https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/images/developer/auth_multiplecap…

I’ve spent the last 3 hours googling how to take a customer’s credit card number and charge it later. This is useful for products that are out of stock or if the customer wants to delay shipment. Nothing I found made any sense since I’m not an API programmer.

What’s more, nothing came up when I googled the words “Keep a Credit Card Number on file And Charge Later.” Turns out, this is because paypal and the people who blog about this sort of issue call it by the official merchant terminology: “authorization and capture.”

Now, if you Google “authorization and capture,” you’ll get a lot of pages. But you won’t be able to understand any of them. So I simplified it for you here.

Every paypal button comes with embeddable code. Whether you’re embedding a buy now button, a add to cart button, or even a subscription button, all you have to do is add one more parameter to the code. Here it is:

paymentaction=”authorization”

When you do, instead of making a transaction add to your paypal balance, paypal holds the money until you select “capture” from your paypal history list. If you have any questions, contact us at http://sparkah.com/website.php

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

If you’ve got fantastic products that will fly off of your shelves but don’t know how to setup a ecommerce website, this is your lucky day.

There aren’t many head to head comparisons between the three major ways you can create an online store. Did I mention, there are three major ways to create an online store?

eCommerce Shopping Carts / Features	ZenCart and OsCommerce	Paypal
Total Flexibility of Design Layout		Yes
Requirement for Design Modification	HTML; PHP	HTML
Hosting	Owner	Paypal
Additional Hosting Cost	Yes
Security	Owner Responsible	Paypal
Additional Security Cert Cost	Yes
Ideal for SKU Numbers	100+	1-150
Support and Maintenance	Experienced PHP	User / Owner / HTML
Auto Product Tagging and Grouping	Yes	(CMS required or simple HTML work)
Product and Pricing Change Authorization	Admin	Paypal Account Owner
Main Usability Differences	Both ZenCart and OsCommerce allows product tagging, simple price changes, inventory depreciation, and more features t available in paypal. However, for less than 100 items, and if quickbooks is used, none of these features are necessary. Also, these cart systems requires that all content and web design need to be inside of the system. Paypal does’t swallow the website	Paypal is the simplest and most secure shopping cart management system. Recently, they even added universal button changes where one control panel detail can be changed and instances of that “buy w” or “add to cart” button will be automatically modified. With Paypal, the ongoing cost of a 3rd party security certificate is unnecessary as all transactions happen on Paypals HTTPS servers. The biggest difference is that both ZenCart and OsCommerce require all changes including price and design to be done within their software. Paypal does t. Paypal works with any simple html page.

If you have any questions or need help building out your online store and driving traffic to you, feel free to contact me at http://twitter.com/journik or 310 598 1606 – Bob Wan Qi Kim, CEO Sparkah.com Development and Marketing

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

If you’ve got fantastic products that will fly off of your shelves but don’t know how to setup a ecommerce website, this is your lucky day.

There aren’t many head to head comparisons between the three major ways you can create an online store. Did I mention, there are three major ways to create an online store?

eCommerce Shopping Carts / Features	ZenCart and OsCommerce	Paypal
Total Flexibility of Design Layout		Yes
Requirement for Design Modification	HTML; PHP	HTML
Hosting	Owner	Paypal
Additional Hosting Cost	Yes
Security	Owner Responsible	Paypal
Additional Security Cert Cost	Yes
Ideal for SKU Numbers	100+	1-150
Support and Maintenance	Experienced PHP	User / Owner / HTML
Auto Product Tagging and Grouping	Yes	(CMS required or simple HTML work)
Product and Pricing Change Authorization	Admin	Paypal Account Owner
Main Usability Differences	Both ZenCart and OsCommerce allows product tagging, simple price changes, inventory depreciation, and more features t available in paypal. However, for less than 100 items, and if quickbooks is used, ne of these features are necessary. Also, these cart systems requires that all content and web design need to be inside of the system. Paypal does t swallow the website	Paypal is the simplest and most secure shopping cart management system. Recently, they even added universal button changes where one control panel detail can be changed and instances of that “buy w” or “add to cart” button will be automatically modified. With Paypal, the ongoing cost of a 3rd party security certificate is unnecessary as all transactions happen on Paypals HTTPS servers. The biggest difference is that both ZenCart and OsCommerce require all changes including price and design to be done within their software. Paypal does t. Paypal works with any simple html page.

If you have any questions or need help building out your online store and driving traffic to you, feel free to contact me at http://twitter.com/journik or 310 598 1606 – Bob Wan Qi Kim

Posted via email from Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Closet Revolutionary

I FINALLY figured it out. No. It is NOT intuitive. And no. The other pdf and html pages Google pulls up won’t help. They are out-dated since Paypal’s last crazy redesign.

All I wanted to do is put all my customers on map so that I could strategize where to open a retail store, concentrate meet-ups, and even put more funding into advertising. But paypal would not spit out a csv file for excel that had my buyers’ addresses.

I would take that excel file, delete all the names, and dump only the addresses into a geolocation / gps conversion app that would convert the actual addresses into map data in KML, KMZ, or GeoRSS file format.

After days of research, I decided to just click all the links I could find. It worked.

This is how you export your Paypal Buyers’ Address into a csv file (WHEW!):

The results of my mapping are next… stay tuned! To get me involved in your marketing strategy and execution to hundreds of thousands of people world wide, contact me @journik http://sparkah.com

Posted via web from journik’s posterous – a grade A shouldery. (social media agencies / marketing wise)

OK, so I just got done ranting and shit talking Paypal for not letting me export my buyer’s addresses.

This is no small FAIL. Once you can visualize your data in a geomapped perspective, new and startling revelations inspire your marketing genius. You start seeing epiphanies left and right. But since Paypal wouldn’t let me ex-frikkin-port my address data, I took 3 hours to manually geo map my last few dozen clients. And it was worth it.

This is what I found:

If you want to team up with me in marketing your brand, reaching your customers, and standing in like at the Soho Starbucks, contact my Team. We are a small but furiously ingenious web marketing firm.

Posted via web from journik’s posterous – a grade A shouldery. (social media agencies / marketing wise)

You gotta be kidding me. Is there no way to run a geolocation report of all the customers who’ve bought from my website?

I spent one hour waiting for paypal to generate a online report of all my sales for the last few years. It would be well worth it I thought. Afterall, with thousands of sales, I would be able to create a powerfully telling geovisualization of my customer base. Using this map of customer concentration, I could launch any or all of the following:

1. meet-ups

2. seminars

3. retail sales locations

4. shipping centers

5. branch offices…

You can see how any of the above five initiatives based on sales data of existing customers would launch me into the next phase of my business growth. I imagined color coding my geopoint from red to grey with red being the hottest latest buyer and grey being the oldest buyer from January of ’08. I visualized a world wide map of the family of my customers with larger geopoints corresponding to larger orders. 

I salivated at the idea that I could launch meetups where larger volumes of sales were coming from and retail stores where higher sales tickets were being generated. 

But no. When I exported my paypal history, it came with no addresses. Do you know a way to get my buyers addresses out of paypal?

Posted via web from journik’s posterous – a grade A shouldery. (social media agencies / marketing wise)