If you receive payment online for your ecommerce business, you probably have to print shipping labels everyday. Shipping by USPS for small packages is still a lot cheaper than UPS or Fedex. There are software like stamp.com or Pitney Bowes Shipstream (used to be until today).

So I have been using Pitney Bowes ShipStream for a few years. It took about 15 seconds to put an address in Shipstream and getting a shipping label out of the printer. If you have a large volume, this is the way to go. I chose Shipstream over stamp.com a few years back because they are more programmable if you want to automate the process.

I started the day printing a shipping label which tells me that my account is not active. I looked more closely and it showed that my account has been “closed.” After a few long phone calls (long waits), I find out they have changed it to pbSmartPostage. It took me a while to login, and see that my account balance is 0. They refunded the balance and I have to make new deposit, set up payment methods all over again.

Now the new way of printing is that I have to login to the website (instead of the standalone user interface like Shipstream or UPS WorldShip). My first try? it takes me about – say 5 minutes? I don’t know yet as it’s still loading! The time I am spending waiting is plenty for me to write up this blog article!

Who does business like this? This kind of transition is unheard-of. It looks like the person who handles the transition has never used a computer or has not spent a minute thinking about what customers feel. Or perhaps they just don’t want the business anymore. OR they just need a new team of programmers to work on the website login. After all, I doubt that they have as many site hits as the 1940 Census release that would make login such a daunting task. I cannot start to imagine how fast it will be printing shipping labels.

Now the new way of printing:
1, You have to enter address line by line (in ShipStream, You can copy and paste the whole thing at once.)
2, you have to select label size every time!
3, I have to check “hide postage” every time if I intend to do so.
4, you have to manually verify BOTH address every time!
5, You have to manually enter package dimensions every time (for small packages dimensions usually do not matter).
6, We used to be able to add item code in a corner of the shipping label so the person who does the packing knows what to pack. The feature is of course gone and we have to start over again.

Now the entire process to get a label printed out? Probably more than 2 minutes.

Way to go! The world is constantly changing, not always moving forward though I guess.

The truth about Paypal seller protection is that they want you, the seller, to pay them fees. The epic announcement of 100% seller protection is just a bait. Paypal claims to give you 100% seller protection if the shipping address is confirmed. The 100% protection is also applied to ALL transactions even for unconfirmed address if the transactions are from eBay.

Other than a previous case where they flagged all my transactions for 1 full year. Here is another transaction through eBay. While I was comfortable about the chargeback filed by the buyer, I only ended up losing the money plus $20 chargeback fees. Why was I feeling comfortable? Other than the 100% seller protection, I had a Fedex tracking that showed the item was delivered while buyer kept saying he did not receive it. Now you wonder how in the world, I ended up losing everything?

What does Paypal say? “This is between you and the buyer’s credit card company. If you have anything to say, talk to them yourself!” Right! How do I even talk to them myself? and why in the world am I paying Paypal all the fees?

When I cited Seller Protection, they kept saying it’s a “chargeback.” Why does chargeback have anything to do with Seller Protection at all?

on the eBay side, they said the buyer did not file a dispute through them, so it’s between me and Paypal. Last time I checked, Paypal is an eBay company AND the 100% seller protection involves BOTH eBay and Paypal.

In the end, I lost the merchandise, I lost the shipping cost, I lost the money, AND I lost $20 on the chargeback fees. What seller protection? think again!

Sending retail orders to international customers has become some kind of “niche” in internet selling. Many large online retailers do not accept international orders because they have plenty of domestic orders and they don’t have to take the risk.

Aside from the messed-up USPS (US Postal service), the risk of international orders is supposedly greatly reduced by Paypal-eBay seller protection. Paypal (claims to) offer full seller protection for all (international) eBay orders. UPS/Fedex is very expensive in international shipping, while USPS seems to lose every other package shipped! This is a little exaggerating, but the fact that they cannot offer any tracking information even for priority mail, is really not good business. I had a recent shipment that took 2 full months to get delivered at a Canadian address, prompting me to recheck the world map for the location of Canada!

Usually though, Canadians are among my favorite international customers. They are usually not as bitchy as many domestic customers. (I am not saying all domestic customers are bad, but there are some really annoying eBay buyers. Many agree that eBay customers “want it now” and they “want it free!”) My other favorite countries include Brazil, Taiwan, Japan, France, Norway, Australia, Ukrain, Malta, and Northern European countries, etc. To my surprise, Russia, Thailand seem to be OK too.

Making the top of my shit list are Israel and Italy. Italians top my list of item-not-received claims. I don’t know if it’s their customs or they are just scamming. Israeli account for most of my unauthorized claims! There are some really smart Israeli scientists, and I guess the rest are smart too on “how to get merchandises for free!” I once had to call an Israeli several times 3:00 in the morning Israeli time. I thought if I had to send him a gift, I might as well gave him a few wake-up calls. At least I got some entertainment for the money I lost..

