I will never use Paypal again. After being a loyal customer for over 3 years, one day they decided to place a 6 month hold on my money for no reason. I couldn’t access over 20k in my account which I needed to pay my bills!

The above quote was just one of many emails I received in the past few months since my article went live. In the interest of full disclosure, I use Paypal Website Payments Pro to accept payments for my online store and I’ve never had any problems with them in 4+ years. But the fact that so many readers have such strong anti-Paypal sentiments made me a little paranoid about my business. After all if you can’t process credit cards, you can’t make any money.

Paypal Horror Stories From People I Know

Most of the horror stories I’ve read about Paypal through surfing the web have to do with Paypal randomly limiting accounts or freezing funds. Most of the complaints I’ve come across seem to indicate that Paypal will rarely hold your funds for longer than 6 months, but 6 months can be a long time if you need access to your money. And once they freeze your funds, it doesn’t make sense to continue accepting money through Paypal if you can’t access it. In other words, once your account is frozen, you are pretty much screwed.

All of the stories that I’ve read online are from people that I don’t know personally or from people that I’ve never heard of before so I’ve been taking them with a grain salt. However, I do have a few fellow blogging friends that have had their accounts frozen for no reason so I asked them for their side of the story.

In both cases with my blogging buddies, they had their accounts frozen after a big product launch. For one of them, Paypal limited their account by only allowing them to process $10,000 per day. The other blogger had over 40K in funds frozen for 180 days. It seems as though Paypal doesn’t like seeing huge spikes in money being received into your account.

In the case of my online store, the revenue we receive is pretty steady and consistent from month to month but occasionally we get spikes of revenue when we hold a sale. So, I decided to call my dedicated account manager at Paypal to get the story straight and here’s what I found out.

Why Paypal May Limit Or Freeze Your Account

After talking to my Paypal rep for over 30 minutes, they reassured me that it’s extremely rare that they ever place holds on user accounts. They also told me that there were no limits on my account whatsoever and that I could process as much money as I wanted to in any given day. When I brought up the stories about my blogging friends and how they had their accounts frozen, the representative assured me that the reasons for limiting an account vary greatly from user to user and largely depends on the situation.

Under the following circumstances, Paypal has certain triggers in place as a safeguard against fraud. Here are some reasons why some of these safeguards might be triggered

• You’ve received an abnormally large amount of money in your account that is way above your average
• Someone has filed a complaint to Paypal about your business
• A series of chargebacks have been placed against your account
• Your website has questionable content
• You are in violation of Paypal’s use policy. For example if you sell drugs or anything illegal, you may get banned
• Your account information is not up to date or your account is not fully verified
• Someone has logged into your Paypal account from a strange location.
• Your credit score is low or something with your background history makes you a higher risk customer
• They have detected fraudulent activity on your account.

Preventing Paypal From Ever Limiting Your Account

Towards the end of my conversation with Paypal, they assured me one last time that only a very small fraction of a percent of people get their accounts frozen and that accounts are rarely frozen for the full 180 days. They also recommended the following guidelines to greatly reduce the chances of this happening.

• If you are expecting to receive a large sum of money, then you should call Paypal ahead of time so they expect to see the extra funds. In other words, if you are planning a large product launch, make sure you let them know ahead of time
• When you first signup for Paypal Website Payments Pro, there’s a survey that you have to take. Make sure that you check off higher numbers in terms of how much money you anticipate making every month
• Contact Paypal to make sure that your account is not limited in any way in terms of how much money you can accept per day. Sometimes limits are placed depending on various factors relating to your credit history or background checks
• Make sure your name or the name of your business is on your Paypal account and that it exactly matches your bank account and credit cards.
• Use the exact same addresses and phone numbers that match your bank account and credit cards
• Always use trackable methods of shipping if you ship physical goods in case a dispute is filed against you
• Make sure that your FEIN or social security number exactly matches the name of your business on the account
• Link both a credit card and a bank account to Paypal

Does This Sound Like Too Much Trouble?

Here’s the bottom line how I see it. If you are in the business of selling informational or digital goods and your revenues are extremely lumpy, then I would go with a regular merchant account and gateway like Merchant Plus. If you have low credit scores or any history of fraud or criminal activity, then go with a regular merchant account and gateway like Merchant Plus. If you never want to deal with the possibility of getting your account frozen or limited, then go with a regular merchant account and gateway.

