Normally when you are considering how you could increase your sales volume, rebills quite often come up as a good way to do that. A very good way. One would think why sell something for just 19.99 USD when you could sell the same for 19.99 USD per month or year? Of course, not every single buyer will keep their subscriptions intact, but if, conservatively speaking, 10% of your customers do pay regularly to you, then it means 10% higher income, RIGHT?!

It is somewhat correct.

However, the problem is that rebills can very easily bury your merchant account. Thus for a short-term profit you are potentially risking your long-term selling.

How does that happen? Many sellers overestimate attention, patience, goodwill or indifference of their customers. They (sellers) think in a way like:
“OK, I will clearly show on my offer or checkout page that it is a rebill based product/service which will charge customers $X every month, so if someone (who wouldn’t actually want to pay more than once) misses that and is rebilled, he/she will just shrug off and won’t do anything about that extra charge. In the worst case, if the customer gets upset about that, he/she will understand that it is his/her own fault for missing the part about rebills and still won’t do anything”.

The reality is that buyers is a very touchy species which can cause problems for any reason be it right or wrong. They won’t forgive anything. Below are 6 reasons why subscriptions can cause a lot of trouble:

1. People miss even the most obvious notifications that they are buying a subscription.
   
   You can write these “it is a SUBSCRIPTION” notices on every product page, checkout page, receipt letter, etc., use big, CAPITAL, bold, flashing letters to get buyers’ attention to that and still a lot of people will be genuinely shocked when they see a new rebill charge.

2. People forget they bought a subscription.
   
   It is particularly relevant for yearly subscriptions. Think about it, do you remember everything you bought a year ago? It is strongly recommended not to rebill your customers less often than every 3 months. If you need to rebill your customers every 6 or 12 months, I’d suggest asking your customers to simply re-purchase your service again. Yes, it might be a hassle for some of your customers, but it will still save you from a lot of potential chargebacks.

3. People think that each rebill has to be authorized by them in advance.
   
   A lot of people are convinced that each rebill has to be authorized by them at first. God forbid if you automatically rebill them without asking prior to that. Then they will undoubtedly raise “unauthorized” or “fraud” disputes for your rebills and even consider calling a police. No, I’m not kidding. To avoid such unpleasant situations you might want to send a prior notification about pending rebill charges.

4. People expect subscription sellers to read their minds telepathically.
   
   Some customers will decide that they do not want to continue their subscriptions anymore and that’s it. No emails or calls to you about that, no clicking on “unsubscribe” links, simply no real action will be taken to stop their subscriptions. And then once they are rebilled their first question to you will be “WHY DID YOU CHARGE ME THIEF?!!”. Actually, such message is still not the worst you can expect. Some people will go straight to their banks and fill “unauthorized” chargeback claim.

5. Refund everything!
   
   Another annoying habit some of customers have is that once for some reason they do not want to continue their subscription, they have no qualms to request refund not only their last rebill payment, but 3, 4 or 5 prior monthly payments as well.

6. “I screwed up, but it’s still the seller’s fault”.
   
   To illustrate this just let me give a recent example I saw for one of subscription sellers. His customer purchased his subscription through PayPal and everything was fine until the first rebill. Once it happened, the customer cancelled his subscription at first and then raised an “unauthorized charge” dispute claim. All this situation shows that the customer did find in his PayPal account that he purchased a subscription which clearly states that there would be a charge every month, but he still did not want to admit to himself that he missed that. And after that instead of asking the seller to refund his latest payment, he simply pretended that everything happened without his knowledge and the seller illegally charged him (when it was actually PayPal who rebilled the customer).

Do not get me wrong, there are a lot of sellers who successfully sell their subscriptions without much issues. So subscription based products/services can be very profitable both short and long term. Just know that it’s not always a straightforward path with these subscriptions, thus do take some time in implementing various techniques to prevent my mentioned causes or reasons for dissatisfaction of subscription buyers.

See you next time,
Vytis

Let us introduce a special thing for you if your products are priced between 0 and 5 USD. Without further ado, our fee for transactions of 0-5 USD amount is just 0.55 USD.

That’s right, for just 0.55 USD per sale your products will have credit card and PayPal payment options, full affiliate program, real-time reports and absolutely no other fees.

Whether you sell a small software, mobile app, an ebook or report, design/tech quick jobs, etc. this is a great deal for you.

You won’t have to pay for declined transactions, only for successfully completed sales. No monthly fee, no registration fee, no upgrade or support fees. Sell a 5 USD product 10 times? OK, we will charge you just 5.5 USD. No $50 registration, $100 setup and $30/mo non-sense.

