author: Kathy

This refers to the process of obtaining the money from your customer and transferring it into your account.

Payment processing can be online or offline.

Offline payment processing is recommended for sites with minimal volume of transactions. With offline payment processing, you will be handling your payments manually: depositing a cheque or money-order sent by the client, or manually processing credit card transitions via your Point of Sales (POS) terminal.

Online payment processing is recommended for sites with high volume of transactions. With online payment processing, payment will be taken automatically via an online payment gateway and a merchant account for higher efficiency. With automation, they do not have to manually process or handle transaction payments. When a customer submits their credit card information on your website, the information is then transferred to the payment gateway. The information is then validated and funds transferred directly into your merchant account.

Questions you might have:

1. What are merchant accounts? Do I need one?
2. What is a payment gateway? Do I need it?

You do not need a merchant account to do business online. But if you are planning to accept credit card payments on your online store, you will need an online merchant account. You can setup an online merchant account through a Merchant Service Provider (MSP) or through your local bank.

A payment gateway is a service provider that automates the payment transaction between your customer and you. They act as the bridge between your online store and your bank.

To understand how it works (click to enlarge image):

You will need an online merchant account if you would like your customers to be able to pay you in a real-time environment (ie. online) with their credit cards.

If you do not want to accept orders via credit card or you want to accept credit cards but you will be manually processing the payment transactions offline, then you will not need a payment gateway nor an online merchant account.

Next, we’ll examine a few of the shopping carts support on our Doteasy hosting services: PayPal Cart, Zen Cart and Doteasy Commerce.

author: Kathy

So now comes the big question – which shopping cart should you use?

As we have mentioned in our Shopping Cart section, whichever cart you choose depends on how well it fits your needs, your budget and your experience with scripts and databases.

PayPal Shopping Cart

Free shopping cart software by PayPal. With a PayPal Cart, you don’t need a SSL certificate or scripting knowledge. PayPal provides with a store HTML link that basically directs your customers to your store on the PayPal server. All SSL and scripting functionality as well as payment processing is handled by PayPal.

Downsides of the PayPal cart include its limited features and customization capability. For example, PayPal's standard cart does not support inventory management, or direct links to USPS or UPS shipping methods.

PayPal is good for small stores that have minimal products and minimal monthly transactions.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a free, open-source shopping cart. By saying that, the Zen Cart script is free to use and its source codes are open for anyone to modify or customize. This allows for the improvements and further developments of the software with other programmers and designers. Unfortunately, free and open-source also means there are chances of being hacked.

Zen Cart is acclaimed for being user-friendly, with it’s easily installation and extensive FAQ and help via forums.Because you will need to upload the scripts onto your server, you will need to make sure your hosting plan offers the required scripting and database support (PHP and MySQL). You will also need a SSL certificate, a payment gateway service, and a merchant account.

For information, including the installation guide, can be found here.

Compared with the PayPal Cart, with the Zen Cart, you will be getting more features and functionality (either built-in or through add-ons that you have to install separately). But, you will need a powerful hosting package that offers scripting and database support and you will need to install the scripts.

Doteasy Commerce

While many shopping carts seem to be a little too technical for the average non-technical user, the Doteasy Commerce is easy to use. We do all the installation and configuration for you.

The Doteasy Commerce has the features that you’ll see in the open-source carts, but because it is focused on sales and marketing, you will find more marketing features, such as product recommendation, promotional codes and discounts, email newsletters and product update communication, search-engine friendly meta data and tags, etc.

The Doteasy Commerce is not an open-source shopping cart. In fact, your source codes are compiled. This acts as an extra security feature. Say, if someone taps onto your store will ill intentions, they will not be able to tamper with your shopping cart’s codes. You do, however, have access to your storefront files – allowing for advanced storefront customization.

Doteasy Commerce allows you to setup real-time shipping inquiries for UPS, FedEx, USPS and Canada Post. Supported payment gateways include Authorize.net, 2Checkout, HSBC, Moneris, and more. Of course, if you want to use the PayPal gateway, you don’t need to worry about purchasing a SSL certificate.

So, considering the same basic requirements (advanced hosting plan, SSL certificate, payment gateway and merchant account) and the same basic functionality, why choose the Doteasy Commerce and not a free open-source shopping cart?

• Many of the free open-source shopping carts are often geared towards a business owner who is technically proficient. Because the average user may not be tech-savvy, they might not have implemented their shopping cart correctly. The shopping cart is your interface between you and your customers. You want to make sure they see the professional side of you and your business, and a poorly implemented cart will not do justice.
• Most free carts rely on support from other users via forums. Unfortunately, uptime means sales generated, downtime means sales lost. Support is an important issue and with a pay-shopping cart, you’re guaranteed support

More information on the Doteasy Commerce, including features, demo, and how to order.

