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Lesson Info

How We Accept Payment

I want to talk about just e commerce in general and what it takes to accept payments because, you know, this is something that's I guess, kind of like, Duh. But there's some things in here that are gonna be important. This is payments what it takes. Now, this is kind of a generic model. Okay? This is very, very generic. The first thing is a product or service to sell this. When I was said, dog, this is what I was talking about. Going to sell something. You need to sell something right now, this is the interesting thing. This is something I didn't quite understand when I when I started doing all this selling something could be almost anything. It could be a product that could be a physical product. It could be a downloadable product. It could be a service. Like I do a lot of consulting. I do a lot of corporate training, things like that. I sell that. I can actually sell that via PayPal. Do different, different methods. And that's a service that I'm selling. Okay, so that's something tha...

t I could do. We can also, and this is something that we're gonna kind of touch on a little bit here, but we can accept donations, donations, the big deal. I work with some, you know, nonprofit organizations that need to accept these. And there's a lot of ways to do that so we can accept payment. Now, the other thing about this type of process or or selling or payments, if you will, is that this may actually be, I guess you could say, a warm up to get to a sales agent. This could be kind of taking people through a process and not entering a credit card or sending a check, but actually just gathering information to say maybe you want to sign up for a service, but we'll contact you at the end. Have you ever had something like that where you think you're gonna go, like, plop down a credit card and see how much gonna cost? But they say Okay, well, let's go contact an agent. Let's get you hooked up via phone or online. So we have to have something we're gonna sell. Okay, the next thing we're gonna talk about is payment interface. This is this is huge. Because if you think about selling something, I showed you guys that example of papal, that button. It was just a button, basically, with maybe a few options. And when you click the button you went to PayPal, you went toe, you know, stripe or whatever it happened to be. And it was kind of a simple method was kind of a simple process. That's great. We want to try and keep the process simple. If you go to Amazon amazon dot com, and you look at how much they have the cell, it's It's just it blows your mind. I mean, seriously, that site is huge. It's huge, and they do a really pretty good job of trying to make the ordering process or the selling process pretty simple, pretty unique, but easy to manage, easy to go through and find what you've done. The payment interface is something that in some cases we can control a lot. We can say, Hey, I want to change the color of that button. I want to add like a whole bunch of sizes. If we're selling T shirts, I'm gonna do things like that. I want to add a card going to do this. Do that, or it could be a simple is just throwing a button on a page. So this is something that you know, we need Teoh, discuss and figure out, and we will Don't worry a lot of times to get a payment. We also need what's called a payment processor. Now this Honestly, when I started doing this, this was the part. I think that was really missing the payment processor. I really It's something that's kind of intangible. It's something that's a little bit vague, if you will. But if we go to sell something and let's say you're gonna accept a check, okay, which or C o. D who does seo d anymore? I But let's say you're gonna do something like that. You don't really have to worry about a payment process of them. You could actually have a form on your site. This is by it, sentiment email and say, Send me to check or give me the cash when they deliver it. Okay, that's pretty simple, but we're not going to see a lot of that these days. We're gonna deal more with credit cards with debit cards with the credit card logo on them, that type of thing that kind of processing. We need a payment processor, and this is actually referred to as a payment gateway, and I'll show you a diagram. I got this cool diagram to kind of show you all this, But this is a company that is you're gonna use you're going to sign up for okay, And this could be papal. This could be authorized dot net. There's a 1,000,000,000 of them out there and we'll take a look at some of them. But they're the ones that are gonna do the heavy lifting. We're gonna We're gonna do something like either take the credit card info on our site or addition right off to that other website, like the Amazons and the this and the Nats. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna actually get the company the money from the credit card company, if you will, and then do something with it, okay? And that's kind of a big deal. It's not this simplest process in the world. So we hire a payment gateway or a merchant to do something like this for us, and then we have to have something called a merchant account. A merchant account is basically sort of like a bank account that they have to take the money. Once they collect it, they gotta put it somewhere. Okay, so we usually will hook it up with Scott what's called a merchant account. And sometimes that can debit right into your your checking account or do things like that. But these are companies companies that specifically will do this. And I mentioned one. There's a 1,000, authorized dot net, for instance. There's a 1,000,000, of mount there. We'll take a look at a few of them, so we need some some company that's gonna process the payment. Okay, They last not last, but the next thing here is SSL or security, and this is huge. We've already just talked about this a bit. I'm gonna talk about a little bit more, but we need to make sure that that process is secure. If you think about it. What I what I did the first time I set up a cart was I didn't have SSL. I didn't have some kind of security on it. And the thing is, you're opening yourself up to your site, data your site to somebody that could come in and look at it, if you will, or take information such as credit card information, etcetera. So we need to be really careful about that and the last thing here to accept payments. This is the part. I think that kind of falls through the cracks fulfillment. It's just because you get the money and you're like, Yeah, I just got 50 bucks. $6000. Whatever happened to be for that thing? Now the real work kicks in because we can set all of this up and, you know, it's it's like setting up stacking up Legos or doing something like that. We get it set in place and we're done. We have to manage the process, etcetera forward. But the fulfillment, the hard part, this is what keeps coming, keeps coming. If you're gonna sell something, let's say, Ah, physical product. You gotta ship it. How do you do that? What do you do? Are you gonna go to USPS yourself? Are gonna go to UPS yourself? Do you have a carrier? Come to your house? Do you? How does that work for you? So we need to consider fulfillment. The other thing is shipping taxes. Taxes is huge. If you're selling something like a service, you may not have to charge taxes for that. Okay, depending on your state as well. If you're selling something like a physical product like I sell some ice l E books, at times, one of my sites and I need to charge state tax for it. Okay? I currently live in North Carolina, and so I have to look at a tax rate and figure all that out. But we have to collect out, because we, you know, we owe taxes on that product, depending on state, depending on country, depending on where you are, this can all be different. Okay? Fulfillment is a big deal. The last part of fulfillment is customer satisfaction. You guys, if you plan on selling something in your planet, doing it right, you must must must take the client first. You must take their consideration. What they're thinking, what they're doing, what they want into consideration. If they send you an email, you got an email right back. You've got to be on top of these things because that that's part of the process. That's part of accepting the payment and making it a good I guess you could say Ah, good way to do things. Okay, so anyway, so that's talking a little bit about just working with products now. The other thing that I want to mention here is we're talking about this whole payment thing, like, How do we do it? What does it take to do it? We can also a few realize, er, or decide later on that this is just too much. It's too much to set all this stuff up. Maybe. You know, we're impressed. You're working where? Press, but you want to make a dead simple. You just want to sell an e book, for instance. Well, there's a lot of services out there you can use where you just send a link off to the service like I sell E books on lulu dot com, for instance. There's a 1,000,000 of them out there. I'm just mentioning that one, cause it's one, but they actually have an entire cart system. They actually have a store or shopping area. You can go to and put your cock content up there, and it's either just us dishing it off. The loons they go, just go by their go to Amazon and buy it or go to, you know, whatever it happens to be and buy it if we decide that this is not the path we want to take. So these air some things to think about as Faras taking into account all of us. Now let me get back over to my site here. I'm gonna close this up. You know, there's there's a lot of information out there on the Web, and there's a lot that we need to look at as far as selling and just trying to decide it. Can't say how many times I get the questions Should I use, uh, should ease paper. Should I should I create my own cart? Should he use Google should do this. Should I do that? There's an e book out there. I would just suggest taking a look at its on I themes. I things dot com and is the WordPress Need Commerce? A simple guide for selling products online. Take a look at it. It's a good idea. It just kind of runs through some generic. Some scenarios, things I'm talking about. They cover some of that in there as well. Okay, but it's a good idea to take a look at all right. What I want to do now is I kind of want to break down these different topics and talk about some of these different features. One of the things I keep talking about a security, Okay. And it's a it's a big deal and something we need. Consider, we're gonna talk about that next. I want to talk about what's called SSL. Okay, Now I have right here a website, and Kimoto is one of the companies that will actually sell you unnecessarily. You actually you buy this thing, Okay? If you're gonna do this this card to do all these different things yourself, okay? You can buy an SSL. You can go out there and some of them cost like five bucks. Some of them cost $1000. And it really depends on the level of security you want and what you want to build to