The main reason my wife and I use Paypal is because they offer an extremely convenient way to ship packages and accept Paypal payments with one easy to use interface. Paypal’s fees are higher than a traditional merchant account but the perks are worth it for our store. But if you do decide to go with Paypal, it’s probably a good idea to give them a call to make sure that there aren’t any artificial limits on your account.

Photo By BoxChain

As I mentioned in my article on best posts of 2011, the traffic to my blog has doubled in the past year.

And unfortunately during that time, the amount of spam comments has increased by an order of magnitude as well.

Just to give you an idea, there were several days in December where I was getting bombarded with over 20 spam comments every few seconds.

Yes, you heard that right. Whenever I refreshed my dashboard, I would see 20 or more spam comments in my Akismet filter. In fact, the amount of spam made all of the websites on my server extremely slow or inaccessible for a long period of time during those days.

The Problem With WordPress

Now under normal operation, my blog does pretty well under heavy traffic because of a plugin called WP Super Cache. Essentially, this plugin creates a static version of every article in my blog so that it can be served very quickly to the end user. However, this plugin is helpless against a heavy influx of comments because comments require your server to call up WordPress each time in order to process the comments one by one.

And because WordPress is such a resource hog, a heavy influx of spam comments can easily take down any blog even if you’re on a dedicated server and you use a caching plugin. It doesn’t matter if you use the best comment spam filters in the world, all spam comments still have to get processed by WordPress which takes a good chunk of server resources.

The Characteristics Of Spam Bots

Now having a slow or inaccessible blog is one thing, but comment spam also affects other sites that are running on the same server which is unacceptable. After doing some research about spam bots, I discovered a few things.

• Spam bots typically do not accept cookies
• Spam bots can leave comment spam in a matter of seconds
• Spam bots typically don’t run javascript

So what does this mean? In a non technical terms, a spam bot does not behave like a regular user on a web browser. And the key to solving my problem involved detecting the spam bot immediately and directing it to an error page instead of launching WordPress.

Based on the characteristics described above, I could detect spam bots either by placing a cookie on the user’s machine, disabling comments for many seconds after a page loads or coming up with some javascript code to detect the spam bot.

Solving My Comment Spam Problem

After much deliberation, I came up with a fix to secretly insert a cookie on the user’s machine whenever an access is made to a page on my blog. I could then look for this cookie on the user’s machine before allowing a comment to go through. Because a spam bot typically doesn’t accept cookies, I could easily detect the bot and direct it to a static error page.

Originally, I was planning to post my source code on this blog entry which I wrote in javascript (I would be happy to send it to you if you are curious), but after talking to a few fellow bloggers, I discovered that the same author of WP Super Cache, Donncha, had already written a plugin called Cookies For Comments which essentially does the same thing that I just wrote. Because his plugin is written a lot more elegantly than my javascript plugin, I highly recommend you go and download it.

But if you plan on using Donncha’s Cookies For Comments plugin, make sure you make the following change to your .htaccess which differs from the plugin’s installation instructions.

What do these 2 lines do? Basically, these lines of code detect the presence of the secret cookie that was inserted on the users machine. If the cookie is not present, the user or spam bot is directed to WordPress’s 404 page or “page not found”. Now the problem with this default setup is that WordPress still gets called in order to process the 404 page which still requires a lot of server resources.

The difference here is that the spam bot is directed to a completely static error page which prevents WordPress from being loaded up altogether.

Problem Solved??? Not Quite

So the changes I described above fixed my comment spam problem, but after running smoothly for a few days, my server started crashing again! Looking at my server logs, I discovered the following.

mywifequitherjob.com GET /oxvumirserver33.rar
mywifequitherjob.com GET /oxvumirserver33.rar
mywifequitherjob.com GET /oxvumirserver33.rar

Basically, some rogue machine kept trying to access the same nonexistent file on my server over and over which was crashing the site. Now with normal websites, these rogue accesses would not affect the server at all. However, WordPress processes all accesses to nonexistent files and sends users to WordPress’s custom 404 or “page not found” webpage.