Then again, this is just my experience. Others might experience differently.

So Paypal offers “full” seller protection on all eBay transactions starting like 1-2 years ago. That makes eBay a lot more secure for sellers, especially for international orders. With each Paypal transaction, it will show “Eligible” even if the foreign address is unconfirmed.

Compared with eBay sales, transactions on my website (outside of eBay) show “Partially eligible” if shipping address is unconfirmed, even if the address is U.S. domestic. If you click on the “partially eligible” link, it will explain that unauthorized-charge claims are not covered.

I have had this perhaps “misconception” that full eligibility for seller protection means I am protected even against unauthorized charges.

So I got this unauthorized claim from an Isareli on an eBay sale. Paypal asks me to provide tracking#. Why do they need to ask me for tracking? Now that eBay and Paypal are linked together – every time I enter a tracking on eBay, it is automatically written into Paypal. I can see the tracking I entered on eBay. Why can Paypal not see the tracking#? So I gave them the tracking# again.

Still uneased about the seller protection, I ask them about the eligibility of seller protection for this transaction. They do everything to avoid answering my question: Even if Paypal lose the claim to the credit card company, I will not lose this money? I only wanted a Yes/No answer, and I cannot get it!

This leaves me wondering what a full eligibility for Paypal seller protection means..

In most credit card merchant account with virtual terminals, there are 2 monthly fees. Generally one of the fees (around $10) goes to your credit card processing gateway. This is the process that reads from the virtual terminal (the web form that customers fill in credit card information), presents to you, for you to decide to charge the credit card, and deposit into your bank account. You can at this point choose to cancel or void the transaction. The payment gateway basically verifies that the credit card in question has enough balance to pay the specified amount. The process is often called “authorization.” When an amount is “authorized,” it cannot be spent in about 2-3 days. If the amount is not actually charged by the merchant (you), the authorization will drop and the amount will become available again.

When the payment gateway authorizes, according to my understanding, it also somehow verifies the authenticity of all the credit card/personal information. The process is a good protection for merchants. According to my personal experiences, payment gateway plays an important role in preventing you, the merchant from being scammed by credit card thieves. It depends on how they program the screening and acceptance.

According to my personal experience, my 1st merchant account used a gateway that was relatively loose and I lost money on a few occasions. The 2nd time around, I did not use a virtual terminal (and thus no payment gateway). I had to make a lot of judgments myself especially when a lot of customers want their orders shipped to addresses that are different from their billing addresses. If you strictly follow the advice of merchant accounts, you will lose a lot of sales. After a while, I decided to get a virtual terminal (and thus the payment gateway). The new payment gateway evidently is very strict. It often declines transactions from an email it “does not like!” I might have lost some sales using this gateway, but it seems to offer a pretty reliable screening so far.

When you are setting up your merchant account, you might want to find out some information about the payment gateway too.

Paypal is probably one of the easiest way to set your online business up to accept and process credit card transactions. You do not even have to set up a shopping cart. All you need is to copy and paste a piece of HTML code onto your website, and you will have a “pay by Paypal” button. You do not even need a secure HTTP (https:// before your URL). However, if you do not have your own merchant account to accept credit card directly and rely completely on Paypal, they will chew you up and spit you out!

Last year, 2010, Paypal added a rule which grants all item-not-as-described claims from buyers. The rule adds a huge risk for the merchants. So far this year, 2011, I have personally had 3 transaction reversals in which I lost the entire amount of money, the merchandises, and the shipping costs (paid to UPS or USPS). In a most recent incident, customer asked for refund for 1/4 of the total transaction because 1/4 of the items received did not work for him. While the customer sends the item back, Paypal has made a decision to give the customer full refund! Paypal asked the customer to send the item back this time. (In previous incidents, Paypal issued full refund even the merchandises were not returned.) Obviously Paypal invented this rule to prevent themselves from any possible losses to disputes. They also encourage buyers to file claims! It looks like they have enough seller accounts already! I will be surprised to see a class action suit coming against them.

Other than the possibility of account suspension which will freeze your cash flow, another ridiculous thing Paypal does is that they do not require customers to provide a phone number. Among the most popular transaction processing methods, as far as I know, only Paypal does not ask for a phone number.

If you are serious about running an online business, Paypal should not be your only way of processing customers’ credit card transaction. Get a merchant account!

Keywords:

merchant account, credit card processing, online credit card processing, accept credit cards

Three of the major ways to accept payments online for your websites are credit card (merchant account), Paypal, and Google Checkout. It is always a good thing to make more options available for your customers. Obviously if you want people to pay you, you want to make it as easy as possible.

There are however slight differences on the fees each of these online payment processors charge. The fee percentage per transaction is called “discount rate” for credit card merchant account. The percentage is as low as 1.26% if a physical terminal is used/swiped.) The main differences are summarized as follows.

