So it was a bit surprising that until recently, with our own online stores, we only accepted credit card payment or bank transfer. We had used Paypal here and there in the past, but hadn’t in some time since. Over the past 6-12 months we reinstated Paypal on some of our own online stores, and were surprised to find that take-up of this payment method was quite substantial. Substantial enough that we will be keeping it.

Providing your clients with limited forms of payment options online will create a barrier that will make it a little bit less likely that some people will choose to purchase elsewhere.

I now use Paypal myself for many online purchases, business or personal, and find it a very convenient alternative to re-typing my credit card number  all over the internet. But I believe it’s for a niche market – people who already have a Paypal account.

If you are offering only a solution such as Paypal you may find this doesn’t suit everyone. You should offer at least 2-3 payment options, one of which should be direct bank transfer. Just because your online store is online, there is no reason why you can’t accept bank transfer for your orders. By having the right process in place to deal with those orders which are a bit more “manual” in nature, you can ensure those orders are processed as promptly as pre approved credit card payments.

If you are able to offer a reasonable selection of payment options for your online store, it is reasonable to expect more people will choose to purchase from you.

Fees

“But what about the fees?”, I hear you say. Yes, these options do incur a fee – some more than others. This is one of the costs of doing business, and you will quickly be persuaded on the benefits when it brings you extra business. Be sure to factor in the payment processing fees when creating your pricing, too. Otherwise it will eat into your margins. Keep your pricing competitive but you should be selling to make a profit. My personal preference is to incorporate the fees into your pricing model – there is nothing worse than reaching checkout and being told there is an extra 2% charge for VISA, Mastercard or Amex.

Top Tips – Recap

So our top tips for payment methods for your online store are as follows:

1) Offer 2-3 payment options for your clients.

2) Include a “manual” or “offline” payment method, for those not set up for credit card or Paypal payment, or prospective customers who do not want to enter their credit cards onto your website.

3) Offer Paypal as a payment option – just because you don’t use it yourself doesn’t mean your customers won’t.

4) Forget the fees – this is part of business. Try to factor them into your pricing rather than charging separately for them.

“CASH ONLY” cafes: Please take note!

IT professionals always talk about backing up and how important it is. But why?

The simple answer is, because it is the most important thing you can do on your website.

The main reason for this is, once your website is hacked into, deleted accidentally or there is some other sort of failure, that’s it. It’s not like if you accidentally drove your car into a river, and someone can tow it out. With a website, it’s always best to have an exact copy of the site, in the form of a backup, so that if you need it, all that is required is for the site to be reinstated using that backup, and everyone can breathe a sign of relief – whew!

Recommended backup software

There is lots of software on the market for WordPress site backups, but the best one by far is BackupBuddy:

http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

We highly recommend this over any other solution. We do provide a service to purchase and install BackupBuddy for our clients, so if this is something you could benefit from, please get in touch.

Click below to view the full article.

The Payment Express plugin for WooCommerce requires the PxPay option (contact Payment Express support to get yours – there is no charge), and is available for purchase from the WooCommerce Extension store, here: http://www.woothemes.com/extension/payment-express/

Our office will be closed from Friday 23rd December 4PM, reopening on 9 January 2012 at 9AM.

Please note that we will have limited access to e-mail and phone until 9th January 2012 and may not be able to respond promptly.

If you have any urgent enquiries during this time, please contact urgent@opmc.biz, and one of our team will attend to it as soon as possible.

Check out the site here: www.shoppinglive.com.au

While no design time has been put into this site yet, it displays quite neatly without doing anything.

Over at WooThemes you can buy ready made designs for your WooCommerce store. It’s just a case of buying the option you want. Note if you buy what is called a “Child” theme, you need to buy the Parent theme too. So for example a $20 child theme might require a $70 parent theme to run.

Jargon aside these are just files you download once you pay for them, and installing them into Woocommerce in WordPress will activate them.