Please note that this pricing is available on a request, just drop us a message that you would like to have this pricing. Then we will apply it for your account.

Join us!

We are glad to welcome Stripe to our “family”! Click2Sell system already supports 12 merchant account providers (full list here) which means that if you have, let’s say, a PayPal or Authorize.net account, then you can accept payments from your customers directly to these accounts, have full affiliates tracking, nice real-time reports, easy products managements and so on and so forth.

Now you can have all these benefits for your Stripe account too! Add your Stripe account into your Click2Sell account and this is what you get immediately:

1. Full affiliate tracking. Don’t be alone in promoting your services or products. Now others can do this job for you and you won’t overspend for their advertising campaigns! Why? That’s because you will have to pay commissions only for fully completed sales. Actually, you might just leave your product/service advertisement to others altogether, yet have full details of how each of your affiliates perform.Let’s see, a nice day of 100 new sales to your Stripe account? Just log in to your Click2Sell account and get a full report of who of your affiliates are responsible for this successful day.
2. Easy products management. Click on “Add product”, spend 1 minute for going through all the options and then add its newly generated buy button or link to your product website. That’s it. No manual coding or other technical hassle. All purchase forms, checkout pages, custom purchase questions, delivery of product file will be automatically and immediately provided to you.
3. Real-time reports. Details of each of your customers? Stats of today sales or visitors? Day-by-day breakdown of your sales? Sources of your website visitors? Conversions of different products or plans? Yes, of course, you get all this stuff.

Our fees for all this? Just one, two or three bucks for a completed sale. No registration, monthly, upgrade, support or any other kind of fees. Don’t worry about that. Actually, considering that affiliates will drive you sales, their referred additional income will completely cover our fees.

How to begin

Here’s how you add your Stripe account into your Click2Sell account in a couple of minutes:

1. Register (signup link) and log in to your Click2Sell account;
2. Go to My Profile -> My Payment Processors page;
3. Choose Stripe in Step1 to add it;
4. Choose Stripe in Step 2 in credit card slot to activate it.

That’s it, you can start adding your products in “For Vendors” section, putting their buy links into your product website and profit.

You have created a great software product and would like to sell it online to earn some money or start your own software company business. You have created a great looking website, your software has a huge demand on the market and you are ready to sell it. But how to accept payments you’re your customers? You need to get a credit card and Paypal processing solution… But where and how?

In order to start selling your own software or any other digital products (ebooks, membership website, etc.) online, you need to get a real merchant account from the acquiring bank so that you could accept credit card payments on your website. Usually this process takes a lot of time:

1. You need to fill out the lengthy bank forms telling about your product, sales volumes, provide personal information about your company.
2. You need to scan and send your company’s documents to the bank. In addition to this you need to provide the notarized copies of your passport, identity and other documents.
3. You need to provide a professional business plan to the bank explaining how your software company operates and how you will sell your product online.
4. You will have to tell the bank everything about your customers: your target market and major countries.
5. Even more – you will have to provide your own payment processing history. The bank will ask about your sales volume, number of transactions processed per month and overall amounts.
6. Banks usually go for a long process of document and track record verifications. They will even check your credit scores and credibility ratings on credit score agencies.
7. The viability of the business lifecycle and the profitability is also verified before approving the merchant account.

These criteria might not be a problem for an already established and working companies, however… If you are just starting out with your first software product and your company is new – you have no business history, no credibility, nor turnover, payment processing history. Then it will be almost impossible for you to open a merchant account for your new online business, because the majority start up, small businesses fail to meet all the requirements. So it’s like a never ending circle: you’re new àyou don’t have payment processing history àyou can’t get a merchant account àcan’t start processing credit card payments àno turnover àno ability to get going, because no bank will talk to you.
However, there is still a solution for you…

1. Just register on Click2Sell and login to your account. Go to For Vendors page and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing plan.
3. then visit For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your product’s  description along with all the details.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your online shop! That’s all.

Once your product is activated, you will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments on your online shop along with other multiple payment options. The whole process takes than a few minutes and you can start processing within 24 hours instead of waiting a couple of months.

If you do business online and sell software or any other products, the most important part of it is to be able to offer your customers the most convenient way to pay for their purchases. In the past decade, buying on-line has become a global trend, with millions of transactions happening every day. And, of course, the payment methods that customers use to pay for a product have diversified. In the beginning credit cards were the only option, but now there are several websites, such as PayPal or Moneybookers that offer other payment solutions and have become very popular. Some online vendors accept only these e-wallet payments without a direct credit card payment option without thinking that they might lose customers. Credit card payment is still a preferred payment method for most online customers.

