One product/options

Evoir · 04-18-2002, 12:19 AM

Hello everyone,

I have a client who wants to sell a book on her FQ hosted site. Lets say she sells 1,000 copies of her book in a year. What would you recommend for this type of credit card need? I *think* she wants to use something like KAGI or something, right? Or is KAGI for larger volumes of sales?

She'd like to be able to accept credit cards, does not have a commercial account at a bank... There's got to be a service to be able to accept credit cards for an individual, right?

The only ways I can think about it is KAGI and paypal (and I have been reading the paypal thread in the server forum

)

What other options does an individual who wants to sell an item or two off their website and wants to accepts credit cards?

I appreciate your help.

Evoir · 04-18-2002, 12:41 AM

nevermind. I found this .

*Rich* · 04-18-2002, 08:52 AM

For this quantity of sales, your client should definitely get her own merchant account.

Evoir · 04-18-2002, 01:25 PM

Rich,

I am confused. It seems like a small amount of sales to me. In fact, I think I am estimating high, but who knows?

How much (generally) does it cost to get a merchant account? What are the costs of setting up a relatively small shop like this?

(I am hoping to use a simple order form. Can you point me in the right direction?

*Rich* · 04-18-2002, 02:29 PM

I usually recommend that "small" merchants seriously consider a merchant account at about 100 orders per month or at about $1000 per month volume, whichever comes first.

In additional to the possible financial benefits, you gain a lot more control over your sales process and how the transactions are handled.

For this example, although you didn't mention the price for the e-book, let's assume the hypothetical case of $27which is about the minimum for a good e-book. We'll also assume 3rd party processing fees of 5% + .5 per trans and merchant account fees of 3.5% +.35 per trans (although you should be able to do better than this):

1,000 x $27 = $27,000 per year
3rd party costs: $1,850
merchant acct: $1,295

This is a savings of $555 per year. When you add in the back-end sales, etc. the savings just get better. Plus, YOU have the decision of which transactions to approve or not instead of relying on a third party.

Send me an email offlist to rich@rsmarketing.com and I'll give you my rates and info about how you can use the merchant account with simple html forms.

Evoir · 04-18-2002, 02:35 PM

It is a physical book. Price is 14.95 plus shipping.

inason · 04-18-2002, 03:26 PM

If the client does a very small volume with credit cards I usually recommend a local bank or 3rd party services like PayPal even though the rates maybe higher the banks usually do not charge a minimum monthly fee and sometimes a very small statement fee and 3rd party services really do not have any monthly fees other then rates and transaction fees.

*Stephen* · 04-18-2002, 04:19 PM

how does the author intend to make a profit? really.

as an author myself i decided that there was no way i could make any money selling my own book directly from my site. once you deduct the cost of the book (for printing) and then the cost of distribution (about $2 for postage) you are left with pennies, not multiple $ profit per sale as implied in Rich's analysis. in the end i said forget it. let Amazon.com handle it. on the other hand, i was never able to get Amazon.com to correctly categorize the thing, or put it into their search engine--so no one can find it

i think it's worth plugging a book with a dedicated web site. but unless you have a huge amount of traffic the number of sales isn't likely to be high. given the logistics of setting up for credit card transactions (i've done it), i think that unless you are absolutely sure that 100 sales a month is likely, i would say forget the merchant account and go with something simpler to begin with.

Stephen

and now for the plug...

a.k.a. Leonard Crane
author of Ninth Day of Creation
www.ninthday.com

*Rich* · 04-18-2002, 07:47 PM

Quote:

once you deduct the cost of the book (for printing) and then the cost of distribution (about $2 for postage) you are left with pennies, not multiple $ profit per sale as implied in Rich's analysis

I would agree. That's why I made the statement that about $27 is the minimum price for an e-book to realize a good profit form its sale. With an e-book, you don't have any publishing or distribution costs, so the profit margin is higher. For a printed book, the selling price would need to be higher.

Evoir · 04-18-2002, 09:20 PM

I don't know what her costs are.I did ask her some questions, and I think we'll go with Kagi. Kagi takes a 2.50 minumum, and she is fine with that loss. She earns less from Amazon per sale, that's for sure. She has 900 books that she'd like to sell.

I guess there is nothing special in terms of a secure certificate or any special web forms. Does kagi take care of all that kind of stuff?