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Some people will call the 800 number no matter what you offer them online, because they feel uncomfortable not talking to a real, live person or entering their credit card number online. This 800 number is assigned to me by my fulfillment house. They answer the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,, and take orders for the products that I offer. For this they charge fees, the most significant being $1.20 per minute while taking orders. The average order takes 3 to 4 minutes, so it costs me approximately $5.00 for every order placed through the 800 number (plus a few small fees that are "tacked on" my monthly account). This fee represents extra profit I could have made if they ordered directly online, and that is why I encourage online ordering as much as possible. Once an order is placed through the 800 number, the client is told they will receive the software version of the book within 72 hours. The next day all the orders for the previous day are printed off at the fulfillment house. My representative at the fulfillment house charges the credit card from her location, packages and ships the order, and emails me a copy of all the orders. Within 48 hours of receiving the order via fax I must manually email the software to the clients that have requested it (this again is a hassle that can be avoided by encouraging customers to order online with the secure server). I have used a few different fulfillment houses and the company I most highly recommend is Mountain West Communications. Their number is 1-800-642-9378 (ask for Jeannie, and tell her Corey sent you - she will get a kick out of that). Mountain West Communications also has merchant accounts you can use if you are just getting started. In other words, you do not have to host your own merchant accounts. They pay you once a month for the sales you have charged less their fees. Note that if you use their merchant credit card accounts, you will not be able to charge online orders to that account. That is because all orders must go through their 800 number as required by their bank. Also note that the discount rate (the rate that the credit card company charges you) is about 5%, whereas you can get it at 2.5% or lower if you use your own merchant accounts. The customer can also write
a check or send a money order via snail mail for fulfillment.
You could either give the address of your home/business,
or give them the address of your fulfillment house and
they can take care of it all. The fulfillment house
will just send you the original envelopes and checks
received, once a week (or whenever you ask them to).
Again this makes it "hands free" for you. If you are
consistently home, you could have the orders come to
you and then fax (or email) them to your fulfillment
house for shipping. Payment Types To Avoid There are other ways to collect money other than using credit cards, or mail and a check or money order. You can collect money directly online through companies such as Cybercash (http://www.cybercash.com) or First Virtual (http://www.firstvirtual.com). These companies are very similar to fulfillment houses in the sense that they charge the customer's credit card account and then pay you (less the discount rate). This is how most of them work:
There are a couple of major drawbacks with these kinds of transaction companies however:
In ending this section,
let me say that using a transaction company is generally
a waste of time. Getting credit-card merchant accounts
are, in my opinion, the only way to handle sales
efficiently. You will find that most people online have
credit cards.
Receiving checks by phone/fax sounds great in theory but in practice it is not so great. It is generally very time consuming and can be a big hassle. For those that do not know how this works, you basically take the bank and account information from customers via phone or fax. You then produce a check on your computer printer from check writing software that is "supposed" to be valid at a bank. This is a very similar technique to a "debit card", where customers authorize you to take a certain amount of money directly from their bank account. There are two ways to take checks by fax. You can get your own software that prints checks, or you can have a service bureau take the information from the customer and produce the checks for you. Sometimes you end up waiting months to get paid for faxed checks because they are not considered a legal form of tender by some banks. There is also a big problem with illegibility, incomplete info, etc. If you still want to collect your money using the method above, I strongly recommend getting your own check writing software. That is one way of avoiding the service problems (you are in control instead of depending on another company to handle your transactions), and to get prompt turn-around at the banks. Do be aware that some banks are not very fond of this scheme, and some will not honor the check unless the customer verbally approves the transactions (again, another hassle as it is unlikely you will get a hold of the customer when you want to). Keep in mind that this method is usually more trouble than what it is worth. Most people have credit cards and will use them. Those that don't will be confused by the process in which they have to go through to effectively use checks with the phone/fax method of ordering. I have used a couple of different systems in the past (with two of them I had to pay a $495 "set-up" fee just to become a user) and as I said before, in my opinion, it is a waste of time and effort |
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Internet
Marketing Center have developed Affiliate / Associate Program
software from scratch and been using variations of it for the
last 3 years (they call it 
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| Merchant Account Articles - How to Accept Credit Card Scurely, What Is The Perfect System? And Payment Types NOT To Use! |
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