A Baker's Dozen Copyright © Darlene Styers 2003

How many times have you been told "The Money Is In The List"? Let's talk a bit deeper today and discover just how to build a list. It goes without saying that larger list, more potential. Everyone wants their list to grow as quickly as possible. But even more important than subscribing is retention of your subscribers. And perhaps most challenging. Let's discuss 13 (a Baker's dozen) ways to maintain your list.

ONE: Place a Subscription Form on every page of your site. It does not have to cost an arm and a leg to have a website. The total cost involved in site we use is $6 per month including hosting. No HTML knowledge is required. If you can type you can build a site. This is probably one of most important things you will do.

TWO: How do you feel about subscription forms that ask for your life history? Actually all you need is their email address so don't ask for more. Do you always give your true name when filling out one of those long subscription forms?

THREE: Your Welcome Letter as well as your Subscribe page should give lots of information about your publication. How often do you publish? Just what's in this subscription for reader?

FOUR: Do you offer free advertisements or subscriber bonuses? Tell them about it. You may want to, at least, offer advertisements for new subscribers. However, there are many who are simply looking for free advertisements and nothing else. You never know when someone interested only in free advertisements may just become interested in your Newsletter. Be sure to make it obvious there is no cost involved in subscribing to your list, and that their information will never be shared with others.

FIVE: Search for websites that invite Link Exchanges. If you have your link on a dozen websites and you gain only one per week from each link, this could bring you as many as 600 subscribers per year. Link Exchange pages also require that you place their link on your site.

------------------------------------------------------------ copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin ------------------------------------------------------------

Small online businesses are mostly represented by home-based entrepreneurs. In this regard any payment scheme or system should meet at least two criterions:

First. It should be relatively cheap. Individuals are usually not enjoying huge investment potential in contrast with legal entities. Second. It should lead to complete automation of financial transactions as a result of lack of time or inability for majority of entrepreneurs to hire support stuff to serve these transactions.

In short, it all comes down to shortage of money and time. For these simple reasons, sophisticated e-commerce systems based on merchant accounts are expensive, hard to establish and support for an average entrepreneur. That is why third party payment processors that will handle all online orders on your behalf became widely popular among small businesses. They require very little effort to establish and even less effort to support. In most cases they will provide you with completely automated as well as quick and reliable for your customer way of payment.

This will allow you to accept payments 24/7 focusing your business to work on other tasks and activity.

In practice once set up, whole customer paying and product delivering process becomes fully automated and consists of following steps:

1. Customer fills out order form and clicks on submit button to pass order to payment gateway; 2. Automatic payment gateway routes credit card (e-check etc.) data and purchase amount to payment processor of merchant (seller) acquiring bank; 3. Acquiring bank sends authorization request to payment processor of customer's issuing bank; 4. Issuing bank validates customer's account, credit limit and authorize transaction, freezing specified amount on customer's account; 5. Issuing bank routes authorization code (or "transaction declined" message) to acquiring bank's payment processor; 6. Acquiring bank routes payment approval (declined) message to payment gateway; 7. Payment gateway notifies merchant (seller) about approved (denied) transaction; 8. Provides customer with product s/he ordered, details of shipping etc. or notifies about payment problems; 9. Banks' clearing settle mutual transfer of funds, crediting respective merchant (seller) account with specified amount of purchase.

All these steps due to complete automation process, if we don't speak about phone or mail orders etc., will take somewhat between several seconds to several minutes, still usually faster than when you are billed at store's pay desk and much faster considering speed of going for online shopping instead of "offline".

This publication intended to analyze existent picture of third party processing companies and represent you comparative facts that would help you to determine your preferences based on business needs and capacities.

The table below will provide you with basic features of most "visible" today's online payment processing players. Please note, that online financial market evolves extremely fast, so table data is accurate as on February 2003 what I cannot guarantee in a month, all more in a year, so my advice here is to choose 3-5 most acceptable and affordable financial intermediaries (even if some important for you feature is missing) and recheck their services and fees once more at their web-sites before making any final decision.

------------------------------------------------------------ Company Name in alphabetical order: 1) Setup fees 2) Monthly fees 3) Commission structure*

2CheckOut: 1) $49 2) no 3) $0.45 + 5.5%;

CCNow: 1) no ($11.95 for Int.) 2) $9.95 3) $0-$100 - 0%, $100+- 9% (11% for Int.);

ClickBank: 1) $49.95 2) no 3) $1 + 7.5%;

IBill: 1) no 2) no 3) $0-$9,999 - 15%, $10,000-$24,999 - 14% etc.;

MultiCards: 1) $15 or $150 2) no 3) 11.9% or 9.9%;

PayPal: 1) no 2) no 3) $.30 + 2.9%;

PaySystems: 1) $49.00 2) no 3) $1.00 + 3.95% or $0.45 + 5.5%;

ProBilling: 1) no 2) no 3) $0-4,999 - 13.5%, $5,000-12,499 - 12% etc.;