You have created a great software product and would like to sell it online to earn some money or start your own software company business. You have created a great looking website, your software has a huge demand on the market and you are ready to sell it. But how to accept payments you’re your customers? You need to get a credit card and Paypal processing solution… But where and how?

In order to start selling your own software or any other digital products (ebooks, membership website, etc.) online, you need to get a real merchant account from the acquiring bank so that you could accept credit card payments on your website. Usually this process takes a lot of time:

1. You need to fill out the lengthy bank forms telling about your product, sales volumes, provide personal information about your company.
2. You need to scan and send your company’s documents to the bank. In addition to this you need to provide the notarized copies of your passport, identity and other documents.
3. You need to provide a professional business plan to the bank explaining how your software company operates and how you will sell your product online.
4. You will have to tell the bank everything about your customers: your target market and major countries.
5. Even more – you will have to provide your own payment processing history. The bank will ask about your sales volume, number of transactions processed per month and overall amounts.
6. Banks usually go for a long process of document and track record verifications. They will even check your credit scores and credibility ratings on credit score agencies.
7. The viability of the business lifecycle and the profitability is also verified before approving the merchant account.

These criteria might not be a problem for an already established and working companies, however… If you are just starting out with your first software product and your company is new – you have no business history, no credibility, nor turnover, payment processing history. Then it will be almost impossible for you to open a merchant account for your new online business, because the majority start up, small businesses fail to meet all the requirements. So it’s like a never ending circle: you’re new àyou don’t have payment processing history àyou can’t get a merchant account àcan’t start processing credit card payments àno turnover àno ability to get going, because no bank will talk to you.
However, there is still a solution for you…

1. Just register on Click2Sell and login to your account. Go to For Vendors page and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing plan.
3. then visit For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your product’s  description along with all the details.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your online shop! That’s all.

Once your product is activated, you will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments on your online shop along with other multiple payment options. The whole process takes than a few minutes and you can start processing within 24 hours instead of waiting a couple of months.

If you do business online and sell software or any other products, the most important part of it is to be able to offer your customers the most convenient way to pay for their purchases. In the past decade, buying on-line has become a global trend, with millions of transactions happening every day. And, of course, the payment methods that customers use to pay for a product have diversified. In the beginning credit cards were the only option, but now there are several websites, such as PayPal or Moneybookers that offer other payment solutions and have become very popular. Some online vendors accept only these e-wallet payments without a direct credit card payment option without thinking that they might lose customers. Credit card payment is still a preferred payment method for most online customers.

Find out why customers use credit cards more often compared to other payment methods:

1. No need to register anywhere – there is no need for a customer to register or have an account on any of the websites to complete the purchase (unlike with e-wallet payments).
2. Fast and convenient – credit card transaction is processed within seconds once your customer enters card details on your checkout page. An order gets approved or declined instantly. Unlike with echecks or bank wire payments, the order can be shipped immediately after the payment, because the funds are deposited instantly to a vendors merchant account.
3. Fraud protection - credit card companies offer customers a better protection against fraud and it enables you to chargeback if the merchandise is not what you expected. So customers are more protected when they buy online and they feel safe when ordering a product.
4. Additional security layers - Visa and Mastercard have developed special Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode programs that add an additional security layer for all card purchases. Once this feature is implemented, the customer is asked to provide a certain password during a purchase. This ensures the safety of an order – that card is used only by the authorised person. Customers feel safe when they order your product. It is proved that having this feature working on your website will bring you more sales. At the same time you – as a vendor – are protected from the majority of possible chargebacks with ‘I didn’t do it’ reason.
5. Get rewarded - customers are also likely to get reward points from their credit card banks for using a card often, which can bring them benefits in the long run. So they prefer to use cards even more.
6. Pay in credit - your customers can pay you using their credit card limit – even if they don’t have enough funds at the moment by borrowing money from a bank. This increases your sales even more.
7. Get more international customers - if you sell online internationally then your foreign customers will be more likely to pay using their credit cards than any other payment method. So it is a must for you to accept card payments in order not to lose potential customers.