Author: Kevin

What goes on behind the scenes at Doteasy? Well, we've been busy with the preparation work for the SmartMail upgrades.

There's actually a lot that needs to be done for the SmartMail upgrades on both the hardware and on the software. Our technicians need to do countless hours of preparation work before an upgrade can take place.

First, hardware needs to be tested to see which type would perform the best with the SmartMail software. This testing phase was not a easy stroll in the park. It actually takes a lot of time to test every aspect of the hardware with the software to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

Adding new servers to a data center is no easy task. A lot of preparation work needs to be done before we can hook all the new servers up. We need to figure out where we can place the new servers, and also upgrade our cooling system and our electrical circuits to accomodate the new servers. Just to give you an idea on how big this project is, we have already spent several hundred thousands dollars on hardware and data center upgrades alone!

Secondly, in addition to testing the performance of the hardware, we also need to test the performance of the software. Before we can release the SmartMail system, we had to make sure there are no bugs or any other “surprises”. Documentation also had to be prepared so that you guys can learn more about the new SmartMail system and get the most out of it. All this work needs to be done before any upgrades can take place. As you can see, these past few weeks have been quite hectic. Hopefully, our efforts will not go to waste and everyone will be able to enjoy the new SmartMail system.

Author: Kathy

SPF is a measure to help stop email spoofing. SPF gives domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren't.

Think MX records. Your domain MX records states which mailserver handles your incoming emails. This allows other mailservers to know where to send any email address to your domain.

Your domain SPF record is like a reversed MX record. It states which mail servers send emails for your domain name.

How does SPF work?

When an email is sent out, the email message has an envelope, a header, and the body (which contains the actual text of the email and any attachments).

There are three identities on the envelope:
1. "HELO" identity, which names the mailserver (MTA) that is sending the message
2. "MAIL FROM" identity, which is the sending email address (also the email address where error message will be sent if the mail delivery should fail).
3. "RCPT TO" identity, which is the message's recipient address.

These identities are used during the transport of the message and are generally discarded upon delivery. That is why you only see the message header and message body when you receive an email.

SPF checks the HELO and MAIL FROM identities on the envelope. It compares the sending mail server's IP address to the list of IP addresses that are authorized to send email for that domain. The list of authorized email-sending IP addresses is stored in the domain's SPF record, which is included in the domain's DNS records.

In other words, if the message comes from an unknown server, or a mailserver that is not listed in the SPF record, it can be considered as fake, and the receiving mail server will handle the "fake" according to its settings.

How does this affect me?

Say, someone is trying to send you an email and upon checking, our mailservers finds that the email comes from an unknown server, the email may be rejected. This means that the email will not be delivered into your inbox. Suspecting that there might be problems with the receiving-aspect of your email account, you send us an "I am not receiving emails" report.

Just because an email that was allegedly sent is not received, it doesn't mean that your email account is broken. We need to understand that there are many reasons why an email delivery is unsuccessful.

1. The sending mailserver was experiencing problems and could not send out the email.
2. The email did not pass our spam and virus checks.
3. The email did not pass our SPF-checks.

Yes, our Doteasy mailservers conduct SPF-checks for incoming emails.

When you report the problem to us, we will ask our email administrators to do a check to confirm if the email was rejected due to SPF-Fail. If that is the case, you will then need to notify the sender. The sender can then notify their email service provider and/or domain registrar to rectify the problem (ie. update their SPF records).

Author: Kathy

Back in September we wrote an article on how to get your site listed on the search engines, and we advised that you submit your website URL to the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Live Search. So now that's done, you might be wonder what else can you do to make sure your website URL rank well, ie. make it more 'searchable'.

It is only logical to assume that to be 'searchable', you need:

• people searching for it
• a website that matches the search inquiries

Well, since we can't control what people search for, that means the only thing that's left to do is make sure your site matches as best as possible to potential search inquiries:

1. What is your website about? What is the purpose of your website?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. If people are to search for your website, what search words would they most likely use?
4. Is your website content relevent to the purpose, target audience and keywords you've identified?

And who determines the relevancy of website content? Well, the search engines - Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Live Search, etc. After all, their goal should be to keep their users happy by giving them the information they are looking for.

You've probably heard of the term SEO, Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of improving traffic to a website from search engines via search results. Search engines uses complex algorithms to determine what information is fed to the search user and in what order. So, it's safe to say that as long as you satisfy these complex algorithms, your website URL will appear higher on that search result list. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo! Search and Microsoft's Live Search do not disclose the algorithms they use.

But they do offer tips, hints, suggestions and guidelines that you can follow.

From Google Webmaster Help Center:

• Webmaster Guidelines
• Creating a Google-Friendly Site?

From Yahoo! Search:

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Improve Ranking
• Indexing