Kevin Muldoon

What do you think of eBay’s policy on Google Checkout

February 25, 2008 in Personal with 2 Comments

We were listing some of our shop items for sale today on eBay when I noticed what I would personally call a very unfair policy from eBay towards Google and it’s checkout users.

I listed the item for sale and put PayPal as the only payment option but since we accept Google Checkout in our shop I added this at the bottom of the sales description

Whilst PayPal is preferred we can also accept Google Checkout. Please contact us if you are interested in paying using an alternative payment method

It turns out that if you enter the term ‘Google Checkout’ anywhere in the auction you will get this message

You cannot submit your listing due to the following problems

Attention Sellers!

It appears you are offering Google Checkout as a payment method which is not permitted in the eBay marketplace. Buyers have a wide variety of choices when deciding how to pay sellers. Most payment methods offer a high degree of safety and convenience, however, a few simply are not appropriate for the eBay marketplace. Based on safety concerns and input from the Community, eBay established an Accepted Payments Policy that clarifies eBay’s position on payment methods.

Please revise your listing by removing the non-permitted payment method.

Whilst I understand that eBay and PayPal are the same company, I think it’s unfair that they are excluding other payment services from eBay, surely they should include more payment options for users. What do you think of eBay’s Google Checkout policy?

More SSL fun

February 21, 2008 in Internet Stuff with Comments Off

A few days ago I wrote about my first experience with Secure Sockets Layer certificates. After a brief search on the net I chose Instant SSL. As I explained the other day, since we don’t have our PO box set up yet and since we are still operating from home it was going to be difficult to provide 2 pieces of information to verify our address. Even though I asked about all of this via phone and via email, Comodo still didnt answer me until after they had issued my certificate which had my home address for the world to see. I thought that was bad until I tried to get a refund using their 30 day no hassle refund policy. Unfortunately their no hassle refund policy is a lot of hassle. I’ve called 3 times and I’ve emailed 3 times in the last 2 days and they have yet to reply to me. On the phone I was told that phone support cannot access any info about refunds but that still doesnt explain why no one is replying to me to let me know what is happening. All in all I’ve found Comodo to be an absolute joke.

Since I don’t want this to hold me up I went searching for a new ssl company. Dan Grossman left some advice for me in the comment area and advised me to get a GeoCert certificate (thanks Dan!). In my search for a good GeoCert reseller I found out a lot of things about SSL

Although there are thousands of companies selling SSL certificates, nearly all of them are reselling them for about 3 or 4 main SSL companies. Wikipedia states that

A 2007 market share report from Security Space as of September of that year determined that VeriSign and its acquisitions (which include Thawte and more recently Geotrust) have a 57.6% share of the certificate authority market, followed by Comodo (8.3%), and GoDaddy (6.4%).
There is a huge difference in price in the certificates that are on offer however the browser compatibility (mostly 99.3%) and the encryption is the same across the board ie. the more expensive certificate options are just as safe for passing information across the net.
The main differences between the lower priced cerificates and the higher priced certificates is the amount the customer is covered for and the level of checking they do. The cheapest certificates like RapidSSL only require you to authorise that you own the domain. More expensive certificates involve authorising the certificate using bank statements for proof of address etc. However, beyond that the only major difference between SSL providers is the brand name and that is what your paying for.
The level of support varies widely between providers though this is the same with any internet service eg domains/hosting etc/

I checked out lots of SSL providers but the main ones I considered were The Planet (formerly ev1servers and before that they were RackShack.net) and ResellOne. I was keen on those because not only were the prices about the cheapest you could find, they also both had support forums. I love services with busy support forums because it means that if support is slow you can post a thread and get help from a fellow customer.

In the end I decided to get my SSL from enom. All my domains are hosted there so it was easy to order it there since I had money in my account. They offer RapidSSL, GeoCert and Secure Business Services certificates.