 Direct credit card payments account for around 50% to 85% of total online orders. This percentage depends on your industry and niche. If your product is more oriented towards the majority of people that don’t spend much time online, then you will get much more credit card orders compared to Paypal or any other payments. Moreover, US based buyers tend to use more e-wallet type of payments compared to international customers – from the Western Europe, etc.

If you are serious about online business, you should be offering as many convenient payment methods as possible. This way your customers will have a better choice to complete their payment and they will select the most suitable payment method. Offering credit card payments along with Paypal will definitely increase your sales compared to only credit card payment option, so make sure your online shop always offer the most popular payment methods. Then your customers will not have any problem placing an order on your website.

How to accept multiple payment methods on your website?

1. Just register on Click2Sell and login to your account. Go to For Vendors page and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing plan.
3. then visit For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your product’s  description along with all the details.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your online shop! That’s all.

Once your product is activated, you will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments on your online shop along with other multiple payment options.

So you are a software developer – created your own peace of software masterwork and now would like to show it to the world and make some money online selling it! That’s great… But the biggest hurdle you can face online today is that ‘starting point’ – how to start selling online and accept credit cards for your software products when you don’t have any selling history, just starting out and nobody provides you with payment processing services.

This problem is the same problem like starting your own business from scratch – no capital, no gains, no possibility to start. Never ending circle that you can't get into… In order to sell your software product online, you need to have a special online merchant account to accept direct credit card payments from your customers. However, applying for a merchant account on the bank is a real headache, because:

1. You’re just starting – you have a great software product that you would like to sell online, however your business is new, so you have no business history. All banks will say – sorry, the doors are closed for you.
2. Processing history: when you want to sell your software online, all banks ask you for a credit card processing history. You need to show the payment processing volumes that you do per month. But what can you show – only 0s everywhere, because you haven’t even started? Sorry, a bank will say – no merchant account for you.
3. Refund and chargeback rates should be low: all acquiring banks need to evaluate your processing risks and they need to see your chargeback levels (that they don’t exceed 0.5-1% of all sales) and evaluate your refund rates. Again, what would you show them when you are not processing payments at all. Again – banks show you a big finger.
4. Digital business risks: you have a great product and you are sure that it will sell online greatly, however all banks view your software selling business as a ‘very high risk’. You are exposed to many customers returning the product and asking for a refund. They don’t know how you manage your customers’ complaints and if you really return the funds for unsatisfied ones. Selling software products is viewed as a high risk online business by most banks. They can't be sure that you will deliver your product, etc. This doesn’t help you start processing payments online.
5. Show your business license: some banks might even ask you to show your business licenses and software registration documents, patents or other documents. They usually require your financial documents of the company – profit and loss statements, shareholder information and business activity records. This doesn’t help you when you are a single developer or a small company looking to start selling online your newly developed software program.
6. Time consuming process: you might have heard of merchant accounts getting approved within 24 hours! However, this is a total non-sense. Yes, you might get your software’s website checked within this time period, however, the problem is that after this you will be required to provide a ton of company documents, licenses, registration certificates, your personal details. Once the bank receives such documents they go over everything thoroughly, check your credit rating, query some credit agencies for your company’s financials or to check the validity of your provided documents. This approval process usually takes from 2-3 weeks up to 6 months. Usually it takes around 2 months to have everything signed and a merchant account working… Some products (especially software) has time sensitive offers. You can’t let yourself wait so much time…
7. Integration headache: even if you manage to go all this bureaucracy nightmare and you get a merchant account, then you need to hire developers to integrate your website directly to the bank’s raw payment gateways to accept your orders.

Getting a merchant account to accept credit cards online for your software product is a real time consuming and daunting task… However, the good news is that there is a simple solution for this problem. Instead of trying to get a merchant account, just signup on Click2Sell. We will sell your product and accept credit card and Paypal payments. You won’t need to open a merchant account, nor hire developers to integrate your website into the banks' payment gateways.

All you need to do is just to:

1. signup on Click2Sell, then login to your account and navigate to For Vendors section and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing model.
3. then go to For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your software program’s details – put your online software for sale on Click2Sell.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your product’s sales page and you are done!