do with it. If you go to your host, your host will sell you an SSL. I guarantee if you get go Daddy Blue host 11 etcetera. They have ssl is you can buy. The idea here is that if we decide that we want to sell something and want to go the route of actually taking over the whole process. We want to have, like, a Curt. In addition to that, we don't want to just send him the papal. What we're gonna do is we're gonna have to set up a lot of stuff in sl's one of them and SSL is essentially certificates. Okay? The idea behind it is that if we create our website, we by this thing called a necessary This is kind of a simpler set up, but we by this thing, called on SSL and what we do is we associate it with our website with Are you are you say okay for this site? We want to use this secure. It's called a secure socket layer. We want to use this thing for our site. And what we can do is we can actually secure specific pages on our site. So you say Okay, when somebody gets to the check out or the shopping cart page or something like that, or their you know, their account page, I want to secure it. I want to have this SSL thing in there. You're going to see right here that if somebody goes to one of those pages, what's gonna happen is it's actually gonna go out and check the website up on the server and see if it's got this certificate and it's gonna check it with the browser and kind of see if it's a certificates match. If it's a good one, and if they match, what it's gonna do is going to say, Okay, we're gonna give you a green light. We're gonna give you a thumbs up. This is secure and it's actually gonna allow it to encrypt the data when it sends it. This is pretty key because credit card information, all this kind of thing, if it gets sent over, somebody could technically grab that if they knew what they were doing. So this actually right here you can see it actually transmits or transfers to data and encryption guys, which is good. Good thing now, Like I said, SSL is important if we set up ah cart, you know, used things called on site payments, which will talk more about if you plan on, make keeping it simple and go into like PayPal or stripe or this kind of thing. This is something you don't have to worry about because we're gonna send someone to another site to get this done. And they've already had it all secured. Okay, but this is the idea behind assets. I'll go up to your your host if you decide to go this and you'll understand this more when we fit it into the whole scenario here. But that's that's an SSL. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about what a payment processor is. Okay? And this is something that we can either handle ourselves. Like I said, are we gonna have another company? Dio Okay, the one I keep mentioning. And there's you get. Believe me, I'm probably gonna get comments on this. I understand your chat. There's a 1,000,000 of amount there. Okay, There's a 1,000, amount. They're authorized dot Net is is a little bit old school, and this is one that I've used forever. And it's something that you can if you want to take their service and their kind of the middle man. Okay. So, just generically, I'll show you. Let me kind of draw this out real quick, but you're going to see that we have here is our server. Okay, so I'll just say that that's our Web server right there. Here's somebody's device. OK, old school. It looks like an old school TV. That's fine. You got the server here when we actually go and say, OK, let's collect the information. We're gonna get your credit card. All that kind of stuff were actually gonna have that SSL working. The SSL is actually gonna be typically sitting on the server here, and it's gonna encrypt the data between their browser and the server itself. Okay, when we go to collect the data like, let's say, credit card and we want a process the credit card, You want to get the money? Obviously, that's where we get into this merchant. Okay, we'll call. This is the merchant. So you can see right here that the idea here is that this is the gateway of the processor. So what they do is they will actually take the credit card information. It's also the credit card. They'll take that information, they'll go to the credit card companies, do the processing check to make sure there's enough funds, etcetera, etcetera and they'll grab that cash will grab the money, okay? And then we have to take the money that they get. Okay? The merchant and I'm simplifying this greatly. There's a lot that's going on, but they're gonna take that money and they're gonna send it off to something now, Typically, they're not going toe. Some will let you just dish it off to a bank account. You have, for instance, OK, but a lot of these types of merchant accounts, they will actually have something like, ah, merchant account built in where you go access the funds and you can forward them or send them somewhere else. But we have to have some kind of merchant account. It's called. It's sort of like a I'm not gonna say checking account, but it's sort of like a like a checking account, the money the funds go into and then you can take that money and do what you want with it. Okay? This is how a lot of them worked very generically. And I actually have a page here. I want to show you This is the section chemical so authorized dot net has a how credit card processing works. And you guys, if you're gonna do something like a really simple like, let's just use an existing service that does all this for us. This is just for your information, okay? You might have to deal with a lot of with