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1 Josh H September 15, 2009 at 11:16 pm

I have spent a little time looking into blog editors to speed up the time i am adding content to my blog, but i haven’t found one that i want to commit to. Ecto sounds like an easy program to use. Any way that you can better optimize your time is always going to help you out. I think it is a great addition to the tools you use Gideon!
ScribeFire is a free plugin for firefox that will allow you to post to your blog. It is free so it does have some bugs with the plugin. It has been downloaded over 2 million times if i remember right. One that bloggers could look into for posting to their blog.

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2 Gideon Shalwick September 16, 2009 at 11:39 pm

Hey Josh

Cool! Thanks for the ScribeFire resource…

This little video series is starting to benefit me too! Nice

Talk soon!

Gideon

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3 Andrew September 30, 2009 at 10:28 pm

Hi again Gideon,

I own http://www.autism-essentials.com a simple E-commerce site and we use Paypal for all our credit card transactions. Generally it works very well and is simply to setup. It’s also very reasonable with some of the lowest credit charges in the business.

One BIG DOWNSIDE though that I’ve found is that customers are not always automatically returned to your thank you page, meaning that your conversion tracking can be completely inaccurate. So if you’re using any form of paid advertising (which a lot of people are), it makes it impossible to measure the ROI of your various marketing campaigns. Our shopping cart may report 8 sales while our analytics program only reports 3 sales (because only 3 out of the 8 customers manually clicked on the “Return to Merchant” button after their order was processed). So without that precious conversion being recorded against the campaign that sent the person to your site in the first place, you have NO idea which marketing campaign to credit for the sale.

Paypal account holders do get automatically returned to your website, but they are by far the minority. Paypal Pro supports auto redirecting but this is only available to US/Canadian merchants.

Since this is such a critical factor for our business, we are in the process of looking for an alternative to Paypal. A service that can guarantee a successful conversion is recorded each and every sale.

Just thought you readers may wish to know this before leaping into Paypal feet first.

cheers
Andrew

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4 Gideon Shalwick October 4, 2009 at 6:04 pm

Hey Andrew

You are right about Paypal. They are really great for getting things set up fast and easy, but they definitely do have some limitations.

One thing we often do to help with the issue you mentioned is to tell people beforehand what they need to do, just as they go into the transaction. For example, just before people click on the payment button, we tell people to click on the “Return To Merchant” button to be able to access whatever they purchased. It’s still not fool proof, but at least it has improved our process a bit and has reduced customer support issues quite a lot.

I have not found the perfect solution yet, and am constantly researching new ones all the time. Currently, for what I’m doing (selling digital products below $1,000 in price), ClickBank and Paypal is the easiest solution for me, all things considered.

I’ve already tested all the main ones like 1ShoppingCart, 2CheckOut and even Google Checkout (to name but a few), but all of them fall short in some way or form.

Infusionsoft is also an option, but the trouble there is that I live in Australia, and for that I still need to set up a complicated USD Foreign Currency account that will allow me to sell things in USD online – and for that I will need a separate Gateway provider like eWay, etc etc etc …. it’s all just too complicated. And by the time the money gets into my account, all the “middlemen” have taken their share, which is equivalent or even more than the fees someone like Clickbank would take.

So yeah… it’s a little frustrating for us all. Still waiting for the perfect solution… Do let me know if you find something really cool!

Best regards

Gideon Shalwick

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