Find out why customers use credit cards more often compared to other payment methods:

1. No need to register anywhere – there is no need for a customer to register or have an account on any of the websites to complete the purchase (unlike with e-wallet payments).
2. Fast and convenient – credit card transaction is processed within seconds once your customer enters card details on your checkout page. An order gets approved or declined instantly. Unlike with echecks or bank wire payments, the order can be shipped immediately after the payment, because the funds are deposited instantly to a vendors merchant account.
3. Fraud protection – credit card companies offer customers a better protection against fraud and it enables you to chargeback if the merchandise is not what you expected. So customers are more protected when they buy online and they feel safe when ordering a product.
4. Additional security layers – Visa and Mastercard have developed special Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode programs that add an additional security layer for all card purchases. Once this feature is implemented, the customer is asked to provide a certain password during a purchase. This ensures the safety of an order – that card is used only by the authorised person. Customers feel safe when they order your product. It is proved that having this feature working on your website will bring you more sales. At the same time you – as a vendor – are protected from the majority of possible chargebacks with ‘I didn’t do it’ reason.
5. Get rewarded – customers are also likely to get reward points from their credit card banks for using a card often, which can bring them benefits in the long run. So they prefer to use cards even more.
6. Pay in credit – your customers can pay you using their credit card limit – even if they don’t have enough funds at the moment by borrowing money from a bank. This increases your sales even more.
7. Get more international customers – if you sell online internationally then your foreign customers will be more likely to pay using their credit cards than any other payment method. So it is a must for you to accept card payments in order not to lose potential customers.

 Direct credit card payments account for around 50% to 85% of total online orders. This percentage depends on your industry and niche. If your product is more oriented towards the majority of people that don’t spend much time online, then you will get much more credit card orders compared to Paypal or any other payments. Moreover, US based buyers tend to use more e-wallet type of payments compared to international customers – from the Western Europe, etc.

If you are serious about online business, you should be offering as many convenient payment methods as possible. This way your customers will have a better choice to complete their payment and they will select the most suitable payment method. Offering credit card payments along with Paypal will definitely increase your sales compared to only credit card payment option, so make sure your online shop always offer the most popular payment methods. Then your customers will not have any problem placing an order on your website.

How to accept multiple payment methods on your website?

1. Just register on Click2Sell and login to your account. Go to For Vendors page and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing plan.
3. then visit For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your product’s  description along with all the details.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your online shop! That’s all.

Once your product is activated, you will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments on your online shop along with other multiple payment options.

So you are a software developer – created your own peace of software masterwork and now would like to show it to the world and make some money online selling it! That’s great… But the biggest hurdle you can face online today is that ‘starting point’ – how to start selling online and accept credit cards for your software products when you don’t have any selling history, just starting out and nobody provides you with payment processing services.

This problem is the same problem like starting your own business from scratch – no capital, no gains, no possibility to start. Never ending circle that you can't get into… In order to sell your software product online, you need to have a special online merchant account to accept direct credit card payments from your customers. However, applying for a merchant account on the bank is a real headache, because:

1. You’re just starting – you have a great software product that you would like to sell online, however your business is new, so you have no business history. All banks will say – sorry, the doors are closed for you.
2. Processing history: when you want to sell your software online, all banks ask you for a credit card processing history. You need to show the payment processing volumes that you do per month. But what can you show – only 0s everywhere, because you haven’t even started? Sorry, a bank will say – no merchant account for you.
3. Refund and chargeback rates should be low: all acquiring banks need to evaluate your processing risks and they need to see your chargeback levels (that they don’t exceed 0.5-1% of all sales) and evaluate your refund rates. Again, what would you show them when you are not processing payments at all. Again – banks show you a big finger.
4. Digital business risks: you have a great product and you are sure that it will sell online greatly, however all banks view your software selling business as a ‘very high risk’. You are exposed to many customers returning the product and asking for a refund. They don’t know how you manage your customers’ complaints and if you really return the funds for unsatisfied ones. Selling software products is viewed as a high risk online business by most banks. They can't be sure that you will deliver your product, etc. This doesn’t help you start processing payments online.
5. Show your business license: some banks might even ask you to show your business licenses and software registration documents, patents or other documents. They usually require your financial documents of the company – profit and loss statements, shareholder information and business activity records. This doesn’t help you when you are a single developer or a small company looking to start selling online your newly developed software program.
6. Time consuming process: you might have heard of merchant accounts getting approved within 24 hours! However, this is a total non-sense. Yes, you might get your software’s website checked within this time period, however, the problem is that after this you will be required to provide a ton of company documents, licenses, registration certificates, your personal details. Once the bank receives such documents they go over everything thoroughly, check your credit rating, query some credit agencies for your company’s financials or to check the validity of your provided documents. This approval process usually takes from 2-3 weeks up to 6 months. Usually it takes around 2 months to have everything signed and a merchant account working… Some products (especially software) has time sensitive offers. You can’t let yourself wait so much time…
7. Integration headache: even if you manage to go all this bureaucracy nightmare and you get a merchant account, then you need to hire developers to integrate your website directly to the bank’s raw payment gateways to accept your orders.