As with a lot of things on the web, you usually have to learn the hard way about it to become more clued up on it and that seems to be the case here. Thanks again to Dan for pointing me in the right direction

The journey into Ecommerce continues

February 19, 2008 in Internet Stuff with 2 Comments

After a few weeks of limbo due to our bank taking so long with delivering our visa cards, we have finally been able to move forward with our online shop (which I will post the details of in a week or so when it is completely ready).

Yesterday was a very long day with me spending about 14 hours at the pc but I can’t really complain because I haven’t really done much work in the last few weeks. The first thing I did was integrate Google Checkout into our shop. This was faitly straight forward.

Integrating Google Checkout

I was able to test it out in Googles test area which is called ‘Sandbox’. After that I made Google Checkout live on the site. The only problem we have at the moment is the passing of the delivery information. From what I have read in the CS-Cart forums I’m not entirely certain if the problem lies with Google Checkout or with CS-Cart.

Here’s the problem : I have shipping disabled in my cart so there is free shipping on all items. When you click on google checkout in the shop it takes you to an invoice from google checkout and under the heading ‘Shipping and Handling’ it gives the customer 3 shipping options
* Royal Mail £0.00
* Special Delivery £0.00
* Free Shipping – £0.00

Obviously there is no need for 3 settings with zero so I need to be able to remove two of the options. Of course, this won’t stop us from selling anything and it isn’t a major problem but it’s something I should try and fix.

The other small problem I have is with CS Cart handling GCO as the only payout solution. Since GCO is an external payment solution the script tells the customer

There are no available payment methods, so you cannot proceed to checkout.

I’ve read that a few other people have this problem so I’m sure there’s a solution (I probably just need to do some hunting and remove this part from a php file). We will probably be adding Paypal as a payment option soon too so that might fix it too.

My first experience with SSL certificates

Although I have been working on the web for years, this is the first time I have had any reason to purchase a Secure Sockets Layer Certificate. I did a bit of research yesterday and found that prices range from very low at Godaddy at $20 to the very high price of $1200+ at Verisign. There seems to be a lot of disagreement about which SSL certificate companies are best. Some say that the larger companies are simply charging more because of their brand name and their service is no better than some cheaper alternatives and others have added that the average shopper just sees the little padlock symbol in their browser and don’t check who the certificate is from. I am more inclined to believe that 99% of the time this is true.

I spoke with my always helpful hosting company WiredTree and they recommended a company called Comodo which has an SSL website called Instant SSL. Our shop now is now secure and we have proudly displayed the 2 logos below on our site.

The only problem we have with the SSL certificate is that it has my name and home address as the details instead of our website name and po box. Our po box is set to start on March 10th 2008 so we will have to wait a few weeks to do this change. Then, in order to change the ssl information we will have to provide :

1) Articles of Incorporation (with address)
2) Business License (with address)
3) Trading License (with address)
4) Copy of utilities bill (Tax/Electricity/Water/Telephone/Gas)
5) Bank statement
6) Cheque containing your company name and address

Normally this kind of information is easy to provide but we have set up our company account under our partnership name ‘Muldoon & Garry’ and not under our website name. It was important for us to do this because it allows us to change the name of the website in the future if needed without having to change our company details. So our partnership name will be the umbrella for all projects we will be working on. However this does cause us problems in providing the above info ie. we are working from my house so all utility bills are in my name and our bank statement and cheque book are in our partnership name.

None of this is hard but it’s these little things that can hold up a project. Over time I’m sure we will have many small obstacles like this but it’s all good as we are learning every week

How to change your sata drive from Dynamic to Basic in Windows Vista

January 29, 2008 in Operating Systems & Browsers with Comments Off

Today I got my new Antec MX 1 sata hard drive enclosure delivered from Misco. I had considered the Coolermaser Xcraft 360 but after reading some reviews I opted for the MX 1.

I have to admit it’s a very nice product and well worth the money (about £34).