Speaking of customer service, Google Checkout is the worst – no phone support at all and email takes about 48 hours to get a reply. Paypal also recently change the rules and will grant any “item not as described” claims with full refund (including shipping charge).

I also showed evidence that merchant account increased sales by 100% for a retail site in a previous article. Adding to the evidence, the above comparison also strong suggests it is beneficial to get a credit card merchant account for your website (online business).

Get a credit card merchant account now!

Keywords:

merchant account, credit card processing, online credit card processing, accept credit cards

If you are running an e-commerce website selling merchandise or service, you might be asking yourself: should I get a credit card merchant account? I asked myself the same question for a few years before I “took the plunge” too.

Of course as you know, there are popular online payment methods such as Paypal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Payment which accept credit cards from the customers. So if you use these payment methods, you can say that you accept credit card payment, indirectly. These online payment services all charge similar fees of around $0.30 per transaction plus a percentage of about 2.5-3% of the transaction amount. So why would you need to accept credit card directly?

Obviously, accepting credit card directly gives your customers more options. After customer adds item(s) to cart, he/she is lead to a page to pay. On that page, he/she will see an additional option of paying by a credit card. If you were the customer, which method would you prefer to use? Before we even start to guess, I’ll show you an order log from one of our websites http://www.goldduo.com:

The order log shows 40 most recent consecutive orders from the site with payment methods. You can see that we accept Paypal, Google Checkout, and direct credit card (gateway_cc in the log).

Among the 40 orders, 13 transactions were paid by Paypal, 5 by Google Checkout, and the rest by direct credit card – a whopping 55% of the customers chose to pay by direct credit card! Our experience showed that by accepting credit card payment directly, our sales increased by about 100%. OF course this percentage is a little different than the percentage of transactions paid by credit card because some customers might have been “forced” to choose between Paypal and Google Checkout, while others might simply leave if they really do not want to use Paypal or Google Checkout.

This is just about the most powerful proof you can get. So are you still asking the question – do I need a merchant account? Yes – Get your merchant account here. If you are really curious about the reasons of this, see my guesses below.

Why would some people prefer using direct credit card? Here are my guesses:
1, A lot of credit card gives 1% some even up to 5% cash back or some type of equivalent such as airline mileage.
2, Going through Paypal or Google Checkout means your personal information goes through an additional party. If you are going to pay by credit card anyway, why should you go through an additional 3rd party? This is true especially if the customer does not already have a Paypal or Google Checkout account. Don’t we all have enough of “accounts” already?
3, More (privacy) sensitive internet users can be concerned that Google or Paypal is collecting their preferences and personal data.
4, Some of them might have had bad experience with Paypal or Google Checkout.

Credit card merchant account fees are similar to Paypal and Google checkout fees. You can get better rate when your sales volume is larger.

Keywords:

merchant account, credit card processing, online credit card processing, accept credit cards

What is a credit card terminal? A credit card terminal is a small piece of equipment that is used to swipe credit cards (through). The terminal reads card holder’s information off the magnetic stripe (of the credit card) and sends it through a phone line to a credit card processing gateway which talks to the credit card issuing bank to verify the card holder’s information. A “virtual terminal” means a terminal that is not “tangible.”




A credit card virtual terminal refers to a web form that is placed on a webpage that accept credit card holder’s information to complete a credit card transaction. Obviously the web form is more than just a form. It connects to back-end processing. The web form can either be filled out by the credit card merchant (i.e., the website owner), or a customer (i.e., credit card holder). When a “submit” or “confirm” button is clicked, the information is sent to the credit card processing gateway through the Internet.

If the customer is physically present with a credit card, obviously a physical terminal is more convenient because it only takes a “swipe.” A virtual terminal though can also be used, it is primarily for the purpose of “remote processing,” meaning when the customer is not physically present with the card. When a customer is on the phone, the advantage of a virtual terminal is apparently that you do not need 2 phone lines.

Take it one step further, the credit card virtual terminal has a lot of advantages over the conventional terminal. It can be used with a shopping cart software to accept credit card payment on your website obviously even when you are not present. That is the beauty of the Internet e-commerce.

The disadvantage of accepting credit card on your website is the risk is higher compared to when customers are physically present with the cards. It is up to you to make the judgment to avoid risky transactions.

Either virtual terminal or not, you need a merchant account to be able to accept credit card payment.

You can certainly operate an e-commerce site without a virtual terminal or credit card merchant account. You can use Paypal, Google Checkout, or Amazon payment among others. So why do you want to use a credit card virtual terminal (i.e., getting a credit card merchant account)? According to our experience, accepting credit card directly (as opposed to using Paypal/Google checkout/Amazon Payment) increased our website sales by more than 50%.

Keywords:

merchant account, credit card processing, online credit card processing, accept credit cards