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Dear Coach...
The theme this week is setting up RealAudio ecourses from your
TeleClasses. And once you have your RealAudio files made
(and we recommend you have those tapings transcribed as well so
that your customer have more reasons to buy from you), you'll
want to set up way for customers worldwide to purchase access to
your RealAudio course using their credit card or online check.
Should you bother setting up a merchant
account?
Yes, yes and yes. Why? Because the vast majority of
the public is now comfortable enough with the online buying
process. And, if you don't make it easy for someone to buy RIGHT
NOW, you'll lose 30 to 50% of your sales if they have to make a
phone call or send a check, especially for a RealAudio
ecourse. People do NOT want to jump through hoops to buy
stuff online. And if you don't want to get involved in the
process of setting up our merchant account/shopping cart, just
outsource it to a consultant or web person to do it for you.
There are 2 components to setting up an
ecommerce site.
1. The merchant account.
This is the account you set up with a company that is an agent
for VISA, MasterCard, American Express and other credit
cards. It costs between $0 and $500 to apply for and set
up an account with them. They'll deduct between 2 and 4%
of each sale as the merchant fee and they deposit the remaining
funds into your business checking account several days after
each sale is made.
It is NOT as difficult to get a merchant account as you might
think. Especially if you use one of the vendors that
CoachVille has a relationship with (see below). The only
real question is how much revenue you'll be permitted to
accept/process each month. $10,000 per month limit is
fairly common for new merchants but we got a $120,000 monthly
limit at CoachVille and we were a start up, so it's not a scary
as you think.
When you get your merchant account (and if you do not get an
online shopping cart), you can manually type in the credit card
numbers for your coaching clients, or even for your RealAudio
ecourse sales. But it will be a manual process because you
only have set up a merchant account and not an online shopping
cart. The benefit of having an online shopping cart is
that customers enter in their credit cards themselves and the
authorization process is done automatically, in realtime, so
there is NO action needed on your part. And no delay on
the part of the customer.
2. The
online shopping cart.
The online shopping cart is just some HTML coding that gives a
place for the customer to type in their name, address and credit
card number information. Then, when they click on BUY,
this information is sent to an intermediary/gateway (we use
authorize.net, which is a very large provider), which verifies
that the card is good and it puts the charge through on that
card within 30 to 90 seconds. The customer waits during
this time, and they get a confirmation on their computer screen
that the charge went through. Then, they are presented
with access information (meaning a link) to where your RealAudio
course is (or whatever you're selling online; you control what
they'll see). They also receive a purchase
confirmation/receipt via email, automatically, within seconds.
One generally pays $300 to $500 a year to use an online shopping
cart.
Again, the benefit of having an online shopping cart is that
every sales is automated, there is no delay and virtually no
administration on your end. Which matters, believe me,
because your online sales will grow, grow, grow over time.
For example, at CoachVille, we have between 50 and 100
sales/customer a day for our memberships, ecourses, and other
goodies. If we had to manually process/manage these
transactions, we would need a full time person.
And, a huge benefit of setting up a combination shopping
cart/merchant account is that, once you set it up and when you
have your first automatic sale, YOU WILL BE HOOKED! I
venture to say that it's so much fun that you'll create more
eproducts and services just because you can. And they WILL
sell.
Your vendor choices.
We have a sister company called CartVille.com
where you can set up both a merchant account and a shopping
cart, automatically. We have a 99% merchant approval rate
and use the most sophisticated shopping cart software
available. You simply fill out the forms online to set
this up and our system creates the html code that you cut and
paste onto your web pages. Very, very simple.
Another company (no financial relationship) is practicepaysolutions.com.
James, the owner of this company, has a lot of experience with
helping coaches set up merchant accounts.
Another option is iBill.com.
If you don't want to set up your own merchant account or
shopping cart, you can, for a higher percentage, set up an
account with iBill.com. Basically, you become a 'sub
merchant' with iBill.com and you pay between 12 and 15% for this
service. So, it's extra money out of your pocket, but
there's virtually no waiting in setting up an account with them
and you can use their shopping cart system as well for no
additional charge. My friend Dean Jackson (with his StopYourDivorce.com
ebook) has used iBill for the past year and has been very
pleased with their service/system, although he is now setting up
his own merchant account and shopping cart via CartVille.com
given the cost savings as his ebook sells more and more copies.
And finally...
Becoming an online merchant is a vitally important
evolutionary step for coaches and anyone offering eproducts,
TeleClasses and the like. Eventually, 100% of coaches will be
online merchants; there will be no other option. And, it
will improve your sales immediately. There are even
coaches who refuse to accept a client who won't put their
monthly coaching fee on a credit card. This, because the
coach doesn't want to worry about monthly billing (you can set
up your merchant account to bill clients automatically each
month vs manually typing in the card number).
Oh, one more thing. With the CartVille system, you can set
up your TeleClasses on this, so that folks are registered for
your class (and receive a welcome letter pertaining to that
class) and it will stop accepting registrations when that class
is full because you can set a student limit via the
system. and you can carry unlimited number of classes, or
anything really.
Online Example
Also, if you want to see a real example of a
CartVille site, check out GiftVille,
another of our companies. We use the CartVille system
(instead of our highly customized CoachVille shopping cart
system) with GiftVille, because we have outsourced the shipping
of all of our shippable products (mugs, key chains, CD's) to ifulfill.com.
So, if you're shipping products, consider ifulfill.com.
We've found them excellent to work with (we have no financial
interest in ifulfill.com).
I hope that this has been helpful.
Thomas
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with
thomas leonard
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