payment

Personalized Payment Page: PayPal.Me

PayPal has been widely used by freelancers and other businesses to send and receive money. Over years many such payment gateways have emerged and still PayPal is a prominent tool for most people.

Personalized Payment Page
Now you can set up a personal page(Payment Profile Page) to receive money from your clients. Visit PayPal.Me and create a username and upload a profile picture, so that your clients know who they are sending money to. Make sure the username(vanity URL) reflects your business(my personal view) For example: My username is technotip which reflects my business name. If you’ve built or trying to build personal branding, then go with your name(and sure name, maybe) Ex: book authors.

Payment: One click payment
Once you create your payment page, you can append the amount along with the URL of your page and send it to your client. For Example: My page is at PayPal.Me/Technotip If I want to charge my client with $25, I would append it with the URL like this PayPal.Me/Technotip/25 and send it to him/her. Client can click the link and pay using his/her credit card or debit card or his/her PayPal account.

Why Personalized Page?
Some times we might type wrong email address / PayPal id and send money – this leads to days of back and forth email exchange to get the money back. I’ve an email ID with .org extension but sometimes(even after explicitly specifying it to clients) clients send money to .com extension and think I got the money. We need to bug PayPal support team to get back the money and channel it in right direction. With Personalized Payment Pages I can simply send the link and they can pay me in few seconds without any hassle.

Amemeber: All In One Solution For All Your Online Selling

I have seen many plugins that cost from a range of $95 to $800 that are used for creating membership sites, or some sort of sites that allow accepting payments.

Every other software script is built to solve any one particular problem. That is good, if someone has only one problem to solve and has a lot of money to spend!

But what if you want to create a membership site and also sell your ebook on the same site. And you have multiple income streems and you don’t want to depend on a third party website service to accept payment for you and then send it to your paypal a/c.

Amember is the solution. It doesn’t cost you a whole lot,.. its a great script which costs ( ~~$199.95~~ ) $179.95 – for single domain license. You will also get a license key for installing this script on your local machine(local host — wamp, mamp, xamp ).

There are various plugin’s which support integration of amember with WordPress, vBulletine, phpList etc. Below is a complete list.

aMember Pro ($179.95 for lifetime license with 6 months of free updates)
WordPress plugin (Free lifetime subscription)
“One-Time download” plugin ($30.00 for 6 months)
4Images plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
@Mail integration ($60.00 for 6 months)
CopperMine plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Dokeos plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
DruPal plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Expression Engine plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
FusionBB ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
I-Rater plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Incremental content plugin ($60.00 for lifetime subscription)
Invision Board Plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Joomla plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
ListMail plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
MamboServer plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
OpenRealty plugin ($70.00 for 6 months)
OsCommerce ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
PerlDesk plugin ($20.00 for lifetime subscription)
Phorum plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
PhotoPost integration ($40.00 for 6 months)
SMF plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Serendipity plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
Vanilla Integration ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
WowBB plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
XOOPS plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
e107 CMS plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
phpBB3 plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
phpFox plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
phpList Integration ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
phpNuke Plugin ($40.00 for 6 months) details
phpWebSite plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
punBB plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
vBulletin3 plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Facebook integration gate (new)

Some of these plugin’s cost $30 or $40 and the license in for lifetime. But WordPress integration plugin is free and its licensing is also for lifetime.

If you ever decide to sell something online make sure you check out amember, you will surly love it and save a lot of money in the long run of your business. See it as a good investment.

I wanted to explained how to install the script, but I advice you not to try this yourself. If you run into problem it will be difficult to analyse the root cause for the problem and solving it may take a lot of your valuable time. The good news is, you need not spend in hiring a professional to install it for you. In fact, once you purchase amember software you will get a one time free installation service.

Some of the things to know:
1. Security: Amember is a secure software for accepting money online. But I still recommend not to use this to accept credit card payments if you are on a shared hosting. If you are serious about your business then go for a dedicated server.
2. Troubleshooting: When you run into trouble with your script, contact amember support team directly. I had a minor issuse with my php.ini and Alex from amember sorted out the problem very quickly. And with all those email exchanges I had with the staff, I feel that their support staff is technically very strong.

Amember For Membership Sites:
Recently I setup a membership site for one of my clients and used amember and wordpress alone to create a very good, simple to navigate and maintain membership site.

You can run membership sites with recurring payments and also sites where you have multiple levels of memberships like: Silver, Gold, Platinum membership etc.

Basically I had installed WordPress two times. One in the root and the other in a directory called members. The root WordPress is like anyother WordPress powered blog. Its intended to be a public blog. Another WordPress installation was protected using amember and the access was allowed only to registered members. Its so simple and easy with amember.

Affiliate System To Boost Your Sales/Bussiness:
Amember also has a built-in affiliate system, which doesn’t seem to be as powerful as the dedicated affiliate system software out there. But it does its main job properly, that is, tracking the incoming affiliate traffic, setting the cookie and assigning the commission. What I would love to see is a graphical stats(pie chart, bar chart in the stats for visual representation) and some option to convert any link on the website into a affiliate code.
For example, people should be allowed to link to news letter page instead of sales letter page using their affiliate code. There are manual ways to do that of course, but a automated tool would help.
What I like the most about amember affiliate system is, we can assign affiliate code automatically to everyone who is signed up as a member(we can enable or disable this option easily in the admin area).

