A very frequent question that we get is something like "I added some products in my Click2Sell account, but I’m not sure if I did everything correctly". Let me answer this question to dissipate your doubt if you are wondering about the same thing.

Luckily, there is not much what you have to do in order to have "everything setup correctly". There are just a few very simple things that you have to keep in mind once you are adding a product for selling at Click2Sell:

1. Once you finish adding your product for selling on Click2Sell, you will get unique buy button/link codes for that product. They have to be placed in your product’s website. If you won’t add Click2Sell provided "Buy Now" buttons, Click2Sell service will be useless, because we won’t be able to track sales for you and your affiliates. This is the only thing that you have to add into your website. You won’t need to alter your secret thank-you pages or anything else, there is no pixel tracking to be added somewhere.

2. Once you add "Buy Now" buttons or links, make sure that in the same website there are no other ways for your customers to purchase your products. Click2Sell buy buttons have to be the only option for your customers. It may sound sternly, but there is a very simple reason for such requirement: we can not track sales taking place in some other system than ours, thus if your affiliate refers you a customer and the customer orders your product via some other payment system than ours, naturally we won’t register any sale for the affiliate and he/she won’t earn any commission. I bet you don’t want your business partners to lose their money.

Well, that’s all. These are the only requirements for your products and websites. You may also check some advices on optional things and find an answer to some frequently asked questions as: 

Why doesn’t my product appear in Click2Sell marketplace? It will be listed in the marketplace once it is sold at least once via Click2Sell system (test purchases are not counted as sales). Please note that product’s listing in Click2Sell marketplace is just one of many things in our system. If your product is not listed on Click2Sell marketplace, it doesn’t mean that you cannot sell it – you still can sell your products, gather your own affiliates, analyze gathered statistics and so on.

Make sure you add as much promotional materials as possible. Recruit Affiliates with banners, pre-written letters or articles, forum signatures, PPC keywords lists, custom websites. This will greatly increase interest of your potential affiliates to your product. Of course, the product and its website has to be of quite good quality.

Make a test purchase of your product. You won’t believe how many sales are lost just due to incorrectly written sellers’ PayPal email addresses. Just try a test purchase once (it never hurts) to be sure that transaction process is correct. If you can’t make a test purchase yourself, contact us via "Support" section and we will gladly help you.

Do I have to place a pixel in my thank-you page for affiliate tracking? No, you don’t have to. We use a different kind of tracking, so no need to mess with your secret pages.

Can I change images of Click2Sell Buy Now buttons? Of course! It is fairly simple and safe procedure. You may read Buy Now buttons modification article in order to know how to do that.

Four months have passed since the launch of our new network of servers which host Click2Sell Affiliate Network system and serve your needs there. That was the first major upgrade of our used servers which were set up before Click2Sell launch three years ago. The old servers performed really well and managed to serve thousands of users without any major issue. During the first three years uptime of the old servers were ~99.87%, and what’s even more impressive is that most of the downtime were just planned system updates (sometimes we naturally had to temporarily close the system in order to update Click2Sell code).

However, growing numbers of users and sales-per-day clearly indicated that it might be difficult for the old servers to handle amount of sales and users in the end of this year. We didn’t wait for the old servers to start mildly choking, because we wanted to provide a top notch reliability for our users. At Click2Sell there’s no place for worries like “do my placed Click2Sell buy buttons work? Can my customers order my products without any noticeable delay?”. We take our responsibility very seriously to make sure that your customers could order your products at any time. Thus even the old servers worked sufficiently, we decided to make another step forward.

Let me tell you how our new network of shiny servers will help you to sell products online or promote them:

• Better uptime ratio (yes, you may be giggling that improving the ratio from the previous ~99.87% to idealistic 100% will save just 2 minutes every day, but who knows what might happen during these two extra minutes? Maybe an additional sale for you?).
• Improved data back-up service. Now servers monitor each other and distribute their information much more efficiently, thus your sales data is extremely safe. Even if one or another server irreparable crashes, your data won’t be lost or affected at all. Rest assured, your data is safe.
• Better distribution of load among servers in the network. Theoretically it was possible that, considering such sales growing tendency as ours, some of your customers might experience a bit slower order processes than others in the end of this year. That’s because sometimes the bigger part of customers might be visiting just one of our servers, leaving other servers empty-handed. But don’t worry, such theoretical scenario won’t be possible any more as we took preemptive actions by re-configuring our new servers.
• Can serve a lot more sellers and affiliates. How many times have you seen such thing that once some website becomes very popular, it also becomes awfully slow as its server(s) can’t handle increased traffic and usage? Well, it won’t happen here at Click2Sell (unless every man and his dog start selling products via our system).