Did I mention WordPress is a resource hog? All it takes is a bunch of these bogus accesses and your server will still go down no matter what caching plugin you use. The secret to solving this problem is similar to my comment spam problem. Ideally, we want to take WordPress out of the equation entirely and send the rogue user to a completely static error page in order to save server resources.

What does all this code do? Basically, when a file is requested from my server which matches one of the types above, I want my server to bypass WordPress altogether. If the file does not exist, the user will be directed to a static error page called 404.html.

Once again, bypassing WordPress is the key to solving my crashing problems. Because the rogue process in my server logs is accessing a .rar file, I now redirect this malicious user to my error page which takes practically no resources at all.

Does This Solve All Of My Problems?

So I’ve been running with the above 2 changes for a few weeks now and my server has been running like a champ with no slowdowns. Unfortunately, the way WordPress is written makes it impossible to prevent all rogue accesses from crashing your server.

For example, whenever someone tries to access an article that is not found on my blog, WordPress still gets loaded. So in theory, if someone wanted to take down MyWifeQuitHerJob.com or any WordPress blog for that matter, all they would have to do would be to access nonexistent pages on the site over and over.

But in the meantime, everything seems to be stable on my end. Hopefully in the future, WordPress can be patched to address these server issues.

Here are some of the highlights for 2011

• Year over year revenue grew 39%
• Year over year profit grew 44%
• Except for just 2 months out of the year, our store had higher revenues than the previous year’s highest month.
• Our SG&A went down as a percentage of revenue due to the fact that we had no major travel expenses.
• Our average order size remained relatively flat but the pure number of orders per day went way up
• Our margins increased significantly due to the introduction of higher end products
• Website traffic increased by about 31%

As you can see from the numbers above, we had another killer year with over 44% growth! If you look at all of the years that we’ve been in existence, that is now 3 straight years of at least double digit increases!

To put things in perspective, if my wife had stuck with her six figure day job, she probably wouldn’t be receiving double digit raises every year. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I got a double digit raise at my current job! It really pays to have your own business on the side and the internet allows you to that with very little upfront risk.

Other Highlights

In addition to a pretty healthy uptake in business, we were also featured in a few major publications and our handkerchiefs were even used in a celebrity wedding though I don’t have permission to publish the name.

• Our personalized handkerchiefs were featured in the annual Martha Stewart Weddings DIY Issue
• Our tea napkins were featured in the Jan/Feb issue of Lonny Magazine
• Our cocktail napkins made the “Homes” section of the Wall Street Journal in the Dec 10th, 2011 issue!

Breaking Down The Numbers And What We Did Differently This Year

The bottom line is that more traffic equals more sales. The reason our revenues increased as much as they did was because our traffic increased by a proportional amount. And these increases were a direct result of our search engine optimization efforts, our increased advertising spend and word of mouth.

Last year, we already ranked in the top 4 spots for our targeted keywords phrases. So this year, instead of trying to get all of those keywords to the #1 spots, I started focusing on long tail keywords that were just shy of the front page. It turns out that our online store ranked for a whole bunch of keywords that were in the top 20 and required just a little push to make the front. These extra long tail keywords contributed to much of the traffic gains for the store.

In addition, the direct traffic to our store increased by 39% as word of mouth continued to spread. Seriously, we’ve been recommended by many of our existing customers as evidenced by some of the phone calls and emails we’ve received.

We Revisited Our Adwords Campaigns

The bad thing about running an Adwords account is that campaigns can quickly go stale. Since I had a lot going on in previous years, I’d been neglecting our Adwords account and many of our campaigns got out of whack. So in the first quarter of last year, I did a major overhaul of all of our advertising campaigns and got back on track.

For keywords that performed well, I maxed out our bids to the point where we were getting the most clicks possible while still making a profit. For keywords that weren’t converting well, I made the keyword phrases more specific to improve the conversion rate.

We Introduced More Product Lines

As I had mentioned in a previous post, the textile industry in China is in major flux. Fabric prices have been shooting through the roof due to increased labor costs and labor shortages so we’ve had to adjust by continually finding new backup vendors to add to the mix. Thankfully, last year things settled down a bit and my wife was able to introduce a few new products lines to our store.