I have two old sata drives which I used to have in my desktop pc (im just use a laptop now) and I bought this enclosure specifically so I could access the data from those files. The first hard drive loaded up fine. The files were accessible right away. Unfortunately, I had no such luck with the 2nd drive.

The drive was not showing in explorer. A quick check in the disk management section (right click computer, go to manage and then go to disk management) showed that the drive was dynamic and it was also offline. I knew what dynamic meant however I had never seen a drive set to offline before.

A bit of snooping about the web and I found out the solution. It turns out that Vista basic does not know how to handle dynamic drives. Vista business and ultimate do but basic doesn’t – why Microsoft didn’t include this feature in the basic version is beyond me. The only option which windows gives you is to convert the drive from dynamic to basic however that means you lose all your data which is obviously not what I wanted.

Thankfully there are two pretty easy solutions, I chose the latter.

The first option is to connect your sata drive to a computer which has xp. XP has no problem with dynamic drives so what you need to do is copy all your files to another drive and then convert your drive to basic and copy them all back.
Option 2 is much easier and it’s the method I used to convert the drive back to basic without losing the data and without having to copy the files anywhere. To do this you need to download TestDisk. TestDisk is a fantastic script for checking files on hard drives and not only that, it’s free!!!. I came across this solution in an article called ‘How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks‘. If you have the same problem as me then I would encourage you to follow the steps in that article. It’s very easy to follow and it will have your drive up and running in no time.

A very long overdue update

January 27, 2008 in Internet Stuff with 6 Comments

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts recently I have been a busy boy!!

The wheels have been in motion for a big change in the way I make money from the internet. A few months ago me and one of my best friends were discussing ways you can make money through the internet – advertising, ebay, selling things, you name it. We did a little ebay trading during the festive period and did ok and so began our journey into starting an online shop. Throughout January we have been working hard on it. We have formed a partnership, created our company account at the bank, uploaded the shopping script and we are currently awaiting our first order to arrive from China. We still have a few things to sort out but hopefully we will able to open the shop within the next 4 weeks.

Of course, this new venture is taking up a lot of my time and it’s going to take up more and more as we hope to move into premises within 6 months and increase the number of products we sell. For us to success we need to put everything into this which is why I am selling my biggest website TexasHoldemForums. It took me quite a while to decide whether I should sell it or not but long term I know that I have to as my time is scarce just now and it’s going to get worse as time goes by.

As usual, I have decided to sell the site at sitepoint. Heres the link

Will my other sites be sold?

I still own some other sites. There are some sites I own which I havent been able to sell for a good price so I am just going to leave them on my server as they continue to make me money every month from selling text links. So once THF goes my main site will be Blogging Tips. I believe the site will continue to grow and thankfully, since I no longer post on the site that much it means that I will be able to keep the site running. I’d like to keep the site another few years and see how it develops. Any work for that site will be minimal, I just need to make sure the authors are doing their job and they’re happy etc and I need to deal with advertising queries. Of course, the site would grow quicker and better with time spent on writing and promoting the site but as I have mentioned, time is the one thing I won’t have.

The future

I’m really excited about getting the online shop started and making it a success. It will be a lot of hard work but I know I will enjoy it and it will be good to not only be able to work with someone else but to be able to switch off when im not working….well thats the plan anyways haha!

I’ll let all you guys know the name of the shopping site once we get it launched

kevin

The story of Anand Ramnath Mani

January 7, 2008 in Personal with Comments Off

Me and a friend have been on the lookout for a good domain name recently to start an online shop. The topic of trademarking came up because we found so many domains for sale which were using copyrighted names (this was particuarly bad with gambling related names).

I recalled the story to my friend of the domain name dispute Armani.com had a few years ago. Basically, A man of Finnish heritage called A. R. Mani registered Armani.com in 1995. Armani contacted Mr Mani and around 1997 Mr Mani offered the domain to them for $1,935 USD. Nothing was settled and in 2001 Armani launched a complaint with the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center saying that the domain name was a trademark was a violation of their trademark. Long story short, Armani lost the dispute. The domain name now directs to their product line so something between the two parties has obviously been arranged since then however at the time it caused a big shock.