You will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments from your customers and sell software online. We will pay all your earnings to your Paypal, Moneybookers or direct wire-transfer bank account. Click2Sell affiliates will help you make even more sales and your business profits will soar!

Sometimes when you face a hurdle, you think that it’s over… Not! Never give up, because there is always a solution waiting for you – you just need to find it.

Hi everyone,

we still haven't told you about custom forms in product checkout pages, but let me rectify that right now. "Custom forms" is a very useful, flexible, yet simple to use feature.

Many of vendors need to get some information from their customers before allowing them to use their purchased products or services. Some vendors need buyers to specify their preferred usernames and passwords, others need phone numbers and preferred call hours, color/style choices and so on. Usually this "problem" is solved by using scripts which generate forms to be filled before purchasing products/services or by simply sending emails to customers asking about their preferences. Unfortunately, both ways are fairly inconvenient as they require special coding knowledge or a lot of manual work.

You can avoid all this hassle by clicking just a few times in "Custom Form" page at Click2Sell. This way you can have a form of several questions (or hundreds of questions, if you wish!) displayed in your product checkout page. Every single question can be made as mandatory or optional, be of very different types (not just text fields; see below for examples), they can also have symbols validation (e.g., it can check if a customer entered a real email address or numeric phone number). In just 5 minutes you can have a fully working, self-validating and unmissable form for getting additional information from your customers.

So what exactly question options are available in our "Custom Form" feature?

You can add such things to your form for asking various information from your customers:

• Checkbox (for questions like "Send me the additional tips");
• Multiple select box ("Select which things you want to be included in the package");
• Password ("Enter your password");
• Radio button ("Choose your preferred color");
• Single select box ("Size: S, M, L, XL");
• Text ("Enter your phone number"); Validation options:
  • accept any symbols;
  • accept only numeric symbols;
  • accept only dates (dd-MM-yyyy);
  • accept only email address;
  • accept only website URL address.
• Text area ("Additional comments")

Such a wide variety of question types will let you create any type of form you want, even the most complex one if there is a need. So you are fully covered in this area.

I'm sold, where can I get this stuff?

"Custom Form" is a product-level feature. This means that each of your products can have a unique form. You will find the page to create the form in this way:

1. Log in to your Click2Sell account;
2. Go to "For Vendor" section;
3. Click on your product name there;
4. Click on "Configure basic settings" link;
5. Go to Step 4: "Custom Form";
6. Start adding your questions!

There you will find full explanations about each option, so you will not get lost. Quick preview panes will help you to understand and see everything immediately, so it won't take long for you to set up the first question form for your customers.

Your customers' answers to your additional questions will be inserted into our sale notification emails and API notifications.

As always, if you need further explanations, have some questions or a feedback, please do not hesitate and contact us at any time!

Lately we’ve been talking about new Click2Sell features/tweaks and general affiliate marketing. So it’s a good time to talk about already existing things in Click2Sell system. Let me tell you some things about one of the core things of the system: Click2Sell Buy-Now Buttons! There are some tricks and tips about them and you might find them useful.

1. Custom Click2Sell Buy-Now buttons image.
   This is one of several different default images:

   

   Of course, it is perfectly fine to add such image into your product’s sales-page. Many merchants are using such default image and don’t face any problem in their sales. However, we strongly recommend you to use your own custom image. Your own "buy-now" button (created specifically for your product’s website) increases the integrity of your sales-page. You know, our default image might just not suit your sales-page style.

   So how could you use your custom image instead of ours?
   Let’s take a look on "buy-now" button code. There is an example one (code lines are very long, so they are breaking in the middle):

   <a id="c2s_bn_lnk_3692" href="https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerespa" ><img src="http://www.click2sell.eu/images/paynow_v3_5.png" border="0" title="Buy now!" alt="Buy now!" ></a>

   [script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt_v2.js"></script>
   [script type="text/javascript">c2s_bn_initializeBuyNowLink(‘www.click2sell.eu’, ’3692′);</script>
    

