Month: May 2012

Add a Surcharge Field to Gravity Forms to Cover Paypal Fees

Paypal remains probably the handiest way to pay for and get paid for products and services but having just done my taxes for last year, I can see that the fees I had to pay for accepting Paypal payments from clients are getting pretty significant. I’ve decided to ask people if they’d like to pay these fees or not rather than forcing it on them and I’m only asking for 50% of the fees to be paid considering both seller and buyer are benefiting from using Paypal. Fair?

The first couple of things that need to be said are these:

  1. Paypal may not like people adding surcharges to cover their fees. In fact it’s probably against their policy. I don’t know why because they would make more money.
  2. People paying for services and products may not like to see extra fees added on checkout.

Nevertheless! Here’s how to add a field that automatically calculates Paypal fees for a customer entered amount.

You’ll need a developer licence for Gravity Forms Wordpress forms plugin for this so you can grab their Paypal Add-on. A developer licence is well worth it for this excellent forms plugin. They have some other great add-ons too. See my review.

Step 1

Add a new gravity form with whatever basic informational fields you want the customer to fill out, typically Name, Phone, Email & Item just so you’ll know who’s paid and for what.

Step 2

Add 2 “Product” fields from the “Pricing Fields” menu, the first of which should be configured to take a user defined price as below. It can also be a set price as opposed to user defined:

The second Product field is the tricky one. Some maths skills are needed! This field needs to be configured as a Calculation from the “Field Type” drop down menu. In the “Formula” field I inserted the “Payment Amount” merge tag from the first Product field above. Then I added the rest of the formula to calculate the % fee as below. You’ll need to visit the Paypal Fees web page to see the exact fees in your country and for the monthly incoming Paypal volume you have personally. For me it’s 3.4% + 0.35 cents. Also remember that I’m dividing by 2 here because I’m only asking for clients to pay 50% of the fees. You can leave that out if you’re not as generous as me. Here’s the formula and setup screen:

(  ( {Payment Amount (Euros):11} * 3.4 / 100 ) +0.35 ) /2

Step 3

Add a “Total” pricing field at the end too just so people can transparently see how the fees were added.

Step 4 (Optional)

In my form, I’ve also added a “Radio Buttons” field from the Standard Fields menu which I’m using to ask the client whether they want to bother paying any of the fees or not. I don’t want to force extra payments on anyone but the addition of this field will help sort the nice clients from the not so nice ones maybe!? With this field added, you need to go into the advanced settings of the second “Surcharge” pricing field and turn on “Enable Conditional Logic” to only show the surcharge field if people have chosen “Yes” to paying the fees. See below:

Here’s a link to my form so you can see how it all comes together:

ReverbStudios.ie.Payments

Leon

Getting Irish Business Online V’s A Proper Website

This is probably gonna sound like a bitter web designer’s rant who might have lost some business to the new kid on the block but sue me. I might actually have made some money as a result of this scheme!

The ‘Getting Irish Business Online’ scheme has got my goat up ever since it appeared a couple of years ago. It’s a Google, Blacknight Hosting, An Post!?, Enterprise Board joint effort whereby businesses can get themselves a free website with free address and hosting (for the first year only!) and avoid the alleged cost and hassle involved in getting a website the old fashioned way.

In the news today, I seen that 10,000  Irish businesses have now availed of the scheme and got their free website. So what’s wrong with a scheme that makes it easier for businesses to market themselves in the middle of a recession?

I’m sure intentions were good but the big problem for me is that this is the kind of scheme that should have existed maybe 10 years ago when the barriers to having a professional website were much higher than they are now. These days, it’s very affordable for a business to hire someone to build a proper internet presence that will look and perform a lot better than the “30 min” free 1 page template offering being given under the getting business online scheme. I think internet users these days expect a professional website from the companies they might hire,  not a site that looks every inch a free handout! It’s like getting a fancy new business card and sticking a Yahoo email address on it. Potential customers will see the free site template and arguably guess that the business in question isn’t doing well enough to have more than a free site. And if they’re not doing well enough, maybe they’re useless?

Recently I’ve had a number of clients come to me looking to upgrade the site they got under this scheme and I’ve yet to see one perform well in search engines.