Although it may seem that such things won’t increase your sales significantly, but it will give you a feel of bigger security and reliability. It will also be somewhat more comfortable to browse in your Click2Sell Affiliate Network members area. I just want to notice again that we have improved our network of servers not in order to fix some imaginary worsened Click2Sell condition. No, building state-of-the-art network of servers which is always more than sufficient to serve its users is part of our striving for excellence.

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!

Top 10 Affiliate Programs List at Click2Sell.EU (March 2010)

1. Everything4360 – Unleash your Xbox – Unleash your Xbox – Get free xbox games, play burned games, and games from other consoles! Plus learn how to fix your xbox yourself – including the 3 red light “red ring of death”, e74, and more! 24/7 Support for customers and affiliates! Articles, Videos, and graphics to help you sell!

2. Automated Income System – Unique and Powerful Non-Stop Cash Generating Formula is Finally Revealed. Discover The Shocking Truth About How Ordinary Guy Designed, Developed And Fine-Tuned His Secret Automated Marketing Strategy that Now Pulls In Up To £700 A Day! Now YOU Can Start Making Some Very Serious Money… Because He Is Going To Show You Exactly How To Do It…

3. Email Processor – How would you like to make money from home doing simple e-mail processing and get paid $25.00 per e-mail you process?  There is no limit to the amount of e-mails you can process and your potential earnings are unlimited!  You are not required to process a certain amount of e-mails out weekly and can work at your own pace and select your own hours.

4. LCD Monitor Repair – I’m Revealing All My Closely Guarded LCD Monitor Repair Secrets To You. Don’t Miss Out The Opportunity How You Can Become A Professional In Monitor Repair In Less Than 7 Days-Guaranteed!”. Become and affiliate and earn good commissions.

5. One To One Training, Coaching & Mentoring – You don’t need a product or website to make money online.  Why not become an affiliate and promote Live Online Training and Mentoring Club? The greatest success principle in history is ‘LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS’, because you’ll never live long enough to learn it all by yourself. Shaun Smith and Simon Stepsys are two of the most successful Internet marketers in the UK right now because they know what just about every other Internet marketer is doing. Promote their affiliate program and learn how to earn money online.

6. 6 by six millions – Imagine for a moment the Reality of logging on to your email account and receiving cash from all over the world. Can you imagine your excitement when you see $6, $12, $24 or even $36 – $60 payments of cash being paid direct to you via your email for the rest of your life !? Well! Don’t imagine it because YOU can do it starting right this minute!!! Are you up to your max in credit card limits? Are you facing possible foreclosure? Are you struggling to meet the rent? Are you facing the auto being repossessed? Do the kids want new clothes or the newest gizmo’s to keep up their status with the other kids or even the oldest wants a automobile? Don’t despair you can turn your life and that of your loved ones, around. It is nice to sit and dream about how this can change your life and turn even the most dismal financial situation around. Along with the amazing 6 By Six Millions package – we will share an extra special attention-compelling ad for you to place anywhere…

7. Power Supply Repair Guide – Whether You Are Repairing LCD TV, Plasma TV, Monitor, DVD, VCD, CCTV, Satellite Receiver, Printers, Notebook Power Adapter, Xbox, Audio Equipment, Projector, ATX Power Supplies and etc, You Need This Powerful Guide To Show You How You Can Become A Professional In Switch Mode Power Supplies Repair In Less Than 7 Days-Guaranteed!

8. Internet Marketing Training Video Course – little money making gems, and it hides quietly inside an obscure little corner of the internet.  Known only to a lucky few people who are profiting widely from this amazing tool, this powerful money maker continues to elude the masses. Grab this online affiliate program and promote!

9. Writing: The Thriller – Rob Parnell’s Famous Introduction to the Modern Thriller – includes 5 BONUS items.

10. Build a Wind Generator – Learn how to build a wind generator and with our 4 bonus books learn about, where to find free solar panels, make your own solar panels and save tons of money, Bio Diesel fuel guide book, and our recently very popular Electric Car Conversion Guide.

Click2sell has carefully reviewed each program, so you can be assured that none of these programs are scams. If you choose Click2sell to find your top affiliate programs, you can always know that you’re working with reputable companies.