We now carry products that span across the entire gamut of price points. In other words, we now carry lower end products, middle range goods and a new high end line of hankies that are imported from Germany. By increasing our high end product lines, we’ve managed to increase margins which have added to the amount of profit per conversion.

Lowlights For 2011 And What’s Ahead

Despite all of the great profit growth, unfortunately there were some lowlights for the store as well. For example, both the average number of pages per visit and the average time on site went down about 7% compared to the prior year.

Based on my last article about why my online store needs a mobile website and how to tell if you need one too, I attribute this reduction in time on site to the increased number of cell phone users that have shopped at our store and the lack of optimization for these customers on our part.

There’s no doubt about it. The number of mobile customers is going to explode this coming year and I’m currently in the process of taking appropriate action. In fact, I’ve been working on the mobile site for my online store for the past 2 weekends and it’s almost ready for prime time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most of my competitors don’t have a mobile site up yet so I’m hoping that having one will allow me to steal some business away from them. If you are curious about creating a mobile site of your own, I’ve documented everything that I had to go through in creating mine and I’ll be sure to have a series of blog posts about it.

There are many different approaches to making a site mobile and I evaluated each option thoroughly before deciding to completely gut my site and custom code most of the pages from scratch. In any case, I’ll keep you all posted once the mobile site goes live so you can check it out. Here’s to a successful 2012!

The Best Blog Posts Of 2011

Let’s face it. We are all very busy with our lives so I know that most of you don’t have the time to read every single post on this blog. So, I thought that I’d take some time and highlight some of the best articles of 2011. Enjoy!

Fun Articles

• How To Improve Your Online Store Website By Negotiating With Your Toddler
• How To Increase Sales For Your Small Business By Potty Training Your Child

Entrepreneurship

• From 0 To Quit: Why You Should Start An Online Store Today And Why Niche Shops Are So Powerful
• Why Embracing The Turtle Will Help Your Online Business Succeed
• Why Etsy Stores Are At A Disadvantage Compared To Online Stores That Own Their Domain
• The Secrets To Being Successful With Any Business You Launch
• Niche Affiliate Site Or Online Store | Which Should I Launch If I Want To Quit My Job?
• Dropshipping Vs Affiliate Marketing: Which Online Business Will Make You More Money?

Ecommerce Related

• How We Use Google Analytics To Improve Our Online Store
• How To Install An Open Source Shopping Cart And Start Your Online Store In Under 5 Minutes
• Why Ranking High In Organic Search Doesn’t Cut It Anymore When It Comes To Online Stores
• How To Get More Facebook Fans With A Facebook Reveal Tab Or Fan Gate
• 3 Usability Issues With Our Online Store Website That Were Uncovered By A Clueless Customer
• Are These Ecommerce Mistakes Driving Newbie Shoppers Away From Your Online Store?
• Ecommerce Mistakes That Make You Look Like An Amateur

Thanks again and here’s to an even more successful 2012!
Take Care,
Steve

Photo By nffcnnr

Me: Let’s go pick up everyone’s gifts at “The Big Convenient SuperStore” (Not the real name).

Wife: I will never shop at that store again.

Me: Huh? Why not? It’s so convenient and cheap. We can get all of our shopping done at one place.

Wife: I ordered there a few years ago and had a bad experience. Can’t remember the full story but I didn’t get my order on time.

Me: Is that all? Was it their fault?

Wife: No, they shipped it out the same day, but it got lost in the mail.

Me: So what’s the big deal? That’s not the store’s fault. It’s the shipping carrier’s fault. Did you get a refund?

Wife: Yes, but I don’t care. Still never shopping there again.

Me:**Rolling my eyes** Okay whatever.

Wife: What do you mean whatever!?! If you must know, the customer rep I spoke to was rude and condescending.

Me: Ahhh ok…I get it. But it’s a large company and you probably just got someone in a bad mood.

Wife: Doesn’t matter. They should train their employees better. Oh and don’t say “Whatever” to me ever again!

Me: Yes ma’am.

I learned quite a few things from this brief conversation with my wife. Lesson 1, never say “whatever” to your wife. Lesson 2, shopping is often more about the experience than the product or the price. My wife was so furious with this company that she vowed never to shop there again.