And just to prove I’m not bitter, I’m willing to upgrade any sites that are currently on this scheme, looking miserable and under-performing to a proper, content managed, SEO’d site running WordPress. All I’ll charge is the hosting fee as the free hosting Blacknight give out under the scheme is not useful enough to install a proper site on.

Leon

Do I Still Need a Website?

This was the question asked of me at the Leitrim Business Network ‘IT expert Q & A’ this week. I’d like to expand on my answer here.

It’s a valid and pretty common question and to be honest, not one I knew how to answer when people first started asking me. After all, you can probably reach a hell of a lot more people on the likes of Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter than your own freshly made website.

My simple answer is that you should have BOTH your own website and a presence on all the major social networking sites. The bigger footprint you have online the better. The only valid reason I can think of for not having your own site is if you have absolutely no budget, but many people still don’t realise the cost of web design has come right down these days.

What I would try to avoid is that old problem of having people think that you’re a business that can only afford a free web presence. It’s like having a fancy business card and a big ugly hotmail or yahoo email address on it. Nothing spells success and professionalism than a nice modern website. It can be just as much a mark of quality as a marketing tool.

Website?

Here’s a  breakdown:

Facebook Pages & Twitter profiles are pretty basic

All that’s on anyone’s Facebook Business page (unless they spend serious money on having Facebook apps developed) is a small ‘About’ section, a news feed and maybe some photos. Same with Twitter. A small bio section then just a list of posts. Is that really the only business presence you want people to see!?

With your own site, you can lay it out how you like and have content presented more logically. I like to think of Facebook & Twitter as a teaser for your company, like a fish hook that you dangle in the stream of people. You give them the basics of your company and have them click through to your proper website where you present them with your full, properly branded business information.

Control

Facebook in particular are forever changing things around, whether it’s the size of banner images, logos or just the general rules on what you can and cannot do. With your own site you don’t have to be at their mercy, you control everything and always will.

The Future

Facebook wasn’t always popular and may not always be. What if you spend serious time and money cultivating followers and likers only for Mark Zuckerberg to get bored and sell the site to move onto something new? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Conclusion

My blueprint for a modern online business precence is as follows:

  • Create a profile on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and any other Social Networking site that may be particularly relevant for your business, ie – if you sell visual products, maybe a youTube account too to show them off properly,
  • Make sure to properly fill out each site profile with your business info, service list, location and web address link,
  • Build an audience by spending some time connecting to new people on each site. Most of them make this pretty easy by suggesting friends based on your email contacts or location,
  • Build a standalone website with a modern web publishing system like WordPress,
  • Concentrate most of your efforts on your own website by regularly writing relevant news content/blogs,
  • Integrate your website with all your social networking sites to automatically send news posts through to them. Dlvr.it is good for this and FREE. This way you can be active on a pile of sites at once, from one location without really having to be on them.
If you’re like me and sit in front of a computer all day, you’ll have that extra bit of time to go in an be active on the networking sites too. Interaction gets you noticed remembered and liked. Reading other peoples news also keeps you in the loop as to what’s going on and what the prevailing mood is which can be helpful.

Leon

 

Website Scrappage Scheme!

It’s 2012 now but there’s still a lot of really crap websites out there that do no favours for their owners businesses. They don’t have to be particularly old to look out of date because fashions and technology come and go pretty quick online but there are some sites out there that obviously havn’t been changed for many years. Accommodation sites all seem poor for some reason for example!?

It’s great that you have a site but a poor one could do more damage than not having one at all. Internet users these days have come to expect a certain standard as more and more people go online.

Some problems I see more regularly than I’d expect:

  • No content management systems,
  • No RSS Feeds,
  • No Latest News,
  • No Conversion pages,
  • No Social Media links/connections,
  • Poor Imagery,
  • Poor Logos and branding,
  • No SEO,
  • Ancient copyright years,
  • No Analytics,
  • Out of date contact details,
  • Eye bending colours,
  • Layouts broken in different browsers,
  • No accessibility,
  • Very basic shopping carts,
  • Poor usability,
  • Poor styling.

I’m willing to offer 30% off the cost of a rebuild.

Get in touch now to order.

PS – Your old site will be disposed of humanely.

Leon