This is the first my post in 2010. And I decided to through last year’s small things which were done by our team in order to provide Click2Sell Affiliate Network users more good affiliate marketing experiences.

The first change of 2009 was new Click2Sell checkout page. Since launching our system we were testing a lot of versions of checkout page in order to understand what factors influence customers to buy products and which things may lead to "sales leak" and lower product conversion rates. We made the checkout page look more simple, easy to fill. All unnecessary fields were removed, other fields which could be filled automatically (such as buyer’s country, etc.) are pre-filled. Amazing, but after changes conversion rates for some products increased by 4% – 18%. On the first sight it could seem not much, but on the other hand some our merchants got more sales doing nothing! I think it’s good for everyone.

The next step was to let Click2Sell merchants Customize Checkout Pages for their products as they want. This gave possibility to translate product’s checkout page into any language: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, etc. So, Click2Sell became useful not only for English speaking merchants and their customers…

Tweak: New Format of Buy Button Code – The main benefit of this change is that the "Buy Button" is shown on browsers even then when Javascripts are disabled. That’s where the old button’s code failed as it was entirely wrapped in Javascript "clothes". And according data we have, this problem was actual for 3% of all buyers. Now it’s not!

The other project was integration of Click2Sell Affiliate Network with "DL Guard" which is more than just a download page protector. DLGuard provides sales link security, expiring download links, membership management, digital shopping cart, customer management, add customer to your mailing list automatically, and a whole lot more. You can read more about it at "Top Notch Protection Of Your Digital Products".

Another very important feature for merchants – integration of payment service providers into Click2Sell. See Full List of Merchant Account Providers supported by Click2Sell. After implementation of this integration merchants are able to offer his customers even 3 payment methods on 1 checkout page – PayPal, Moneybookers or credit card payment. I think it’s more that enough for buyer to choose from.

Of course, in 2009 there were made a lot changes and tweaks which cannot be seen from the first glance, but they definately give value for our merchants and affiliates. Year 2010 is going to be very important and exciting – Click2Sell is going to present it’s users more flexibility, more convenience, more simplicity and of course – top notch customer support. All new system features and opportunities for merchants and affiliates will be described soon.

Merry Christmas to all Click2Sell.EU Affiliate Network users! Merry Christmas everyone! We’re glad having opportunity to thank You for being with us all this time, selling and promoting products thru us, sharing your ideas and giving some reasonable criticism about our work and Click2Sell.EU system. „We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give“ – Winston Churchill‘s sentence we like. You give ideas, we combine them with our own, then we try to implement them and share with you. During next 2010 year we‘ll present you new, better, faster Click2Sell.EU system with some completely unique features which will definitely give you new opportunities to make more money online. But for now – Merry Christmas celebration and a happy upcoming New Year!

Very often we get questions to support mailbox asking Is Click2Sell.EU a merchant account provider? Or what kind of merchant accounts Click2Sell.EU supports? So, in this post i‘ll explain the situation.

As many of you already know merchant account is an arrangement that a company or individual makes with a bank in order to facilitate online sales and payment via credit card, and sends encrypted transfer of credit card and approval information back and forth between the store, the merchant bank, and the credit card processor. Merchant accounts are typically associated with a specific payment gateway provider.

So, if you want to do business online  and sell or promote products and receive money, you definately need an online merchant account. Some of them are quite easy to obtain – PayPal or Moneybookers, because they are „e-wallets“ with very easy account opening procedure (takes only several minutes to open an account) and provide internet users possibility to send and receive online payments, but they do not give you an option to accept credit card payments. It‘s the simpliest way to start accepting money online. Others are more difficult to get – you have to provide quite big bunch of papers to merchant account provider, get product approovals, pay startup fees, etc.

Click2Sell.EU is an innovative affiliate marketing network portal which combines an online point of sale, transaction processing using integrated payment service providers and an affiliate network in one website. As mentioned above, PayPal and Moneybookers accounts are easy to get, so at this moment Click2Sell system uses them as main payment options for merchants and affiliates. Additionally, some vendors can use their own merchant accounts (opened with other merchant account providers).