You can see all the designs available here: http://www.woothemes.com/themes/woocommerce-themes/

At the time of writing there was 15 themes. But I’m sure there were about 10 not so long ago, so the options are quickly growing with the popularity of the solution. $100-odd USD for a ready made online store design saves you thousands of dollars up front, so it’s worth the investment. This can then be modified by yourself or with expert help from a web developer, to take into consideration your branding and individual needs.

We’ve heard about WooCommerce, so wanted to find out what it was and how it worked.

The mission

Set up an online store with WooCommerce, cross fingers it works.

The outcome

An online store set up and working, that can actually sell something, in 45 minutes. While it wasn’t beautiful looking at that point, it was definitely good enough given the effort that went into it. Here’s what it looks like:

With some TLC this could be turned into a successful online store.

The details

We found the set up process very easy. If you already have WordPress set up, you can install Woocommerce via Plugins > Add new and search for it.

The people over at Woo obviously thought about what they were doing before they made an online store solution for WordPress, and this shows in the outcome. After activating the plugin, you come to a nice and easy to understand page that shows you all the settings you can have.

Simply go through and set everything up with the settings you want. There’s some technical options to choose in there, but you can gloss over them and still get the job done easily.

Coupons

One thing we thought was great was how easy it is to make coupons.

It’s so easy to make discount coupons and they work so well. Coupons shouldn’t be rocket science, and WooCommerce treats them as an easy to use marketing tool. They are a pleasure at the payment page.

If you’d like to see how can help you create a store like this, please get in touch. Otherwise, watch this space for more information on WooCommerce and how it could help you sell online!

Has your WordPress website been hacked? Or, do you think it might have been hacked but you’re not sure? How do you tell?

The truth is, you can’t really tell unless you know what you’re looking for.

Sometimes it’s easier to tell, with things like:

1. You visit your website and it redirects to some other website that it’s not supposed to.
2. All sorts of strange things appear on your website – usually lots of text.
3. Things don’t display properly.
4. Your website homepage is replaced by “HACKED BY h8rl33t”

But sometimes it’s not obvious at all. Your website could be hacked, and someone can monitor every move and change you make, but you’ll be blissfully unaware.

WordPress has made it easy for anyone to set a website, but it can be difficult for the novice to diagnose problems. We’d recommend if you are concerned about hacking, to get a professional to take a look. Sometimes the effects of hacking can linger long after the supposed problem is fixed.

I realised how much I had taken this for granted when I recently needed to use Windows. The first 5 minutes there were 10 errors I got told about, none of which I needed to know about. It’s one of those things that is just plain annoying more than anything else.

This is where Apple’s Lion operating system tries a bit harder than last time, but is also not such a good thing. For example, rather than it necessarily telling me it’s searching through my e-mails for something I’m looking for, it seems as if it’s doing nothing. I think the idea is that the results will just instantly appear. But as my computer isn’t the latest and greatest (but by no means aged), it seems like it’s doing a whole lot of nothing when it’s actually doing something.

So how do you know if it’s doing anything? You don’t. If it’s thinking for a minute, and comes up with no results, how do you know whether it’s actually doing anything? You probably can’t easily tell.

So, I like the idea, but when these computers aren’t fast enough to figure out the answer in what one would think is a reasonable amount of time, most people will assume there isn’t an answer. And they’ll never know.

I’d prefer a computer that tells me what it’s doing, so I know if it’s doing something and just thinking slowly, or not doing anything at all.

But earlier this week I took the plunge, and everything seems to be working well so far. And, it’s much better than I thought it would be.

One of the issues with being a power user, is I find things start to go downhill after awhile, and a restart is necessary. But when you have 100 things open, in the middle of a work day, closing everything down and restarting is a major inconvenience.

But with the mighty Lion, it actually lets you restart without changing a thing:

Now, restarting doesn’t mean a major inconvenience, because you can start out where you left off.