to experience.

Sometimes the basic functions you would expect are not available or difficult to find. I’ve had trouble for example forcing a payment to come from my credit card and not my Paypal balance. Sometimes what you think would be an intuitive option just isn’t available and you don’t know if it’s because you couldn’t find it or because it doesn’t exist or has been deliberately made not available.


The Good

The multiple currencies system, which finally started servicing Australia recently, is fantastic and I love the way I can transfer balances in and out of different major currencies easily (you can do currency trading just within Paypal, although the rates aren’t great for short term profiteering).

The cut and paste shopping cart functions are ideal for me since I prefer to use very simple plain text “buy now” links. Once again the more complicated your online shopping cart needs the steeper the learning curve you will face integrating it with Paypal.

Paypal recently launched a merchant account service called Payments Pro that functions as a completely seamless online shopping system for your website. Provided you have the shopping cart software you can use Paypal as the gateway and payment processor and it’s completely private label, which means you can brand it as your own. I have not needed to use this service as yet so I cannot make a comment on how good it is.


Conclusion

All-in-all, for what Paypal does - primarily to allow you to send money through email and take credit card payments online - it does well. It makes what could be a terribly complex function, one full of potential security and privacy issues, and turns it into something as simple as sending email. For that they deserve kudos and I’m extremely happy with the core function and recommend it to everyone.

Yes there are customer service issues. Yes Paypal has a fairly rocky history. Yes you open yourself up to potential losses from chargebacks. The fact remains that Paypal is the largest online payments provider and you really can’t afford to not offer this method to your customers.

I recommend making other payment options available to your customers since it’s never good to rely only on one provider. I also recommend you regularly withdraw funds from your Paypal account and put that money to work for you. There is no interest in a Paypal account and you never know when you could be the next victim of a horror story or fraud attack so keep your money where you know it’s safe - in the bank or in investments.



Yaro Starak
Paypal Merchant


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A Viral Blog From An Authority Site?

Creating authority blogs is becoming greatly popular, but can it also be a viral blog? There are numerous reasons that people are are becoming more interested in taking advantage of this practice. The leading reason being is that a fair share of what used to be effective for marketers honestly isn’t working very well anymore. In many respects, creating a viral blog out of an authority style site, will have great benefits in the future.

Consulting and co-ordinating with quite a few other promoters online, some of us have been seeing a heavy slump in the bulk of profits being created by many different types of products. There has also been some of us paying attention to how much tougher it is to make sales, even with the best products available, and that putting together lists with complimentary reports and the like, is noticeably getting tougher every day.

Personally, I believe it’s because of all of the different giveaway events which have been taking place. Sure, giveaway events are great for helping to build a list, but, the effects are certainly being felt. With so many products being available for free, it seems to have had a damaging effect on the industry as a whole.

It definitely is happening a lot with Resale Rights and PLR variations of products. In a whole bunch of situations, varied types of affiliate earnings are down to. Invariably,this also will depend on which part of the market, you are in, but if you are in the Internet Marketing niche, it has certainly been quite prominent.

In the case of building your lists with free to download reports, it seems to be having limited results since the majority of people have been utilizing this method for quite some time now. Being that most of these reports are complimentary to get their hands on, people are placing very little value on them. This can definitely be the case whether they are supplying to readers extreme high value content for people or not. It’s unfortunate, sometimes people just can’t tell which is of high value or not, since they’ve be onslaughted with so much garbage. It’s only the very intuitive and seasoned marketer that seems to be able to distinguish “what is crap”, and what isn’t.

For newcomers on the scene, they haven’t the knowledge to know the difference yet. It’s very damaging to them as well, when you think about it.

For this reason, and as we’ve been learning with Sam Clark, it’s one of the reasons we need to heavily concentrate on building something of real value, such as an authority site. We must also be fully focused on traffic. By creating a viral blog I’m envisioning your authority style site being much more valuable to you.

Many of the products out there, unfortunately concentrate only on short term profits. Sure, some methods might bring in some fast dollars, but, what about the future of your business when these methods aren’t going to be working anymore, as discussed above. If you build an authority site, we won’t run into these problems in the future. We must always be thinking of the long term goal of our project. Of course we have short term goals, but, by having the long term goal focused in your mind, it will help you to keep plugging away until you get to your destination.

One of the reasons I’m quite reluctant to give bonuses with certain products these days, is that it also seems to hurt the perceived value in which the product really does contain. It’s sort of a toss up, since if you aren’t giving a bonus, a person may just go and purchase the product from somebody else. But, at the same time, with the products I promote, I want integrity in my marketing and quality to to be realized by the customer. I don’t want to water things down so that their perception of a product is now tainted because to sell the product it had to be completely milked with bonuses.