But if you look at the situation from an outside perspective, the store didn’t really do anything wrong. One, we received the package late but it wasn’t the store’s fault and two, we got a full refund. No harm was done and no money was lost. Yet this store managed to lose a customer for life just because of a bad phone conversation. Perhaps the customer rep used the word “whatever”. Who knows?

The Anatomy Of A Bad Review

Later that day, I happened to be reading through some Yelp reviews of restaurants in my area when I noticed some interesting patterns of behavior. While most of the reviews were thoughtful, written in a neutral tone and provided an unbiased review of the food, every now and then I’d come across an absolutely scathing review that had nothing to do with the food whatsoever. Here’s an example.

The food came quickly. But the servers (they switched between 2) were rather curt. I mean this one guy slammed the plates on our table and didn’t care ask who ordered what. And what shocked us the most was when my brother hadn’t even finished his appetizer, the waiter took away the plate right from under his nose… and never apologized even when we called him out. This was by far the most awful experience we’ve ever had. We’re never going back again and wouldn’t recommend you do either. This place deserves a zero but 1′s the lowest you could give out here

Almost every 1 or 2 star Yelp review had similar characteristics. The customer was not upset at the food so much as the service which resulted in the restaurant getting slammed.

The Real Reason Customer Service Matters So Much

I’ve been doing customer service for quite some time now and the situations are almost always the same. When someone calls with a complaint about your business, the actual situation is often quite trivial. Blah Blah Blah…my order didn’t arrive on time. Blah Blah Blah…you accidentally sent me the wrong thing. Blah Blah Blah, the quality of your product is not good enough.

The strange thing is that as a customer, you rarely remember the financial hit that you took when placing the order. It’s all about the disrespect or the indignity that you faced when speaking with the customer service rep.

When a company representative angers you or treats you with a lack of respect, that tends to override everything else. For example, whoever spoke to my wife must have really said something bad for her to boycott an entire store because no harm was actually done. A simple “whatever” and a rolling of my eyes inadvertently disrespected her as well, a mistake that will probably come up again in a future altercation. **Sigh**

Key Takeaways

So what have we learned? When a customer takes the time to send you an email or call you on the phone, make sure that the customer never leaves angry. Do what you must do and make things right, especially if it is your fault.

If there’s one piece of wisdom that I’ve gained from dealing with customers, it’s that their emotions are worth way more than any dollar value. If you can deal with a negative situation in a positive fashion, you can almost always turn the customer around.

After all, whenever you are representing your small business, you have to take off your operations hat and don your marketing cap. Conversations with the customer absolutely matter and even though you might lose a few dollars in the process, it’s worth every penny in terms of mind share because the effects are exponential.

“The Big Convenient SuperStore” lost more than just my wife as a customer that day. I’m no longer allowed to shop there and most likely my kids and her friends will not either. Word travels fast.

Photo By Old Shoe Lady

First of all when I go shopping on my iPad, the last thing I want to do is to have to download an app in order to shop efficiently. The iPad screen is large enough such that browsing full blown sites is comfortable for most online stores.

The only thing that would be a detriment to online shopping on an iPad would be if the site used flash, which most sites already do not.

In any case, reading this article made me wonder how many customers shopped with iPads and other mobile devices at my online store during the Black Friday weekend and how many customers actually made a purchase. After all, I hadn’t done this analysis for several months now. Was I wrong in disagreeing with this post? Do I now need a mobile version of my store? What metrics should I use to make my decision?

Last Year’s Results

Last year, only about 6% of our online visitors arrived through a mobile device using data gathered starting from Black Friday through the first week of December. Note that this period of time reflects our busiest shopping days of the year. Here was the breakdown among devices.



It’s important to note that during this period last year, we had 0 customers actually make a purchase from our store. If you recall, last year I was considering whether to create a mobile version of my website but was still hesitant to pull the trigger.

This Year’s Results During The Same Time Period

This year, the number and percentage of mobile visits increased dramatically by over 3X. In fact, this was the first year ever where the percentage of mobile visits hit double figures at over 14%. Here was the breakdown among devices.



In terms of sales, mobile visitors accounted for about 6.6% of revenues with about 90% of mobile sales coming from iPad users. Not too shabby. Clearly, the number of people who shop on their mobile devices has been growing exponentially!

