Catherine’s toolbox: How to get paid over the internet

So yesterday, as part of a large and lively Awesome Chat session, I got asked about some of my tools and how to use them. I live to serve!

In fact, this will take a few posts to get through them all. Let’s start with the $$$.

photo credit: Martin Kingsley

That’s Australian money. Isn’t it colourful?

How to get paid directly with PayPal

Everyone knows what PayPal is, right? They’re a bunch of dudes who process payments on your behalf so you don’t need to get a merchant account to accept credit cards. They take a reasonable cut on small purchases. For big ones, get a merchant account: it’ll be cheaper over the long run.

PayPal’s big advantages are they’re known (even my mum, who is petrified over sending money Over The Internet, has heard of them) and they’re really easy to get started with. There’s about a week of delay when you’re setting up an account for the first time and verifying it, but once that’s done you can set up a please-give-me-money button in five minutes.

First, you need a PayPal business account. If you have a personal one I’m pretty sure you just have to upgrade, otherwise sign on up and go through all that obvious stuff.

When you have a business account all set up, click on Merchant Services then Buy Now buttons. You can make a:

• Buy Now
• shopping cart
• subscription
• donation
• gift voucher
• payment plan

depending on your needs. Fill in the rest of the fields (it’s easy peasy, at minimum all you need to do is choose a price and name it) and click Create button. Next, it will give you a big smack of HTML code. Copy it, and in your WordPress window go to the HTML version and paste it at the right spot. Generally, I recommend doing it last because it has its own jealous space needs and if you accidentally delete a space before or after it goes weird. PayPal will save the button, so you can use it again.

The problem with this system is that it doesn’t do anything else. I use it to set up a subscription for the Awesome Chat, but that means I have to keep an eye on it and send the darling person an email to tell them what the hell is happening. Otherwise, they would pay me money and get nothing in return.

Which is why I also have…

Using e-junkie to deliver content and other stuff

E-junkie is a mondo-simple shopping cart. Most people use it to sell intangible stuff like e-books, but it can sell physical goods too. It doesn’t do payment processing, so you’ll need something like PayPal to handle the funds. It starts at $5/month, and allows you to do clever stuff like affiliate programs and discount codes and things. I’m gradually transitioning everything over to it.

Originally, Website in a Weekend was sold directly through PayPal, with a automatic process to Aweber which sent an email with the login details. (The course is delivered through a password-protected page). When I switched from Aweber to MailChimp a couple months ago, that wasn’t an option any more. (I’ll talk about email autoresponders another time.)

At its simplest, it takes about 10 minutes to make a new product in E-junkie. You name the product, how much it costs, maybe upload a file if you’re selling an e-book, than you’re done. It gives you a big lump of HTML code that you insert just like a PayPal button. (Go look at the Website in a Weekend page for an example.)

At its most complex? Awesome Fear-Wrangling took me a good six hours of work overall, including:

• designing my own big orange buttons in Photoshop
• setting up an affiliate program that paid out on two different levels depending on which level of the product you bought
• setting up unique discount codes for most of the websites I was guest-posting on
• writing the email that would automatically send to the buyer with their login details

That stuff isn’t necessary, but it adds LOTS of flexibility. Also, I have a big orange button, which is awesome.

How to password-protect webpages in WordPress

Go to the Publish box on the right of the page. Just above the big blue Publish button, there’s an option called Visibility. Choose Password protected and devise a password. Easy!

Bonus advice: Do NOT choose a phrase with a space in it, or punctuation… it will confuse people. Use something like Hoorayformeatballs instead.

What do you use to sell stuff online? Tell me in the comments!