In the time that I’ve been online, I”ve personally read probably well over 100 full length marketing guides from various authors. If you are talking about quality of infomation to be found there are very few guides out there that are even in the realm of quality which people will see from Holly Mann’s newest guide (soon to be released), or Affiliate Payload, and a few others. The information contained in guides of this caliber far surpass the outlay of the prices for these guides. Products such as this, really don’t need any bonuses, this information is pure gold, and worth thousands to the recipients if the techniques are applied. The sad part is, that many people won’t even realize it, because of all the garbage they’ve already been exposed to.

One of the reasons, I created The Elite Breed Newsletter a while back, was because I just couldn’t stand what marketers were doing anymore, to be completely blunt. A lot of marketers out there are marketing anything and everything under the sun, just to make the quick buck. Marketers like this, I feel have a complete disregard, and dis-respect, for their customers. With The Elite Breed Newsletter I really wanted to make a difference in people’s lives by only leading them with the “real” information that they need, and clear the clutter in which they have all been exposed. Whether or not, I’m making a difference with it or not, I’m not quite sure..but, in time, I hope to.

Viral blogging, authority sites, and the use of Social sites is now one of the best things to consider in my opinion. I believe it will save the marketers who want to be in this business in 10 or 20 years.

Building powerful authority style types of sites and blogging has become a real staple recently. When you are taking the time and effort that is required in making a site be known as an authority site, you will have a true piece of value on the internet for years to come. Eminently, if you can create a viral blog out of the authority site you are building, it stands to generate big rewards in the future. Viral marketing can work out with your blog just about the same as in many other types of viral avenues. Actually, the fact that it is a blog is fantastic because of all the functionality and viral respects that can be resulted from a blog.

Is it safe to say that a person ought to be devising an authority site to establish it as a a viral blog? Yes, without a second thought. If you are capable of doing the work on a regular basis, and create a viral blog with your authority site it will be have a life force of it’s own in the future. It will most likely turn out to be less upkeep and work in the future, after a lot of hard work in the beginning. The viral blog effect can be a real asset and value to you.

Consequently, there is a vast amount of you that may be thinking about the question of, “Which blogging platform would be excellent to be building your blog and authority site from?” There is no hesitation in saying, Wordpress is the way to go. Wordpress has the most functionality and personalization options available to people simply because of all of the various plug-ins that can be put to use for your viral blog. Wordpress, is undoubtedly a perfect answer for the viral blogger in you. There are a few other platforms you could use, but, it’s likely most won’t have options for you to be putting to good use. Viral internet marketing with blogs is here to stay, the sooner you get started…the better.

The greatest in all you do,
Make Success Yours!

Davin
“The Davinator”




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How To Become A Great Affiliate Marketer In 8 Easy Steps

by BILL ACHOLA WRIGHT

(1). Decide whether you're in or you're out. Affiliate marketing is not the simplest means of earning income. If you're looking for "easy," get a McJob flipping burgers or doing customer service. Affiliate marketing requires that you be intelligent, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. The benefits offered by various free affiliate programs are usually enough to get you started down the path.

(2). Learn basic web programming. While you can get away without knowing any programming at all, having a good understanding of HTML markup and even a basic programming language like PHP will get you far, and you'll be ahead of about 90% of your competition. Free affiliate programs usually do not offer services that teach you how to program. This you'll have to learn on your own.

(3). Get up to speed on marketing and advertising techniques. Unless you're coming from a background in marketing or you have a MBA, the most experience you've likely had with the subject is being the recipient of advertising. You must learn how to create ads that sell, or at least be able to recognize good ad copy from bad copy if you choose to outsource your advertising development. A free affiliate program may offer you advertising examples you can use as your own.

(4). Find a free affiliate program that can mentor you. Many of the best free affiliate programs offer a section for new affiliates that can get you up to speed on the efficient promotion of their product or service. Some programs will even give you a free version of their product to help you better understand promotion methods.


(5). Decide what marketing methods you want to use. There are a multitude of ways to get people visiting your affiliate promotions. Some are free, while some cost money. Free methods usually take time, whereas paid marketing generally has more immediate results.

(6). Build your affiliate marketing campaign. This is where everything you've learned above comes together. Your first attempts may bomb. Don't fret. Persistence pays off in affiliate marketing, and since you've chosen to promote products from free affiliate programs, your investment is minimal.

(7). Launch! This is the easiest part. Sit back and see what happens.

(8). Analyze the results. And this is the most important part. If you don't understand what's happening in your campaigns, and how to fix it, then you won't be successful. Your free affiliate program may offer resources which will help you better understand the results of your marketing. http://tinyurl.com/dmyexq



About the Author

Am BILL ACHOLA WRIGHT and I write Business Reviews programs to help online users to purchase the right program and to be full time and part time successful entrepreneur.Currently am in the Internet marketing industry,where by i have developed the TOP BUSINESS MONEY MAKING PROGRAMS which has been proven, cost-effective online marketing strategies and software since 1998.



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