On the administrator side of affiliate system, it does a lot of great job. It has option to set first month affiliate payment percentage and percentage for rest of the month etc – we can even set subsequent months payment to null. This model is very helpful where members pay monthly fees and affiliate get commission for each of the payment their referrals make in the subsequent months.

Members area of amember:
In members area, members will have the option to manage their news letter subscription, there is a news letter archieve page, and affiliate statistics(that is the number of clicks, conversion etc).

With all these nice experience with amember, at one place I was stuck-up and felt like a stupid myself! That is, when I forgot my admin panel password and there was no way to recover it 🙁
I think amember purposefully have not included a option for password recovery for admin panel(other members who have signed up for your service have option for password recovery. Its only in the login page of admin panel that doesn’t have a password recovery option.)

That’s just a lesson for rest of you, don’t forget your admin panel password – you will be in trouble!

Things I like about amember:
1. Costs less.
2. It has a super easy DB backup system.
3. Integrates with a lot of open source scripts.
4. Has a lot of payment options. Including the popular PayPal.
5. Sophisticated mailing system(You can integrate it with aweber using plugin. But it works just fine even without aweber.)
6. Simple affiliate system.
7. Free installation(very important!)
8. Report import/export option.
9. DB repair option.
10. Recurring billing.
11. Good Support.
12. Active forum.
13. Good Documentation about all the features and options.
14. Members area user interface is very simple, easy to understand and get use to.
15. 30 days free trial.(very important)

What I don’t like and want to be improved:
1. Not so pleasing user interface in admin side.
2. Would like to have visual representation of stats in affiliate system.

Server Requirement:
PHP 4.3.0 or later
MySQL 3.22 or later
Unix/Linux hosting

Before you purchase any membership software or any other software for selling your products, go ahead and download the free trial of amember and try it. Remember, you get a 30 days free trial of amember.

Update: Alex informed me that, there is a nice tool to recover admin password. Here is the link aMember CP login/password.
It can be reset using this tool: FixAdmin

Assign Password to a Directory via cpanel

It is said that, no data online is safe. Someone can enter and see/use your online data. But we can always try our best to stay safe. Some of the things that we need to ensure is, a secure software (Ex:- like WordPress as a CSM) and a strong password. But at the end, backup of our website and database are the only hope for recovering the data(if some unfortunate things happen).

After receiving 3 to 4 emails with the same question, I thought of writing it on the blog. So here is the procedure for password protecting the directory through cpanel.

Log into your hosting account cpanel. Navigate to “Security” section. Click on the “Password Protect Directories” link.

Next a popup will appear, select the web root and click GO.

Select the directory that you want to password protect. This may be some what a puzzle! for first time user.

If you want to password protect a directory inside another directory, then click on the folder icon beside the link of main directory (see above image for better visualization).
Password-username-protect

Once you navigate to the directory that you want to password protect, click on the directory name and enter a name (any name), usename and password.

You can select and delete any of the older users by selecting the username and clicking on the Delete User button.

Why Password Protect ?
Password protect those folders which you want to secure.
For Example:- If you have a payment gateway, where you process your customers credit cards, then do not take chance or do not compromise with the security aspects. Its not your security, its your customers security, which is of prime importance!

Password protecting such sensitive directories is crucial. Customers would never feel comfortable to be your guest, if you are not serious about their security!

Get 20$ FREE Advertising credit of Bidvertiser, using paypal a/c

We could see that, many people use their paypal account for the internet transaction, than their Credit Cards. And many people contacted us about this issue, after reading this “Best Pay Per Click Network- Bidding System” article.
So we thought of writing about it, for more clarification….

We could see that, many people use their PayPal account for the internet transaction, than their Credit Cards. And many people contacted us about this issue, after reading this “Best Pay Per Click Network- Bidding System” article.

So we thought of writing about it, for more clarification….

There is an option to use PayPal. (In case you use PayPal, there is a minimum deposit of 20 USD in order to claim the 20 USD free bonus).
bidvertiser-add-fund
To fund your account, signup as Bidvertiser Advertiser. Goto “Advertisers Center” tab and hit the “Manage funds”—>”Add funds” tabs. Then select the amount that you want to transfer from your PayPal account. You can fund 20$ or 50$ or 100$ or 150$ or 200$ or 300$, the choice is left on your budget.

Select the amount and then click on “Add Fund” button. Then you will be taken to secure payment server of Bidvertiser, there you click on the ” prefer PayPal” link in the top of that page. Then you will be taken to PayPal billing page or you can login to your paypal account(see below screen shots) to fund your Bidvertiser account.
bidvertiser-paypal-funding

Once you start advertising and your 20$ + 20$(Free) gets finished, then you can just pause all your ads.
bidvertiser-paypal-login
Do not miss this opportunity to advertiser with Bidvertiser, with FREE 20$. You can actually get lot of benefit from Bidvertiser Advertising, as you only pay when somebody clicks on your ad. No CPM costs will affect your money and you can display your ads on thousands of websites. Signup as Bidvertiser Advertiser and get one of the best Adverting deals.