This new streamlined payment page offered by 2ChekOut that collects all the required billing information on 1 page rather than on multiple and should lead to an increase in conversions and a reduction in uncompleted sales.

What do I need to do?

Nothing! MCP4 membership software will automatically send the user to the Single Page Payment screen, just make sure that you have your processor details entered correctly in the 2CheckOut section of the Processors Tab.

Happy selling!

1. A product people want

This is may seem obvious and stupid, but think about it for a second. Have you done any market research? How many competitors are there in your area? How much are people willing to pay for it? Your own time is the most valuable resource of any small company, be very careful what you spend it on. Do research and see if your first idea is worth it, if not, move onto the next one.

2. A website and hosting

You are going to need a website with content on it (that Google can index) and it has to be hosted some where. Even novices can create great looking websites quickly using templates from sites like Template Monster or A+ Templates. You’ll also need to have it hosted some where, Bluehost and Dreamhost both provide good quality, budget hosting.

3. A payment processing account

While you could accept offline payments (checks, money orders, etc…) in the online world people expect to be able to pay and get their product now. To this end, you will need an account with a payment processor who will charge people’s credit card on your behalf (they take a small commission for this service). We have created a list of the most popular payment processors and their supported features.

4. Order fulfillment software

The real benefit of selling online is been able to “make money while you sleep”. In a physical store you would have to have a real person there in order to accept payment, however, in the online world you don’t -as long as you have order fulfillment software like MCP4 - Membership Software . With MCP4 you can automatically process orders online in real time without any human intervention at all. There are a number of competing products out there and we have compared a few for you. MCP4 is designed for people selling digital products such as website subscriptions, ebooks, PDFs, etc…

5. Time

Just because you open a new shop, does not mean people are going to rush into it and buy everything. You have to build a reputation for yourself and your product. This can take time - weeks even months. So don’t give up too early and keep at it.

I hope you have found this article informative, if you have any questions please post a comment.

We would describe MCP4 ourselves as,

Membership software for small companies that sell digital products or services online who waste time administrating an inefficient sales process. MCP4 automates this process allowing companies to focus on their customer needs rather than administration.

So I asked a few customers to answer this question, “In 1 line, describe what MCP4 is to you?“, here are some of the results.

Jordon Said: A complete subscription management system for online web-based memberships.

Marco Said: Essential to manage the subscriptions and members communications.

Jim Said: It’s a back-end membership database software with password protection of files and folders. It helps me manage my sales orders and protects my downloads from free-loaders.

So how would you describe MCP4 membership software?

An interesting exercise to run if you are on a software development team, ask everyone to write/email a description of the product. Now the important part, ask your client to do the same. How well do they match?

It’s all about prospective. Which prospective is right? The simple answer, which ever one pays the bills!

New Features

• New Drupal plugin. When a user is added via MCP4, a matching user on Drupal is created also. Supports single sign-on as well.
• Can now select whether to display a custom “signup successful” page or use the standard one
• Now supports MCP4 running on servers with PHP running in CGI mode
• Added in new trial / demo version
• Improved a number of installer related functions
• Improved the appearence of the plugins page
• Added new setting that decides if PayPal collects a shipping address or not
• Improved handling of cancelation requests

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue where server could timeout on some actions if it had thousands of users
• Fixed license issue
• Fixed bug where under certain conditions using the “Add Order For” did not correctly set the expiration period
• Fixed bug where spacing characters where been wrongly stipped out by the Template Editor
• Fixed minor XHTML issue
• Fixed bug with config file not been found on IIS systems

Now, for some other great news. I am please to announce the release of the trial version of MCP4. This is for potential customers who want to test out MCP4 before signing up. The trial version is a fully function 30 day trial. After which you have the opportunity to upgrade to one of the full version. You can download the trial version from the home page.

If you need help installing the trial version, then try the new Support Forum. It’s free and for a limited time we are also offering free installs on the trial version, just request an install via the support forum and a member of staff shall contact you.

Business Details.

Graphs & data mining.
One of the most important new features in MCP4 is its data-mining and graphing capabilities. MCP4 gives you a visual representation of your sales and users. See how many sales you made in the last week/month/year. Find out exactly how well particular products are selling. See at what time of the day do people order at. Find out your ratio of sales to cancellations.
This information is vital to be able to make strategic decisions about your products and business.