Getting a merchant account to accept credit cards online for your software product is a real time consuming and daunting task… However, the good news is that there is a simple solution for this problem. Instead of trying to get a merchant account, just signup on Click2Sell. We will sell your product and accept credit card and Paypal payments. You won’t need to open a merchant account, nor hire developers to integrate your website into the banks' payment gateways.

All you need to do is just to:

1. signup on Click2Sell, then login to your account and navigate to For Vendors section and
2. select the COMPLETE payment processing model.
3. then go to For Vendor –> Add Product section and enter your software program’s details – put your online software for sale on Click2Sell.
4. Place the provided payment button code on your product’s sales page and you are done!

You will be able to accept credit card and Paypal payments from your customers and sell software online. We will pay all your earnings to your Paypal, Moneybookers or direct wire-transfer bank account. Click2Sell affiliates will help you make even more sales and your business profits will soar!

Sometimes when you face a hurdle, you think that it’s over… Not! Never give up, because there is always a solution waiting for you – you just need to find it.

Hi everyone,

we still haven't told you about custom forms in product checkout pages, but let me rectify that right now. "Custom forms" is a very useful, flexible, yet simple to use feature.

Many of vendors need to get some information from their customers before allowing them to use their purchased products or services. Some vendors need buyers to specify their preferred usernames and passwords, others need phone numbers and preferred call hours, color/style choices and so on. Usually this "problem" is solved by using scripts which generate forms to be filled before purchasing products/services or by simply sending emails to customers asking about their preferences. Unfortunately, both ways are fairly inconvenient as they require special coding knowledge or a lot of manual work.

You can avoid all this hassle by clicking just a few times in "Custom Form" page at Click2Sell. This way you can have a form of several questions (or hundreds of questions, if you wish!) displayed in your product checkout page. Every single question can be made as mandatory or optional, be of very different types (not just text fields; see below for examples), they can also have symbols validation (e.g., it can check if a customer entered a real email address or numeric phone number). In just 5 minutes you can have a fully working, self-validating and unmissable form for getting additional information from your customers.

So what exactly question options are available in our "Custom Form" feature?

You can add such things to your form for asking various information from your customers:

• Checkbox (for questions like "Send me the additional tips");
• Multiple select box ("Select which things you want to be included in the package");
• Password ("Enter your password");
• Radio button ("Choose your preferred color");
• Single select box ("Size: S, M, L, XL");
• Text ("Enter your phone number"); Validation options:
  • accept any symbols;
  • accept only numeric symbols;
  • accept only dates (dd-MM-yyyy);
  • accept only email address;
  • accept only website URL address.
• Text area ("Additional comments")

Such a wide variety of question types will let you create any type of form you want, even the most complex one if there is a need. So you are fully covered in this area.

I'm sold, where can I get this stuff?

"Custom Form" is a product-level feature. This means that each of your products can have a unique form. You will find the page to create the form in this way:

1. Log in to your Click2Sell account;
2. Go to "For Vendor" section;
3. Click on your product name there;
4. Click on "Configure basic settings" link;
5. Go to Step 4: "Custom Form";
6. Start adding your questions!

There you will find full explanations about each option, so you will not get lost. Quick preview panes will help you to understand and see everything immediately, so it won't take long for you to set up the first question form for your customers.

Your customers' answers to your additional questions will be inserted into our sale notification emails and API notifications.

As always, if you need further explanations, have some questions or a feedback, please do not hesitate and contact us at any time!

Subscription module was one of the many things that got a major revamp in the new Click2Sell version which was installed on the first of November. The module was improved by a few new things, while its old features were rewritten from scratch to work more efficiently. Let's review the changes.