Here is complete list of online merchant account providers which are supported by Click2Sell:

• PayPal – „is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account“. Accepts merchants worldwide.
• Moneybookers – „is the cheaper way to send and receive money worldwide. Secure and convenient online payments. More than 7 million customers and 35,000 merchants“
• Google Checkout – „is a fast, secure checkout process that helps increase sales by bringing you more customers and allowing them to buy from you quickly and easily with a single login“
• RBS Worldpay – „accept debit and credit card payments, subscriptions, online payments and more, in multiple currencies and languages“. Accepts merchants worldwide.
• Authorize.net – „payment gateway which enables internet merchants to accept online payments via credit card and e-check“
• eWay – „is the PCI compliant payment gateway, providing a range of eCommerce solutions to meet your eCommerce business needs“. Suitable for merchants located in UK, Australia, New Zealand, European Union, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Brunei, Macau, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
• First Data (including LinkPoint and Your Pay) – „is provider of electronic commerce and payment processing services to financial institutions, governments and merchants in more than 50 markets around the world“
• PayPoint – „provides merchant services including online payments, internet merchant accounts and credit cards processing“. Accepts only European Union merchants.
• Moneris – „provides the solutions to process debit and credit card payments online in a secure, real-time environment“
• Sage Pay (former Protx) – „is the UK and Ireland’s independent payment service provider (PSP). Catering for businesses of all sizes, Sage Pay makes accepting payments online, simple, fast, secure and profitable“
• Optimal Payments – „provides the processing technology and services that merchants require to accept credit card, debit card, and electronic check payments for retail, Internet, mail order, and telephone order sales“. Accepts merchants from United States, United Kingdom and Canada.
• Ogone – „allow your customers to pay for their purchases with their preferred method of payment“. Issues online merchant accounts for vendors from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

So, if you have online merchant account with any of the merchant account providers listed above, you can set-up them on Click2Sell and expand your business possibilities! If you don’t have yet, you should apply for one and I‘m sure that at least one of the listed Payment Service Providers will give you merchant account. Happy selling!

Even though Click2Sell aims to be a perfect all-in-one e-commerce solution, excellence can’t be achieved overnight. We continue to work very hard to provide you the best possible system in the Internet business area and it is only the matter of time when we will achieve that goal. But for now it wouldn’t be wise to reject mature and well-tried products which are leaders in their niches and complement with Click2Sell system. We listened to your requests and worked with several very well known software developers.

We would like to present you the first collaboration result: DLGuard solution! We worked with Sam Stephens to make sure that this software would be 100% compatible with Click2Sell.

Please take a look on DLGuard. We strongly recommend using it!

DLGuard

DLGuard is a powerful and easy to use script that you simply upload to your website and then rest assured that your internet business is not only safe, but also much easier to manage, automating the tasks you just don’t have the time for.

DLGuard protects your products from the most common forms of theft:

• Download link sharing: 
  Each download link can have an expiring time limit as well as a maximum number of download attempts. This means that you can give your customer, for example, 2 hours to download your product with a maximum of 3 download attempts. Even if your customer posted their own real download link on a public forum, the link would become useless before real damage is done.
   
• Insecure thank-you / download pages:
  A common form of "hacking" is by simply searching for insecure download pages via popular search engines. The term hacking is used loosely, as there is no skill in searching for insecure download pages, but the effect can still be devastating.
  With DLGuard, even if the whole world knows the URL of your thank-you page, they won’t be able to download your products.

Automatic auto-responder Sign-up

DLGuard can also help you with auto-responder tasks. Marketing tests and successful business owners tell us time and again that to maximize profits you need to create a loyal customer list. This can be difficult or uneconomical by using customer signup forms as a large percentage of your customers won’t signup. First you need to convince them to buy your product, and then you need to convince them to signup to your mailing list?

DLGuard fixes this problem by automatically adding your customers to your mailing list after a sale is made. No more manual submissions, no more annoying your customers by asking them to jump through hoops. Use only easy, instant and invisible auto-responder signup.

Customer Tracking and Reporting

Who has downloaded your product? And how many times have they downloaded it? DLGuard will track each of your customers download attempts. Simply search for your customers name, email address or receipt number and DLGuard will show you how many times that customer has attempted to download your products and bonus products. View a customer’s information and download attempts. Reset timers, download counts, resend download emails, and more from this screen. Overall reports can be produced as a total, or per month.

DLGuard has a lot more features and options. You are welcome to visit DLGuard website to find out more great aspects of this premier sales protection system.

As we said before, this product is among the first quality software/services that directly support Click2Sell. We will be working relentlessly to make Click2Sell friendly with many different tools that are popular among marketers and sellers. Click2Sell has to be known not only for innovations, but for convenience to use with other tools as well.