Time To Pull The Trigger On A Mobile Optimized Site?

So here’s my situation. When I first designed my online store, I had dial-up visitors in mind. I chose a screen resolution of 800×600 and optimized the site to render the pages in under 10 seconds on a 56K modem!

These days, the newest Android phones pack screen sizes that are 1280×720-pixels in resolution with download speeds that are even faster than my cable modem connection at home. It’s pretty clear in my mind that mobile devices are getting better and better at browsing full blown websites even on a phone. Am I losing out on potential customers by not having a cell phone miniaturized website?

Personally, I try to avoid most mobile optimized shopping sites when browsing from my phone because they are usually poorly done. Having another site design would mean that I would have to do double testing on both full and mobile browsers with my shop.

Real Data From My Online Store

Whenever I have to make a design decision, I always look to my stats so here are some web browsing statistics for mobile users compared to the desktop/laptop users on my website.



In addition to analyzing the data above and drawing some conclusions, I also did some research about the inherent differences between mobile versus desktop traffic. Here’s what I found.

• Mobile users are more affected by proximity. For example, if someone types in “bike shop” on their desktop computer, they are probably looking to shop online. But if they type “bike shop” into their phone, they might be looking to shop at the bike store closest to them. What does this mean? Mobile searchers might be expecting to find a place within walking distance or within a short drive. If these visitors land on my shop which is only offered online, they might leave immediately.
• The search listings are usually abbreviated on a mobile device. The fact that the title tags and meta descriptions are often abridged on a mobile device means that a user has less information when they actually click on a link. As a result, bounce rates will tend to be higher in general
• People don’t like scrolling to the right. If your site is too large to fit horizontally on the screen, chances are that your customer will leave.
• People who shop on their mobile devices have more money. I didn’t know this before but it turns out that 42% of mobile internet users earn over $80,000 a year, and tend to spend more on the run.
• Mobile users are more impatient than desktop users 60% of mobile users only wait 3 seconds or less for a page to load before leaving. 74% of mobile users will only wait 5 seconds. That’s not very long.

Analyzing The Data

Ok, so back to the million dollar question. Do I need to design a mobile enabled version of my store? If you look at the metrics above, the statistics that compare desktop users vs mobile users is pretty frightening. All across the board, the bounce rate is mostly higher, the average time on site is lower and the pages per visit is lower as well.

But if you take a closer look at the data, I chose to break things down by traffic type because I wanted to specifically separate out cost per click traffic. Why? It’s because my CPC traffic is my most predictable and consistent form of traffic. If I want to do an apples to apples comparison of my data, then the CPC data is the way to go. After all, every keyword that a visitor uses to land on my site from a PPC ad is extremely targeted and brings them to a very focused landing page.

So if I look at CPC data alone, it looks like my bounce rate isn’t really an issue. For this limited data set, the bounce rate for mobile users was actually better than desktop/laptop users. However, what worries me is that both the time on site and the pages per visit metrics were drastically lower.

Given the differences between mobile and desktop traffic, I’m not quite sure that I can rationalize a 27.76% drop in pages per visit on a mobile device. In addition, a statistic missing from the table above is that my mobile conversion rates are almost 50% lower than my desktop/laptop conversion rates. Naturally I would expect mobile conversion rates to be lower but definitely not as bad as 50%!

What this tells me is that I need to take mobile a little more seriously. As of today, none of my competitors for my main targeted keyword phrases in the top 10 of search have a mobile enabled version of their site. If I start now, I can get a jump on the competition. After all, mobile traffic seems to be growing exponentially with no end in sight.

The big question in my mind is whether the browsing experience on mobile will improve to the point where it will be equivalent to a desktop computer. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not worried about iPad or tablet traffic. I’m more concerned about people who shop using their itty bitty phone screens.

At this point, it would be a mistake to sit back and hope. I’m going to start experimenting with a mobile site to see if it makes a difference with my numbers. What do you think? Do any of you have a mobile enabled version of your online store? Are your numbers better than mine? Please go to my online store at Bumblebee Linens on your cell phone and let me know what you think.

