I suppose that you have faced such situation before: you prepared some exciting improvements of your products and wanted to let your customers and affiliates know about them, but gathering email addresses of your customers took some precious hours, while contacting your affiliates was practically impossible because all you knew about them was just their names.

In Click2Sell you won’t face such issues. By just a few clicks you can message all your customers and affiliates at once. No manual collecting of emails is necessary, Click2Sell will do it for you. All that you need to do is just to prepare a text which you want to send to your customers or affiliates.

The mailer is especially useful, if you continuously update your products or services and want others to know about the changes. It is a widely accepted truth in marketing that you have to announce about your every new product to people who could be interested in it. Even though we are not some PR company and thus naturally can’t distribute news to every corner of related business areas about updates of your new products, however the Mailer will help you to reach people who will be 100% interested in whatever you have to say: people who ordered something from you in the past and your business partners who promote your other products.

Just let me mention some things that are told via the Mailer by our merchants:

a) to their customers:

• exclusive discounts for some of their products;
• launch of new products;
• updates of previously purchased products;
• changes in current policies;

b) to their affiliates:

• new promotional materials added;
• exclusively increased affiliate commissions;
• notifications about new upcoming products;
• general updates about current products or sales;

The very last my mentioned point is especially useful when you want to keep your business neat and avoid situations when you make some changes in your products or services, but your affiliates keep promoting old versions.

HOW TO USE THE MAILER?

It is very easy: just log in to your Click2Sell account, go to “For Merchant” section and click on “Mailer” link in the main menu.

All of the fields are self explanatory and you will be able to use a robust text editor to make your message look in any way you want.

Do not hesitate to try various options by sending test messages to yourself (just find “Send Test Email” section there). You can send as many test emails to your specified email address as you want.

Please note that you can send only 2 messages per week to your customers or affiliates, so make sure that you tell them everything you want in every message you send.

We are open to hear your opinions or suggestions about the Mailer (or any other feature in Click2Sell). Just drop us a message and let’s discuss about your suggestion!

Today I want to help you to understand role of merchant accounts in Click2Sell better. When I say "merchant accounts", I mean accounts at PayPal, Moneybookers, Worldpay, Authorize.net and Google Checkout. The same regular ones that you use to receive money online.

Why should i have merchant accounts?

You may ask why these merchant accounts are needed at all. Well, first of all, having just Click2Sell account doesn’t mean that you will be able to receive money from your product buyers. It’s not like in some other systems where you sign up for an account, add some products, make some sales, the system’s owners receive money from your sales and then you ask them to send the money to you in order to be able to do something with your earned money. Although such model has some advantages such as less steps to start selling, however such advantages definitely vanishes on the longer term, while a lot higher fees and "frozen money" status keeps hurting you forever.

In order to work with Click2Sell you need to have at least one PayPal, Moneybookers, Worldpay, Authorize.net or Google Checkout account. Just one or a few of them. You can imagine Click2Sell as a powerful add-on to your, let’s say, PayPal or Worldpay merchant account. You keep receiving money directly to your PayPal / Worldpay account (and thus having money from sales available to you almost instantly), but in addition you get all the tracking suite of visitors and affiliates. You can look for more details at Click2Sell working principles and payment processors post. This post is more intended to explain how to manage your merchant accounts in Click2Sell.

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It’s the third part of series explaining product adding and management in Click2Sell.

If you haven’t read Part 1 and Part 2, then I advise to take a look at them before continuing with this one.

Step 3 – Select Categories

It’s the step where you simply select categories which represent your product the best. There are 11 main categories:

• Marketing & Promotion
• Business 2 Business
• Education
• Home & Family
• Money & Employment
• Computers & Internet
• Health Care
• Entertainment
• Society & Culture
• Arts & Humanities
• Recreation & Sports

Each of these categories have some subcategories (105 in total). So you need to choose up to 2 subcategories for each of 2 main categories. I think that the variety of selections is enough to cover your product.

What’s the point of choosing categories correctly? Well, first of all, your product will be placed under corresponding categories in Click2Sell marketplace. Some of affiliates specialize in certain areas (for instance, they promote only sports or work related products), thus they review only such products which are listed in categories in which they are interested. So you really want to make sure that affiliates with necessary specialties see your specific product. Another important aspect of choosing product categories correctly is related to our soon to be developed text-ads system. Briefly, it’s a system which will show Click2Sell products’ ads in various places according to content of pages. Making sure that you choose appropriate categories to your product will mean that your product’s text ad will be shown in places which are visited by people who could be really interested to see your product (and thus higher possibility that they will purchase your product!).

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Here I continue the topic about product adding and management in Click2Sell system.

Please read the first part of Everything About Products Management at Click2Sell before reading this one.

