Posted: December 7th, 2011 | Author: steve | View Comments
Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time really. The more webmasters see how crucial Facebook is to their online presence, the more demand there will be for “likes”. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of companies popping up offering just that. Facebook fans for sale!
At the price many of these companies are charging, I can’t imagine these being real people liking your page. Even if you look at it as a strategy to simply get the ball rolling, there are better ways to get “likes”, and from real people at that. See my blog post here to find out how I was able to get 100 REAL “likes” in less than 24 hours.
SouthWestEcommerce.com shares their experience with a provider called SocialKik:
“In our experiment, we decided to buy 1000 Facebook fans for an Australian fan page, and 2000 Facebook fans for a United Kingdom fan page.
Within days, we began to receive new fans, as promised. But there were some problems.
1. We paid extra for the “targeted fans” option, and clearly specified that we wanted Australian fans and United Kingdom fans respectively. However, it became clear early on that all fans were from the USA. When we replied to SocialKik.com to ask them why we weren’t getting geographically targeted fans, they did not reply. Unfortunately this did not improve and we ended up with almost exclusively USA fans.
2. Some of the “fans” began to leave weird comments on our fan pages. Things like “hello” or “i feel bad today”. That’s no big deal, but the thing is, some fans made identical comments on both of our fan pages. This leads us to suspect that many of the fans (or at least the ones that comment) are either junk profiles, or perhaps paid to join our page and comment. Why else would they join both pages and make the same weird/random comment on both of our seperate fan pages?
3. The fans don’t interact, or seem interested at all. This is no big drama, as we expected this. We can’t be exactly sure how SocialKik.com find the fans, but you can be pretty sure that they’re not joining your fan page because they are genuinely interested. So don’t expect much out of the fans, it’s really more about boosting numbers.
4. We had some issues getting the fans in the promised amount of time. For our UK page we were told that we would get 2000 fans in 21 days. In fact it took several months to get that number of fans, and only after several emails and complaints that it was taking so long.“
Looks like it didn’t turn out too well. 
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Posted: November 24th, 2011 | Author: steve | Tags: Credit Cards, Dwolla, Online Payments | View Comments
This sounds great, how can you beat $0.25 per transaction?
Business Insider reports:
“There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa.
Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.
Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year.
Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.
We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.” [read more]
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Posted: October 16th, 2011 | Author: steve | Tags: eCommerce, merchant account, online business, paypal | View Comments
So you’ve heard the horror stories about Paypal suspending accounts for questionable reasons, but you’re not sure if you want to spend the money and go through the hassles of setting up a dedicated merchant account. Well, let Webtys.com help you decide:
“Which is better, PayPal or a merchant account? We get asked this question… a lot. Each has its benefits and its drawbacks. To make your choice as easy as possible we’ve created a side-by-side comparison below.
The first thing you need to know is that there are two components to processing credit cards with a web site. There’s a gateway which connects your web site with the credit card processor, and the credit card processor which actually processes the transaction. You always need both elements to accept credit cards on your web site.
Now that you know that, let’s compare both below and see what’s best for you and…
PAYPAL:
Low budget, easy to install.
What is PayPal?
PayPal is an all-inclusive external payment solution. This means that people leave your web site to pay their bill, and then come back to your web site when they’re done. PayPal handles all the security for you which is nice. All you have to do is tell PayPal how much to charge, and they do the rest.
How much does PayPal cost?
PayPal doesn’t have any upfront costs. There is no application fee, no setup fee and no monthly fees for the basic package. PayPal will deduct a percentage from each payment people make. This way if you don’t make…”
Continue “Paypal vs. Merchant Account” here.
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