• The Business “Launcher” Package will have $1,033 in courses and guides all for only $97 (90% off for the 72 hour sale period)
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When it comes to building an online business, having the proper education will save you time, money and a whole lot of frustration. Seriously, if all of these business courses were around when I first started, I would’ve been successful much sooner and I wouldn’t have made half the mistakes that I did when starting out.

This year also marks the first year that I actually have a course of my own to throw into the mix. If you are not familiar with what I have to offer, I launched a course earlier this year called Create A Profitable Online Store which teaches you all of the ins and outs of how to run a successful ecommerce store.

While my course didn’t officially make it into the annual Only72.com sale in time, I’ve decided to give away free copies of my course to whoever purchases the Business Amplifier Package through my affiliate link.

How To Get A Free Copy Of “Create A Profitable Online Store”

If you are interested in getting a free copy of my course along with your purchase, please follow these directions very carefully.

Note that if your purchase is not registered as part of an affiliate sale in my name, you will not be eligible. In addition, this offer is only available if you purchase the Business Amplifier Package which costs $497. Those who purchase just the “launcher” package do not qualify.

Please read all of the instructions below BEFORE clicking on my Only72.com affiliate link.

• Very Important!: If you have already signed up for the Only72.com newsletter through someone else, make sure that you complete your purchase with a different email address! This step is crucial otherwise you will not be eligible for a free copy of my course. If you are not sure whether you signed up already, use a different email address just to be safe. If you have any questions, please contact me before you buy.
• Once you’ve completed the sale, send me your email address and I’ll give you a free copy of my course once your purchase has been registered in my account.

Once this 72 hour sale ends, the cost of my Create A Profitable Online Store Course will go up to $399. The course now contains well over 30 hours of video instruction and the library of material continues to expand! This is definitely not a stagnant course and you will receive a lifetime membership!

What’s Included In The Only72.com Sale This Year

As usual, the Only72.com offering is very strong and the sale is only valid for 72 hours starting at noon EST on November 28, 2011. Here are the business courses and guides that are being offered this year…

The Business Launcher Package

$97 for $1,033 in guides/courses (first level)
Danielle LaPorte — True Strengths + The Metrics of Ease ($20)
Srini Rao — BlogcastFM Premium Membership ($97)
James Clear — How to Email Important People ($97)
Lewis Howes — LinkedIN and Webinar eBook package ($94)
Sean Malarkey — Twixplode ($47)
David Risley – Master Your List ($97)
Chris Garrett — Make More Progress webinars ($97)
Sean Ogle — Location Rebel Guide to SEO ($97)
JetSetLife.tv — 6 Interview + Niche Finding Bible ($97)
Shane Ketterman — The Meaningful Business Book ($47)
Scott Young — Think Outside the Cubicle ($47)
Nick Reese — Traffic and Trust ($97)
Tyler Tervooren — Guerrilla Influence Formula ($97)

The Business Amplifier Package

$497 for $4,344 in guides/courses (second level)
Everything in the first level ($1,033)
Chris Guillebeau — Empire Building Kit ($249)
Jen Gresham — No Regrets Career Academy ($190)
Jonathan Mead — Trailblazer (self study) ($397)
David Risley — Blog Master’s Club ($347)
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Amazon Kindle Self Publishing Platform

Amazon allows authors to self publish their material through the Kindle Books platform. You can access this link by visiting amazon.com and then scrolling all the way down to the footer. In the footer section, look for the link “Self-publish with Us”, which is right under the “Make Money with Us” section.

The sign up process is not bad at all, and it doesn’t cost any money. This marketplace is now available to a few other countries outside the United States, and I only anticipate this scope to grow over time as web usage becomes more predominant and common across the globe.

The Kindle Books platform expands your ebook’s use to a whole new world of audience, those interested in reading material on the go on devices such as the Amazon Kindle. In addition, your ebook’s association with a big brand name like Amazon adds instant credibility to all associated with the ebook (i.e. the author and the website).

Because Amazon has a huge preexisting customer base in their marketplace, publishing on their platform gives your ebook instant exposure to the masses. Do not miss on this opportunity to cash in, especially if you already have an ebook.

Google Books Platform

Thou shall never be left behind is Google’s philosophy, so in late 2010 early 2011 Google entered the ebook space with the Google Edition program, which is now called Google Books. This platform allows publishers to publish their books in Google’s library.