   I won’t waste your time with analyzing the whole content of the code, let’s just see which part is responsible for showing button’s image. As you might already sensed, that’s the bolded part. As you see, that part is just a simple URL to image’s location in the Internet. So if your custom image is located in http://www.someserver.com/mycustomimage.jpg, you just need to replace that bolded URL with your own picture’s URL (just be careful not to remove any other symbol accidentally).
   The result of your modification would look like:

   <a id="c2s_bn_lnk_3692" href="https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerespa" ><img src="http://www.someserver.com/mycustomimage.jpg" border="0" title="Buy now!" alt="Buy now!" ></a>

   [script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt_v2.js"></script>
   [script type="text/javascript">c2s_bn_initializeBuyNowLink(‘www.click2sell.eu’, ’3692′);</script>

    
   After this change you will have a fully working "buy-now" button with your own custom image.
   Let me caution you not to make any single other modification in the code (like altering spacing to make it look more "compact").
    

   Read the rest of this entry »

There is one very known truth: once you persuade a person to buy your product, make sure that he/she could pay you as soon as possible. You have to show your potential buyer a purchase form while he/she is still "hot" and full of desire to buy.

Many merchants strive to make sure that once a visitor clicks on "Order Product Now!" link/button, the next page he/she see would be an order form where the buyer could enter all necessary data to make a purchase.

So ideally customers have to click just once in order to be able to make a purchase.

However.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello,

We all have read tons of messages and articles about how to improve your product’s sales pages (so there would be as many purchases as possible). We see endless forum discussions about how one or another aspect affects products conversions. Some of merchants hire designers to make sales-pages look very appealing. Some people do hundreds split-testings in order to improve every small detail of sales-pages.

All these efforts really generate you additional sales. However, there is one very important thing that many people overlook but it drops even 60-70% of your guaranteed buyers (the ones who actually clicked "BUY" button/link and look how to purchase your product or service).

Read the rest of this entry »

In this short article you will read and learn about the initial steps of selling your products via Click2Sell system. The process is very simple, short and costless. So let’s begin:

1. Signup to Click2Sell

   Signup is absolutely free and you need only one account for both merchant and affiliate activities. There are also no upgrade costs, no monthly fees and so on. Once you finish your registration, you can start using Click2Sell immediately.
    

2. Add a product

   After you login to Click2Sell member area, go to “For Vendor” section and then click on “Add product” link in green sub-bar:

   

   Fill in the required fields going through all the necessary steps. If you are not sure what one or another field means, you can move your mouse over [?] symbol and read an explanation. See an example below:

   

   (of course, you can always contact Click2Sell Support if you have any question).
    

3. Get “buy-now” buttons

   Once you finish creating a product, at Step 5 you will see such page (you can also find this via: For Vendor -> My Products -> “Buy Now Links” in the table):

   

   “Your direct link:” is just a simple URL which leads to Click2Sell checkout page. There is no difference for your buyers between this “direct link” and scripted “Order Now!” link (the first one with the grey field full of java code), but we recommend using scripted link or button because they gather statistical information about your visitors, views, conversions (and so on) which you can see in your Click2Sell account.

   On the left column you can see what will appear in the place where you put the code (from the grey text field): it can be just a simple text link “Order Now!” or a graphic button. Choose the desired one and copy all the code from the grey text field.
    

4. Paste the code into your website

   Paste the copied code into HTML area of your sales-page. Be sure that you don’t accidentally alter the code. Check your page via your browser to see if it’s working correctly.

Well, that’s all. Basically, you have done all the necessary steps in order to start selling your product via Click2Sell. Once a buyer purchases your product, Click2Sell will automatically register the purchase and gather all the required information about transaction.

If you need a thorough review of each option and setting in product adding process, please read this article "Everything About Products Management at Click2Sell (Part 1)".

By the way, just make sure that Click2Sell buy-now button is not placed nearby other payment options (for example, Paypal button or your own shopping cart). Potential affiliates who see more than one payment button (e.g. Click2Sell.EU and Paypal) might not want to promote your product, because there are high chances that customers (brought by affiliates) would click on another payment button and the commissions would be lost. So in order to prevent this – always use only one payment button on one sales page.

If you have any question, thought or anything else, just let us know!