I searched the web and found the WIPO’s full report on the matter. If you have ever worried about someone taking your name then it proves an interesting read. Enjoy

WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center for Armani.com

Some basic tips on making money from Website Flipping

December 10, 2007 in Internet Stuff with 2 Comments

Mani Karthik wrote a post today on BloggingTips entitled ‘Earn money from Internet Real Estate business‘. Mani mentions in the post that I have ‘great store house on knowledge in this aspect’. I think Mani was being way too kind when he said that. Over the years I have sold and I have bought more sites I care to remember but I am far from an expert on the subject, infact, I have made a lot of mistakes.

So here are some basic tips on how to make money from buying and selling websites.

Don’t buy websites you have no time to work on
This is the one mistake I have made time and time again. I have come across some bargains over the years, sites which were being sold for much less than what they were really worth. I snapped them up quickly and had lots of ideas on how to increase traffic and how to start making money from the site but I didn’t have time to implement those ideas and slowly the traffic for the site dropped. The main reason I didn’t have time was because I took too much on, I bought websites with good potential but I didn’t have time to update them. I also bought too many websites at the one time which again resulted in my ideas on how to improve the site not being implemented.
Know when to cut your losses
As I mentioned above, there have been many times when I have purchased a site with good intentions to increase traffic to it and either quickly sell it for a profit or to start making money with it. After a while you need to be honest with yourself and ask if you will ever have the time to update it, if the answers no then you should cut your losses and move on. If a website is not being updated then most of the time the value of the site will decrease as time goes by. How much this decreases depends on the website, the market and other aspects but on the whole it’s best to cut your losses and try and redeem something back for the site.

Sometimes you will make your money back and break even, sometimes you may actually make a nice profit on the site even though you haven’t updated it however sometimes you will have to swallow your pride and sell it for less than what you paid for it (or spent on it after you bought it!).
When buying a website, do your homework – Research, Research, Research
When it comes to buying a website the most important thing to remember is to do your homework. Research the website’s stats, research the seller, research the site’s competitors and most importantly think about what you can do with the site.
- Research the website’s stats – Has the seller provided traffic stats? Where is the traffic coming from? What keywords is search engine traffic being generated with? These are the types of questions you need to ask. Don’t assume that every seller is as nice as they make out, there are a lot of con artists out there. Some may inflate traffic whilst others will just downright lie about it. Where the traffic is coming from is definately one of the most important questions. Some sellers will purchase very cheap non targeted advertising so that pageviews increase, others will send a lot of traffic from one of their other websites and then remove the link once they have sold the site. Be Smart!
- Research the seller – Look into the previous transactions of the seller and look at how many posts the seller has in the community. Are they trustworthy?
- Research the site’s competitors and think about what you can do with the site – Try not to get caught up in a bidding war for a site, particularly if you don’t know what your going to do with it. One of the biggest factors of flipping a website is the ability to increase traffic to it and/or increase income from it. You need to have a clear vision in your head of how you would improve the site. It’s no good just throwing money at every half decent website you find. Of course, it is worth buying a website if you think it’s undervalued and you can quickly resell it elsewhere for a higher price but in general you really need to be able to imrpove a website to consistently make money from trading websites.
  It is also important to determine how much time you would have to spend on the site, either to run it or to improve it and then sell it on. Remember, time is money!
Remember, you don’t want to be ripped off and you want to get as good a price as you can so do your homework. Also, don’t get caught in a bidding war as you may find yourself paying over the odds for the site.
Some quick tips on selling a website
- Provide as much evidence of traffic stats and income as you can.
- Be honest in your sale post, it’s not in your interests to con anyone.
- Don’t price yourself out of a sale. Remember, a website’s price is determined by how much it is worth to the buyer, not to you ie. how much time you spent on the website and how much money you spent on it is of no interest to the buyer.
- Give good after sales support. I always try my best to give good after sales support. If you are selling websites on a regular basis then people will become familar with you and this is when a good reputation can make you money. I have made a lot of sales from people who have bought from me before and I have also sold sites to people who decided to buy a site from me after a previous buyer left a positive comment about me (ie. saying that the previous sale went smoothly).
Summary

Flipping websites isn’t as exciting as some people may think. It can be time consuming as good deals are very hard to come by and it can also bea bit risky from time to time too. However, if you use some common sense and do as much research as you can you might just be able to make a good profit.