Google is the biggest search engine with 70% market share as of 2011. In my opinion, it is foolish to ignore anything they do. So I published my ebooks on Google like a good boy, and months later saw a healthy stream of passive income come in from ebook sales.

The Google Books program is also free, but because it is new I find it very “clunky” and hard to navigate. The Amazon Kindle platform is certainly more simplistic and straightforward. I trust Google however to fix the kinks in the near future.

Concluding Thoughts

If you already have an ebook, not publishing it with Amazon and Google is foolish in my opinion. Both platforms are absolutely free, and offer huge brand name credibility association. That in itself is worth publishing your ebooks in their platforms.

As you can imagine, the incremental effort is little, but the upside is tremendous, especially if you already have an ebook out there. If you don’t, these platforms give an additional incentive to create one today. Everyone has at least one ebook in them! I firmly believe that.

Readers: If you have Ebooks, have you taken advantage of the Amazon Kindle, Google Ebooks or similar platforms? Why or Why not? If you have, how has your experience been?

Getting Punished For Being Honest

Here’s just a sampling of what I had to go through in order to install one piece of software that we use everyday for our business. Without this software, we can not sell personalized items in our store. So get this. Even though I completely reinstalled the program using my original and authentic installation disk, the software would not run because I needed to reactivate it!

With programs like Microsoft Windows, reactivation can be done completely online. However, this company required me to contact them directly to get a new activation code. Not only was this a major hassle but I also had to wait until Monday morning before I could contact support which meant that the weekend’s orders could not be processed.

So finally Monday rolls around, I get a hold of support and they inform me that my software was registered using a different address, email address and phone number than before and that they couldn’t reactivate my software unless I used the original information. But the kicker was that they also couldn’t tell me what info I had used in the past.

After arguing with the sales rep for about 20 minutes, she finally relented and gave me a new activation code. But the damage was already done. This ordeal wasted several days of my valuable time and caused numerous delays with our order fulfillment. The worst part? I paid good money for this software, so why was I getting punished and hassled just because someone else decided to copy it illegally?

More Ridiculous Copy Protection Shenanigans

Getting a new computer also meant that I was forced to upgrade my operating system to Windows 7 from Windows XP. And it just so happens that one of my software CDs only has the XP version which won’t run on Windows 7. So I contact support and they provide me with a download link to the Windows 7 version of the program. Cool! Everything is all good until I try and run the software.

The program requires the CD to be in the actual CD drive in order to run!!! Since I didn’t have the Windows 7 version of the CD, I had to contact support and have them send me another one. Another week lost and once again I was getting punished for paying for my software!

More Chaos And A Lesson Learned

In the midst of all the chaos, we also had to deal with one very annoying customer issue. The other day we received a surprise return in our mailbox. But it was not just any ordinary return. This particular lady had the gall to ask for a refund for goods that she had already used. Actually, the word “used” is a mild way of putting it. To be specific, she purchased a set of napkins and returned them to us completely filthy and then demanded a refund.

When we told her that we didn’t accept returns that are not in resell-able condition (not to mention nasty used napkins), she claimed that the napkins were this dirty when she received them. Yeah right…

Your return policy says 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. I’m not satisfied.

Since it wasn’t worth having her throw a fit and getting all upset over 35 bucks, we begrudgingly gave her a refund.

The funny thing though is that this one isolated incident made my wife and I completely reevaluate our return policy. Currently, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee but this lady pissed us off so much that we seriously considered making all sales final. No returns period.

But once we calmed down, we thought about our ordeal with the sewing software companies and realized that we were probably feeling exactly how they felt whenever someone copied their software. And here we were considering some drastic anti-return measures to prevent future customers from cheating us out of money.

After a while, we realized that canceling our return policy just because of this one crazy lady was ridiculous. But man was it tempting. As a business owner and a human being, it’s really easy to overreact especially when you feel completely ripped off and taken advantage of. But it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture and focus on your main customer base, the customers that you care about.

Is your business making important decisions based on a few vocal customers? Are you making your business worse for the majority of customers because of a few bad seeds that are abusing the system?

Now I don’t want to discount the importance of protecting your business profits, but I just hate it when a small group of people spoil things for the rest of us. Let’s try to not to let that happen with our small businesses shall we?