New features for subscriptions module

• Trial period
  This feature was perhaps the most frequently requested thing by our users, so we are very glad to tell you that you can finally set up subscriptions with a trial period!

  So if you are selling some subscription or membership based product and want to let your customers taste the service you are providing, just set up a subscription with a trial period. All this takes only two additional clicks while configuring your subscription product in Click2Sell.

  Just check "Offer a trial period to your subscribers" checkbox once you are adding a new subscription service or editing an already existing one, and then you will be able to:

  1. offer a free trial period;
  2. charge a different amount of money for a trial period.

   

• Limited amount of rebill cycles
  This feature is particularly useful when your subscription or membership needs just a few payments from your customers instead of charging them endlessly until you or a customer stops his/her subscription.

  Do you sell some coaching program which lasts for 4 months for $79 s month? Or perhaps  you let your customers to purchase your product / service by several smaller payments instead of one large payment? Then this option is definitely for you.

  Once a customer fully pays for your service, his/her subscription will be automatically stopped and there will be no more rebillings for the customer in future.
   

• Subscriber page & notification emails
  Once a customer purchases a subscription from you, he/she will get a special secured page dedicated to him/her. There the customer will find all information about the subscription: its name, description, purchase time and method, vendor information and contact email, payments history, etc. If the customer wishes, he/she can cancel the subscription in that page or update expired credit card data to let his/her subscriptions continue.

  Furthermore, your customers will get email notifications from us upon every rebill. The notifications will contain all the information which is necessary to understand what the rebills were for and how to contact you if there is a need.

  All this will help you to save your subscriptions from needless cancelations or even chargebacks when people just simply forget about their ongoing subscriptions and mistakenly think that your rebills are fraudulent.

Subscription management improvements

There are more features related to subscriptions in Click2Sell system than the ones listed above. Let's review them in case you forgot them:

• Subscriptions module
  Well, this is obvious. In Click2Sell you can manage and sell subscription based products (memberships, services requiring several payments, etc.) by just adding your product / service in to Click2Sell (5-10 minutes tops) and placing a single order button code into your website. Everything else (rebillings, "unsubscribe links", retries after failed rebills, list of subscribers) will be done automatically for you.
   
• Very flexible re-billing periods
  You will not be restricted to just weekly, monthly or yearly rebilling periods as in some other software. In Click2Sell you can set up any duration of rebill cycles you want.
   
• Complete list of your subscribers
  How many active or canceled subscribers you have? What are their names, contact information and statuses? Which subscriptions are the most popular? How much are you going to earn this month? The list will answer all of your questions related to your subscribers. Furthermore, there you will be able to quickly search for a particular subscriber, review his/her subscription details or cancel the subscription.

Other useful things

All my mentioned features above are directly related to subscriptions. But there are many other features or functions in Click2Sell which will greatly help you in selling your subscriptions or memberships:

• Affiliates
  Don't be alone in selling your subscriptions, get help from others as well! Click2Sell will not only handle your subscription payments, but also reliably track promotions of your advertising partners (affiliates). So you will know exactly how many of your subscribers were referred by one or another affiliate.
   
• Real-time statistics
  Stay informed about how many, where and how your subscription offer was seen by various visitors. It is not enough to know that you got, let's say, 12 new subscribers today. Did these 12 subscribers come from 100 visitors? Or from just 10.000? Where visitors come from? Are there any fluctuations in new signups (maybe weekends are more profitable)? Click2Sell real-time reports will answer all your questions.
   
• Many different options where you can receive money from your sales to.
  It is up to you where you want to accept your money: Click2Sell account, PayPal (Website Payments PRO as well), Google Checkout, Moneybookers, Authorize.net, Ogone, eWay, First Data, Moneris, Worldpay, Sage Pay, PayPoint.
   
• Convenient mailer to reach all your subscribers at once.
  if you got some updates in your subscription or membership, just write a message and we will mail it to all your subscribers.
   
• API notifications
  Is your membership website based on user accounts? Or perhaps you create or send something to your new or existing subscribers upon their payments? API notifications are automatically sent on every subscription event (new subscription, rebill payment, failed payment, cancelation, etc.) and contain a lot of information for helping you to automate various things.

Subscription management free?!

All features, benefits and tools listed above are available for you without any additional price! Everything is included in to the same $1-$2-$3 for a sale fee. Thus you will not need to pay regular monthly fee or additional $50-$100 for every module to have all the benefits in place, no upgrade or activation fees as well. Sign up and see everything yourself!