us. We're going to see right here, OK, we have the actual buyer, and what they're gonna do is we're gonna go to the website. They're gonna take a look at the site, obviously, and they're going to try and buy something, right? So they're gonna actually submit their credit card information. They're going to say, I want to buy this thing. We're going to submit their credit card information. What's gonna happen and is the credit card information is gonna get captured. It's gonna be sent to authorize dot net, which is that merchant, and you can actually see it right here. Okay, there's the merchant, and they go through and say, All right, let's, you know, go grab the money, do this kind of thing. It's gonna go through this payment processor, which is gonna grab them the cash itself and figure out, you know, where is this money going to come from, How it's gonna work and eventually what it's gonna do is have this interchange of merchant account that's gonna be able to send it to it's called an issuing bank. Okay, now the funds, If you take a look here, it's gonna actually go back and say, OK, well, we're gonna grab this. The buyer is going to see if the cash is there. If they can grab it and do that, it's not going to go in and say All right, well, authorized on that is going to say we're good. The payments been accepted. We can then go in and say, Let's complete the transaction if you will. And then one of the last steps here is the seller is going to send the product, Do the thing fulfillment go through that process, etcetera. And eventually, at the very end of the process here, the cash is gonna be pulled out. Credit card debit. However you guys work it pulled out. Brought through this merchant account. This interchange, if you will and then brought over to your bank to your acquiring bank. And this could be your merchant account, if you will. This is kind of ah, it's a very generic process. I'm showing you here, but this is one that's, I think, important, important to understand, at least just simply, I would go through this and just take a look at it, because I it's convoluted at best, and they try and break it down with these simple symbols and kind of worked out right? So that's the idea behind what a processor a gateway is all about. Okay, now, the next thing I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about WordPress in general and selling Okay, now what that means thes. There's some things that I want you to consider and one of the websites that I go to a decent amount of WP beginner dot com and they actually have thing here about. It's an article about the most common misconceptions about WordPress. One of things about WordPress is that first of all, if we're going to do this, if we're going to sell using WordPress, we have to First of all, decide. Is WordPress right for us, right? I assumed it by you watching this, you've either, you know, divested sometime or thought about WordPress or are actually using WordPress, and you want to sell something right? That's the idea. Uh, the thing is, with WordPress, you're gonna hear a lot of people talk about why or why you shouldn't use it as a way to sell things. Now what's interesting is you guys have heard me so far Talk about these generic processes. You know, these different things that we need in place to get all this toe work. And I'm talking about using third party services and that kind of thing. But I'm mentioning WordPress as well. Wordpress doesn't actually have any kind of payment system built in. There's nothing there. It was WordPress, originally back in the day, was created as a blogging platform. Ah, lot of us are using it as a content management system or a CMS or a way to create a website. Okay, but there's really no no way to sell built in, which is kind of interesting, But that's why there are a lot of other companies that will do this for us, and we use third party to get it done. Now, I've got another pdf that I would like to open here and show you this. Pdf is going to talk a little bit about, um, just why and why not to sell on WordPress. All right, And this is something that I think that we should pay attention to. Okay, if I go out to Wordpress and take a look here and you're gonna see Okay, well, I'll start with the wine nuts. This is these are things that you are going to hear from people. If you ask around my WordPress security issues is gonna be the biggest thing. Okay, Security issues basically means that how secure is WordPress is a platform. Some people will say, Well, it's not secure enough people can get in. People could somehow get their way in and grab the credit card information Or do this. I've heard worst case scenarios, scenarios all over the place. The thing is, this is one of a 1,000,000 different CMS is and ways to go about doing things. And WordPress there on top of security, they really are, You know, they put out patch updates and updates all the time to make sure that there are fixing these security loopholes. If there's anything going on or anything found a so small is it could be the thing that a lot of people say about security issue with WordPress is that it is open source, which is great because there's a huge community behind WordPress. Okay, the big thing about WordPress is that we need to keep it up to date. That's one of the big things, because if they come out with an update, it might not just be to throw a new theme in there. It's most likely gonna be because they fixed a security loophole minutes small meaning whatever it happens to be. So we need to keep WordPress up to date. The other