Remember, flipping websites is just one way of making money on the web and time spent flipping is time you could be spending doing something else ie. building a website from scratch or adding content to an existing site you have.

This isn’t a very detailed post on the subject and I’m sure I haven’t covered everything so if there is anything you want to ask please leave a comment
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Create an ebay turnkey site

November 28, 2007 in Internet Stuff with 1 Comment

ShoeMoney did a review this week of an ebay turnkey script called Build A Niche Store. Basically, for $97 you get a script which lets you create an ebay like store in under 30 minutes.

After reading shoes review I decided to give it a try and paid for the script. The script is extremely straight forward and I was very pleased with the documenation which came with it which explained how the script worked. Was it worth $97? I won’t know for a few months. If I break even with the script I’ll be more than happy as with these type of things I’m just looking to test something new. I created two sites very quickly, MP3 Player Mayhem and Console Cage. I made a point in not spending much time with them – I really dont want to spend a lot of time til I see how it performs (perhaps something I’ll later regret).

This script reminds me very much like the AWS Amazon CGI script which was out a few years ago. That script let you create an Amazon store very quickly and it proved to work well, I personally didn’t get make a lot of money but the sites got traffic and I sold over a dozen of them for a nice little bonus. Infact, the last site I had which used it was MP3 Player Mayhem. I had been redirecting it to a domain parking since last year because it had traffic so hopefully since already it will make a few commissions from ebay quickly.

My gut feeling is that I wont make much from this script but if I create a few I’ll at least be able to sell them on at a low price and make my money back.

I do think that if done right, these kind of sites can be very successful. There’s probably more to be made from the ads which compliment the ebay listings than the money you make from ebay itself. A great site which does this is Wii Pre Order. Wii’s are currently out of stock in most stores in the UK in the run up to christmas with most wii’s selling on ebay for 50%-100% markup. All Wii Pre Order does is show what sites have wii’s in stock but all links have affiliate links encoded in them. I have no doubt that the guy who made this is making a packet from it!! It just goes to show, not all sites need a great site to be successful, if your site helps people in some way then people are going to use it.

Enom bumps up prices again

November 19, 2007 in Internet Stuff with 2 Comments

I posted last month about ICANN increasing the prices of domain names across the net.

Enom announced here that the price I pay for domains would increase from $6.95 a domain to $7.45.

However, when I checked enom yesterday I noticed that I am now being charged $7.95 a domain and the lowest I can resell domains is now $9.18.

What does this mean?

Effectively, it means that my domain name reselling site 815 Domains is dead, well I can still resell domains but I won’t be able to use that domain name – I can hardly promote a site called 815Domains when the prices are $9.18!! If my customers don’t move their domains elsewhere then this change will not really affect me too much ie. I make more money reselling domains than I actually spend on them for myself so the hit is effectively being taken by those with sub accounts under me.

The question is, will I still be able to retain those customers? Godaddy and RegisterFly charge $9.95 per top level domain (tld) however fellow enom reseller NameCheap sells them for $9.29. Will a price of $9.18 a domain be enough to undercut these large companies which have brand names? Time will tell I guess. Obviously, I will have to try and get a suitable new domain name to continue selling domains …this time I think I will get one which doesn’t mention the price of the domain!!

