Amazon Flexible Payments Service is US only

So, Amazon just launched the Flexible Payments Service as a part of their webservices offering - what looks like, from the pricing and other details on the page to be something very useful except for the fact that they are only offering the service to those with a credit card issued by a US bank.

Translated for me and my company, this means that paypal and the international merchant account with CCavenue are the only two ways a business physically not located in the US but doing business there can accept payments.

I was totally hoping that this would be an international service not just limited to the US when this was first announced. Nevermind though, paypal still rocks! (Yes, I read all the negative comments about paypal, but it’s just a question of using the service wisely and not falling for phishing, etc. attempts, while also offering consumers a second option other than paypal to pay for their purchases. Paypal IS secure and protects from fraud as long as the sellers and buyers take the standard common-sense fraud-prevention measures themselves first, and leave the rest on the payment service)

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Why isn’t everyone selling on the net accepting paypal yet?

Jim Kukral says:

I don’t get why every online store doesn’t have a PayPal option? I mean, if you’re going to accept credit cards, and even checks, why not have a PayPal option?

I couldn’t agree more. from an e-retailer’s point of view, especially if you are selling cheaper goods, you are making a huge mistake if you are not accepting payments via paypal.

There is a reason paypal has as many as a hundred million users worldwide - it’s probably one of the first media of online transactions for internet users (they are after all, the primary method for paying on ebay!).

Paypal is also VERY easy to use. Sometimes I’m just too lazy to take out the credit card and type in the credit card number, expiry date and CVV2 number, along with my name, address and telephone number to pay for something on the internet. It’s just easier to type in the paypal username and password, press next and finish the transaction.

Jim writes that he uses Paypal as “Fun money” to make impulse purchases, and buy stuff he’d rather not use his credit card for.

If your e-retail website isn’t a huge brand yet, it makes a lot of sense to accept payments via paypal. A buyer doesn’t have to think 10 times before buying from you. if a store doesn’t deliver, it’s super easy for buyers to lodge a complaint with paypal, and paypal will make sure that fraud isn’t happening on it’s platform - a lot of buyers know that.

If you aren’t accepting paypal on your web-shop, I have a two words of advice for you - ACCEPT PAYPAL!

———-

oh, and talking about paypal, I recently filled out a survey for CJ, one of the questions there was if publishers would like CJ to make payments via paypal. - if they do that, that’d be super-awesome.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

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Customer Support 2.1 - ClixConnect.com

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

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eBay on TV for Time Warner Cable customers

More and more web-apps are getting on the television screen. The latest is e-Bay, at least for time warner cable’s subscribers.

eBay on TV

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Chitika introduces “Linx” - in-content contextual text ads

Chitika - A favourite CPC product ad platform of many bloggers has just introduced “linx”, a new system similar to Amazon’s Context Links that will automatically identify key products/keywords mentioned in the content on a website or blog and link those keywords to product comparison listings from the chitika network (which, if I remember correctly, runs on top of the shopping.com API)

As can be seen in the image, chitika’s javascript code will automatically recognize product names and keywords from a blog’s content and double-underline them, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over any of these links, they see the chitika widget pop up with links - monetized for the blogger - to products on various online stores via chitika’s network.

This new system is currently in closed beta and available only to select chitika publishers by invitation.

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Linkshare testing widget-ads

The Internet’s first big affiliate network - Linkshare, is also one of the first affiliate networks to be able to adapt itself to the new internet.

Linkshare is currently beta testing an ad network that they will be opening up to bloggers and product review sites called Linkshare Showcase. This network will focus on specific products from leading merchants and allow publishers to highly customize the ads with features and reviews. Publishers will be able to choose which products they want to recommend to their users from participating merchants

Reports Salvo.ws

Linkshare showcase is what will probably be a linkshare sub-network targeted towards bloggers and other web2.0 ish content heavy websites that will offer:

• One simple interface for choosing the products you want.
• One small piece of Javascript to copy and paste onto your site.
• LinkShare Showcase is optimized for peak performance.
• No waiting for your money. Fast payments, from the first $1.

There are, of course, other companies that offer such advertising networks, linkshare, however, is the first major affiliate network to talk about offering widget-merchandizing besides shareasale, which started offering widget ads earlier this month

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Why Amazon.com is E-commerce 2.1…

It’s the simple innovations that have made Amazon the e-commerce leader, and ensure that amazon will hold on to it’s position as a leader for many years to come.

The latest of such simple innovations: A subscription service that will automatically ship to you a new toothpaste in June (and other such stuff) as soon as the toothpaste you purchased for May is used up.

In a “Why-Didn’t-Everyone-Think-of-This-Before” move, Amazon.com has recently begun to offer a subscription service for frequently purchased drugstore-type items like one’s preferred shaving cream, face wash or soap. It also offers an incentive to try the service, providing a discount on the product as a reward for subscribing. It’s a great concept, catering to a convenience-obsessed consumer who increasingly relies on the web for all of his or her shopping needs. The service itself is straightforward and flexible, allowing the consumer to choose the duration of the subscription both when making the initial purchase and during check-out.

Read more about amazon’s latest simple innovation on e-commerce cache

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Paypal is now officially a bank - in Europe.

Two months after eBay set up a new entity in Luxembourg, its PayPal subsidiary was granted a banking license for the European Union by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) in Luxembourg.

Reports AuctionBytes.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg have awarded PayPal a banking licence, and the ebay company will be moving their headquarters over to Luxembourg early next month.

This is big news, PayPal have maintained from the start that they are not a bank, but a mere payment facilitator, that doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.

Paypal has been operating in Europe for years without requiring to be recognized as a bank, neither were there any news recently that paypal would need to become a bank if they are to operate in europe.

PayPal said on Tuesday that the new banking license would allow it to continue its European expansion by offering its services to more online merchants across Europe.

It would be interesting to watch PayPal in the coming months. Who knows, they might even apply for bank status in the US and other parts of the e-commerce enabled world - Google checkout has suddenly become a major player out of nowhere in a market where paypal was a near monopoly, looks like this is one smart move to stay competitive, We should see some major slashes in paypal fees and some google checkout-like offers to attract merchants to use paypal soon!.

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