thing is we could add other security or another level of security on top of WordPress if we wanted Teoh and one of the examples and actually can't believe I misspelled it here. That's great Security. It s u C U R I is a method one of 50 different ways to further secure your website. Okay, but this is one of the issues or one of the things that people will come up with and say I just mentioned that wordpress doesn't support e commerce. That simply means that wordpress doesn't have e commerce functionality built in. It doesn't mean that it can't support it, that you can use it with R N e commerce platform or a way to sell stuff. Okay, I could actually go on my desktop, created html file, put that up on a website on a server, and then start selling stuff through it, OK? It's just a plain old HTML file. But WordPress, with all these security hooks built in all these different things built in, you can use e commerce with it. You can okay, the other thing about working with WordPress and I say that we need to keep up to date for security. It could be difficult to update WordPress. This is something that you are going to hear from people. People will say. Well, that's true to a point. Okay, updating WordPress can be a little interesting, because what we're gonna do is we're gonna work with some plug ins. Okay? We're gonna work with PayPal. Plug in. I'm gonna talk to guys about striped plug in just different things that we can deal with, including woo commerce and other shopping card systems. These are plug ins, these air things that you will download to wordpress into your site into install and use as a plug in and it's gonna give you extra functionality. Okay, If wordpress updates, we need to make sure, just like every other plugging in our sight that those plug ins work with the new up there with the new version of WordPress. It's huge. We have to make sure we do that. The other thing, too, is that if you have a plug in that you're using to to sell something for commerce, you gotta make sure it works with your other plug ins because this could be something that could be bad. I actually I was building the site for this course of matter fact. And to be perfectly frank, I only put one payment method on any side ever create. I mean, it makes sense. You're saying, OK, here's my one cart. We could go to 50 different ways, but I tried to put papal stripe two others and then we'll commerce and a shopping cart on the same site, and it just crashed. It brought it down because you're not gonna do that. Okay, you're just not gonna plug ins that do the same thing on there. So you got to be careful about plug ins interacting with each other. That's what I'm talking about. Difficult update the learning curve. I know that if you know WordPress really well, this doesn't apply to you. Obviously this taking it a step further and working with the commerce. It's really not that bad. If you know WordPress, it's not. It's just knowing the ins and outs of the e commerce process, like selling something or getting donations. The learning curve, though. If you are just stepping in a WordPress and people tell you use WordPress, you got to do that. And you're like, Oh, well, I can sell stuff, too. That's great. You have to learn how to use WordPress before you can sell stuff. Okay, so it's It's the whole crawl, walk run type thing. But the great thing about where prices it's easy to install. You throw a theme in there that works and you like, and you could start selling, you know, I mean, you gotta get your content in there, too, but that's the big deal. So, Brian, before you go any further, I want to let everybody know online. If you're watching that, all of the pdf's that Brian is showing right now come with the course. So if you buy the course, you get all the PdF studies put together, and there's quite a few of them. How many? Pdf star there. I think there's, like six people that information with all this content. Yeah, so you can actually go back and go back through this stuff as you re watch. And if you have questions later on, you can do that. I also want to tell you guys jump into the chat room. Ken is hanging out in there. I'm hanging out in there were talking about this stuff while Brian's teaching live. And if you do have any questions directly for Brian the way that you ask those by clicking the little ask button, they're above the video player. So take it away, man. So this this is some of the what you'll hear is faras. Why not to sell with WordPress? Now I'm gonna talk a little bit about why, OK, now I love this. This is contradicting itself, but the 1st 1 is it's easy. Well, I just told you that there's a learning curve. OK, the learning curve is for learning about WordPress to get a site set up, you get a theme. Get everything going, the e commerce or the selling. It's not that bad. It really is not, and it really depends on how far you want to take it. If you decide that you want to just sell a product you're looking to sell e book a downloadable e book or you're looking to sell something like a coffee mug or some something like that, it's actually dead simple to do, and I'll show you how to do it, obviously. But if you're looking to have a full experience and you're looking to accept these payments and keep it within your sight and have a cart and SSL and all these different things, I was talking about the merchant accounts in a bubble. It could get a little more difficult, okay, and that's where some of this is going to kind of step in. Especially like membership sites, they can get a little bit more, but there's