On a side note, I have no idea why prices have been increased again and there is no mention of it on enom so I have contacted them to get a little more info on the situation. I’ll let you know what they say

Script hunting for food and water

November 14, 2007 in Internet Stuff with Comments Off

In the last two weeks I have spent a lot of time emailing companies to arrange partnerships for games and affililiation with my poker forums. I quickly realised how time consuming emailing can be – you take the time to write the email, they reply not answering some of the questions you asked, they reply again and answer it in a roundabout way and so on and so on. Of course, this kind of work does not show any increase in traffic or income right away but over time it usually proves to be worthwhile.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have spent a lot of time looking into scripts for new projects and not only can it sap your time, that time can also be wasted if nothing comes to fruition.

Thankfully, one of the ideas I was looking for a script for came to an end today as I finally added a classifieds area to Blogging Tips. It took me a while to find the right script though. Along the way I checked out a lot of classifieds and job scripts.

Here is a list of some of the scripts I looked at. Perhaps, someone out there will find the list useful :

VBClassifieds – A script which would have integrated with my forum, it was supposed to have a few bugs but on the whole it looked ok. It was discontinued a while ago so it wasn’t an option.
PhotoPost Classifieds – I have the photopost script on my forums however their classifieds script seems like a half assed attempt at making some extra money without the extra work!
GeoDesic Solutions – A poor script in my opinion. Perhaps the functionality and coding is good however the awful design makes me question who would pay so much money for this product.
Web Scribble – Not what I was looking for but seems like an ok script.
A href=”http://www.68classifieds.com/”>68 Classifieds – Very poor in my opinion, particularly for the price. Better free alternatives out there.
PHP Classifieds – Not what I was looking for but I’m sure it could be useful if modified well for a certain topic.
PHP Yellow Pages – Not what I was looking for.
IntoEx Job Script – Nice script but too basic in my opinion. Would suit a different project perhaps.
A href=”http://www.phpprolance.com/”>PHP Pro Lance – A very nice script and one which I did consider.

A script I did consider strongly was the KubeLance script from KubeLance. The problem was it wasn’t exactly a classifieds or a job script so it would have been harder to modify. The reason was the script is an elance clone and therefore has a lot of payment type features integrated into the script. Regardless, KubeLance has some useful scripts which are quite cheap so I recommend checking them out

2 More scripts which might interest you

I know that Digg like sites are everywhere now thanks to the success of Pligg however I liked the simplicity of Swik. Swik is open source so you are free to use it, amend it and..well do anything really as long as you follow the rest of the GNU license rules. You can download the source code from here but unfortunately, the download link wasn’t working for me yesterday. It seems to have an active community so I’m sure the script will be back up soon

Another script which I think some of you will like is ClipShare. ClipShare is a youtube clone. There are dozens of other youtube clones out there however ClipShare is the most professional looking in my opinion and at $199 for the pro version it’s definately worth looking into it if you fancy starting a multimedia site. Of course, the one thing you need to worry about with a video sharing site is bandwidth!

Why did I spend so much time hunting for scripts??

As you know, I’m actively looking to start 1 or possibly even 2 new projects in the next 4-6 months. I have various ideas and most of them would require a unique script or modifying an existing script for my needs. I have used elance a few times in the last 5 or 6 years however my experience with them hasn’t been great. The guy who designed my poker calculator 2 years ago was good to work with but the minute he was paid he was gone…it would have been easier finding wally!

Going back 3 or 4 more years I was trading a lot of website domains at the time. Myself and another member of DNForum agreed to put up 50% of the cost of hiring a coder at elance to design a unique domain script which would list the domains a domain trader owned with the latest bids etc. It was a simple enough script however there wasn’t any other like it out there. Our plan was to resell it on for $50 a time (or around that price). My partner for the project contacted me and told me that the guy had resold the script onto other people and used the exact same code for various other scripts, and most of these ended up in turnkey website stores!!

So to summarise, unless I really can’t find the script I need for a project, I prefer to search for an existing script and then modify it for my needs

If I come across any other useful scripts in the future I’ll post them here for you all

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