Time saving.
The single biggest benefit of MCP4 is its time saving ability. Built from the ground up to be fast and responsive. MCP4 greatly reduces or removes the mundane and repetitive tasks of administrating a subscription site. Whenever you view an entity in the system (i.e. a User, an Order, a Product, etc…) then all related material is also displayed.
Example, if you view a User, not only do you get User details, you also get: Profile details, Order history details, Any notes / comments in the system about that user and links to perform related tasks, like adding a new Order or Note.

Fraud shield.
MCP4 has a new fraud shield that lets you ban individual IP address or whole IP blocks. This allows you to ban potentially high risk countries like Nigeria or Malaysia. You can also ban certain email address domains (example, @hotmail.com or @gmail.com).

Reliability.
Simply put, your customer’s first experience with you and your website is probably going to be via the membership software you chose. You want to make a good impression. MCP4 was designed to be rock solid and easy to use, so even your most inexperienced customers are able to signup and login with ease. This fully automated process allows you to concentrate on your products and promoting your products.

Technical details.

I am sure some of you want the juicy technical details.

It has been written from scratch in PHP (old version was written in Perl), built using an MVC framework using all the best OO design patterns and best practices (geek speak for saying it rocks!). Using a database abstraction layer supports all major database systems, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Access, etc…

Over 30,000 lines of code and 31 entities/tables (old version only had 3!). This alone will probably give you an insight into the amount of work and effort involved. MCP4 has been actively worked on for over 18 months.

A word on upgrading

We expect a fairly significant number of people to upgrade to MCP4. We know down-time is not an option for our customers, so for the next two weeks we are going to do nothing but handle upgrades. This is the only way that we can guarantee quality of service. We also have brought in extra supports in the office to cope with the influx.

Telephone Support

One of the new services we are offering with MCP4 is telephone support. This has been much requested and we are delighted to be able to finally offer it.

Special Offer

As a thank you to all our existing customers we are giving a free Telephone Support incident to all existing customers. This is a $150 value and just a small thank you from us to you, to show our appreciation of your continued custom. To avail of this offer, just purchased your preferred edition and then fill out telephone callback form and we’ll call you back.

Thank You

On a personal note, I’d just like to say thanks to whole team (Alan, Margaret, Eoin) without who MCP4 would never have been made. Finally a big thank you to our customers, without whom we wouldn’t even have a company.

Thank you all.

With that in mind, we went back to the drawing board and created a brand new installer. Totally redesigned, with ease of use in mind. Its simple intuitive interface lets even the most inexperienced users install MCP4 with ease. The installer gathers all needed information, providing defaults and context sensitive help. Also featuring advanced error checking, the installer detects errors and reports useful notices back.

To see how easy it is to install MCP, checkout the Install Guide video tutorial below. In it you can see MCP4 been installed in 1 minute 35 seconds. The second video is the Getting Started video tutorial, in it you can see MCP4 going from fresh install to selling first product in 3 minutes 18 seconds.

Video (Flash) Tutorials.

• MCP4 - Install Guide (1:35)
• MCP4 - Getting Started Guide (3:18)

There is currently no audio track on the videos, this will be added a little later. We probably have an unfair advantage in the fact that we’ve installed MCP4 thousands of times, so “normal” (read: non geeks like us!) people could expect it to take a bit longer. But, the purpose of the tutorials is not to show how fast MCP4 can be installed, as that will vary person to person - experience to experience, but to show how easy / straight forward MCP4 is to install.

Hope you have enjoyed and as usual any thoughts or comments are welcome.

Step 1

You tube generates some code for you, it looks some thing like (YouTube compresses to 1 line),

  <object width="425" height="344">
     <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E&amp;hl=en" />
     <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
     <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E&amp;hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="344" />
  </object>

First thing to do is strip out the <EMBED> tag.