a lot of plug ins out there. There's a lot of third party services and products we can use to make it easy, and that's what we're going to go through. The other thing about why is that? There are widgets and plug ins that we can use that are free. One of the big ones were going to do today in the third part is we're gonna take a look at a plug in called Wu Commerce. I love the name marries have it's just it's woo okay, and they make a lot of stuff. It's worth themes. Were plug ins with this? With that, it's free to buy, and it gives you essentially a a way to sell any commerce way to sell where people can have things like a cart. They can go back to things they can see past orders. They can, you know, reject things. They can do all kinds of stuff. Working with this single plug in that is free. You just install it and start to go. That's what we're going to go through. Of course, there's a lot of up selling that they do, and we're gonna talk about up selling and cross selling and all that. But if you want to take it further, you maybe you want to integrate that with male chimp or you want to be able to, you know, send off. This is one of my favorites but you want to send a client that just bought. You want to send a PdF of the actual invoice or the to receive, if you will, that's an extra plug in. You can put on top of commerce, but a lot of it's a lot of this three. That one is not. But as's faras design changes, it's relatively easy, because when we're gonna work with our commerce, you're gonna deal with CSS quite a bit. Okay, a lot of these plug ins are gonna have CSS and different things built into them already. The buttons that this to that are gonna be already baked in, but we can change a lot of it using WordPress. It's not that bad, To be honest, there's easiest set up, and I see easy ish because it's sometimes like I said, if you're doing a full blown you know, membership site, something like that, it can definitely be more of a headache more going on just because there's so much more going on in the back end. But it could be pretty easy. You want PayPal dead simple. OK, I'll show you that Extensible. This is why a lot of people love it because we can take a PayPal button, a shopping cart system, something that we want to use and actually integrate it with a lot of stuff. The one thing you need to think about is that you're thinking about selling something. Let's say via via were press you want toe don't have donations. You want to sell a product or service. Okay, you're not the first person to do this. All right, so there's a lot. And I actually thought that for a long time I was like, Well, what if I integrated it with block? Somebody's probably already thought of that. That's why we're press is awesome because it's completely extensible and you can get these plug ins. Okay, There's also a lot of themes that e commerce ready, and this is something we have to talk about. You are gonna look and get a theme. A theme is our starting point, right? Kind of like a template, and you want to make sure it's responsive and it's got all the bells and whistles, and it supports the right browsers, all this kind of thing. But it needs also support the plug in or the e commerce solution you're using, for instance, woo commerce, which is one of the big plug ins we're going to use today. If you don't have the right theme, it can look kind of weird. Look off, okay, and certain features could be missing or overridden by the theme. So we need to consider that, and I'll show you a few just ideas of that coming up here. Now, a few things to think about as far as selling unworthy press. If you don't know WordPress yet, it will be a steep curve. In the beginning, it will. That's just that's the nature of the beast. But that's why we have another WordPress course you can go to. Okay, I did one a little while ago. You can't just set it and forget it. I love this one, because in WordPress it's selling aside. It's WordPress in general. We want to go in, and we want to make sure it stays up to date, like already mentioned, and we do all of this and make sure that we're on top of the actual install and keeping up to date. Going with an e commerce supported theme to start is a good thing. It like I just mentioned, you want to do that? And unless you pay someone else, you're gonna have to do it yourself, okay? And this is why today we're going through, and I'm showing you from simple to more complex payment. Acceptance, if you will. So that's something we also need to think about. There's a couple other things out here. I just put these in here. These are the girls. This is the one we just went to. This is a WP beginner. It's misconceptions or things to think about what? Wordpress. And then there's that actually getting started. That getting started guide I mentioned earlier that pdf file from my themes you can go to take a look at. So this is in the pdf. You can you can have. So, Brian, you've actually taught a course here before? Yep. About WordPress. To what was that? What was that called? Maybe could explain a little bit about that course for folks that might be interested in that. Totally. Yeah, that was designing a responsive website using WordPress and that one we went through. And we just basically started out from the beginning. And we said, What is wordpress How does it work? We set it up. We installed it. We used the theme. They get a creative life theme. If they buy that type of thing and they didn't go install that. And we went through everything. We talked about everything. Why its response of how it works?