Step 2 – Product Details

Product Link Name: it is an auto-generated name, consisting of your username + 3 first letters of a product’s name. Currently it is not possible to edit this name as it creates some unwanted issues to the product and its affiliates (i.e. when the product’s link name is changed, affiliate link is changed too; an affiliate might not know about this and keep using the old affiliate link). So we had to disable the ability to change your product’s link name. The system generates it automatically, so you don’t have to do anything here.

Product link name is used in product’s buy link and in affiliate links (which is http://AffiliateUsername.ProductLinkName.click2sell.eu).

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I frequently review various products added into Click2Sell Marketplace and quite often i see that some products could be set-up better. Questions that we get to our support mail confirm that sometimes people misunderstand some product management aspects or just miss important mini features for managing products at Click2Sell.

So let me just guide you through all the parts related to product management and addition to the system.

At first, you should read step-by-step guide How to Start Selling Products on Click2Sell which outlines basic steps what you need to do in order to be successful with Click2Sell. It is especially useful for those people who have just created their own Click2Sell account.

In this article I want to expand second part of that article. I want to go through all the options of adding a new product and explain each of the step with more details. There is a good chance to discover something new.

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I won’t tell you anything new by saying that Click2Sell.EU works completely smoothly with PayPal. Basically, it is enough just to enter your PayPal email address and you can start using Click2Sell service for your internet business.

However, there is a thing that many people miss: PayPal API data. PayPal API allows third party services to connect to PayPal accounts and make necessary actions in background. Usually it is used for automation of various aspects of business and It’s safe to give out your PayPal API data to trusted parties.

It is not obligatory to save this data in Click2Sell, however it can make your life a lot more convenient.
By saving PayPal API data in your Click2Sell account you will be able to:

1. Make mass payments to all your affiliates with just one click of a button. You won’t need to take any txt file and upload it to PayPal system like in some other affiliate networks. You won’t need to click “Pay” button for each affiliate, so you will save a lot of time by having PayPal API data available.
    
2. Refund transactions easily from Click2Sell members area. If you would get a refund request from your unsatisfied customer, at least you can arrange a refund without a hassle. All you would need to do is to login to your Click2Sell account, go to “Transactions Report”, find the needed transaction and simply click on “Refund” button. It is much easier, quicker and more straightforward than in PayPal member area.
    
3. Accept credit cards directly to your Paypal account without redirecting your customers to Paypal page. If you are serious about your internet business, you should really consider PayPal Website Payments Pro account, as it costs only $30/month. We wrote some time ago how direct credit card acceptance greatly improves your sales rate. However, please note that this account type is available only to U.S. residents.
    
4. Pay your Click2Sell fees and affiliate commissions automatically. This will save you from necessity to login to your Click2Sell account just for paying fees and commissions. No more forgotten payments, no more suspicious affiliates, wondering why you are late to pay them. Just contact Click2Sell support about this and we will provide you with full information how to setup such automated payments.

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Dear Click2Sell.EU blog readers,

this post will be about a new Click2Sell system feature: Instant order notification by API.

It will be a long post, so let me present an index of the post:

1. Introduction to Click2Sell API;
2. How it works;
3. Notification structure;
4. Script sample;

Introduction to Click2Sell API

Some advanced Click2Sell.EU members asked for a feature that would 'pass' a transaction's information to the specified URL location or the thank-you page. Why would merchants need this feature? It is simply not enough for some services to have their customers "simply" redirected to "thank-you" pages after a successful purchase. Membership websites, licence based softwares or just any product with some verifications usually need some data from payment processor in order to allow their customers to access purchased products/services.

Instant notifications allows merchants to take their business to the next level as they provide extra functionality, security and save merchants' time.

Even ordinary sellers could consider about automation of things happening after a successful purchase. Just let me give you some examples:

• you're selling an ebook. After a successful sale your script could accept instant notification and add your customer's email address to your mailing list.
• you have a forum with some paid content there. After a successful sale your script could automatically make changes in user account to allow your customer to access paid content.
• you sell a service based on subscriptions. By monitoring our instant notifications you can track if any of your subscribers hasn't missed his/her payment (and automatically unsubscribe if there is a failed payment).

As you can see, notifications are used to transmit transaction/order information from the system server to the merchants' own servers/scripts. Because of our members requests, we have developed a fully working API.

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I think there are no such merchants who do not want to have affiliates and their free sales. I mean – every merchant desires to signup as many active affiliates as possible and make even more money without putting much efforts for product’s promotion.

Simply speaking:
more active affiliates = more sales = higher profits = richer merchant.

Now there is quite common problem: every merchant wants to have as many active affiliates as possible, however not every merchant understands the importance of recruiting affiliates himself/herself.

What does it mean to recruit affiliates yourself?

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