Step 2

Add a “data” and a “style” attribute to the <OBJECT> tag. This points to the flash file (YouTube video) and sets the size respectively. So the <OBJECT> tag will now look something like,

  <object width="425" height="344" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E&amp;hl=en" style="width:425px; height:344px;" >

Step 3

Clean up the remaining <PARAM> tags. You can safely drop the following tag,

     <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />

You can optionally add “bgcolor” param if you wish,

     <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />

So the final result would look like this,

     <object id="charts" type"application/x-shockwave-flash" style"width:425px; height:344px;" data"http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E">
        <param name"quality" value"high" />
        <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E" />
        <param name"bgcolor" value"#FFFFFF" />
      </object>

Note: If the YouTube url includes an ampersand symbol (&), make sure that you convert it to its HTML equivalent (&amp;),

i.e.
http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E&hl=en changes to,
http://www.youtube.com/v/3AdFA6WWJ7E&amp;hl=en

Conclusion

Converting YouTube generated HTML to XHTML (Strict) compliant and can be achieved with minimal fuss while still maintaining cross platform support. This solution is not just restricted to YouTube either, it can be used on other non compliant embedded flash, like the otherwise excellent maanil.us PHP/SWF Charts. The following example is a fully XHTML complaint YouTube video, and the original non compliant code.

Tested on,

Safari 3.1.1, Mac os-x
Safari 3.0.4, Mac os-x
Safari 3.0, Windows XP
Safari 3.1.1, Windows XP
Firefox 2.0.0.4, Windows 2000
Firefox 1.5, Windows 2000
Firefox 3.0, Windows XP
Opera 9.23, Windows XP
Internet Explorer 6 (SP2), Windows XP
Internet Explorer 7, Windows XP
Internet Explorer 8, Windows XP

The blue theme (we call it “Subtle”) is the default template, however you can add your own and you have full control over the appearance of user facing pages.

Lastly, James Davis asked about a WordPress plugin, I can confirm that we have created a WordPress (2.5.x) plugin, it has full integration. I.e. so when someone signs-up via MCP4, a WordPress account will be automatically created, then when the login via MCP4 they are automatically logged into WordPress also.

This is the first in 3 part series on website optimization using Firebug and YSlow. It is aimed at Bluehost users, but should be applicable to any similarly setup host like Dreamhost, Host Monster, etc…

As many know, we are big fans of Bluehost here, but one feature that they really lack is GZip compression.

Q. What is GZip and why is it important?

A. Simply put, Gzip is a compression tool that reduces the size of files (like CSS or javascript files). It is important for two reasons,

1. Reduced file sizes means: faster downloads, quicker site and thus a happier end user.
2. Bandwidth, smaller files consume less bandwidth.

Fiftyfoureleven.com have a very good blog about this topic, however there are issues with both of its suggested methods. Method 1, requires changing filenames, big problem if you have a lot of pages. Method 2, does not work on Bluehost PHP 5.2.5/Apache 2 configuration -will give nothing but unhelpful Server 500 errors. The good news is that all is not lost! Instead, you can use PHP to GZip the components on the fly. There are 3 easy steps to compressing file output streams,

Step 1

In the folder where your CSS files are located (perhaps www.yoursite.com/css/) create a file called “.htaccess”, put the following line into it,

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css

Step 2

In the same directory as above, create a PHP file called “gzip-css.php” and put the following into it.

<?php
ob_start ('ob_gzhandler');
header('Content-type: text/css; charset: UTF-8');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
 
header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s',time() + 2629743) . ' GMT');
?>

Step 3

Again in the same directory, create a file “php.ini” (PHP configuration file) and into it put the following,

[PHP]
 
; Automatically add files before any PHP document.
auto_prepend_file = gzip-css.php

Done!

Now clear your browsers cache and load your main page again. If all worked, you should notice no difference (except maybe page is a bit faster!). If you have Yahoo’s YSlow installed, you can use it to verify that the files have been compressed.

Javascript

Repeat same steps as above, except change the line in gzip-css.php,

header('Content-type: text/css; charset: UTF-8');

to

header('Content-type: application/javascript; charset: UTF-8');

Also in the .htaccess file change the bit “…tpd-php .css” to “…tpd-php .js”. Lastly, If you rename gzip-css.php to gzip-js.php make sure that you update the php.ini file also.

Conclusion

Using this method, the CSS on this blog went from 13.8K to 4.4K and our javascript went from: 18.2K to 11.1K.

Overall, using GZip and the other optimizations our page size went from 131.5K to 38.9K, or a 340% reduction in file-size, not bad for half and hours work. If you run into problems leave a comment. Tune in for Part 2 next week to see what other optimizations we did.