Selling products online

On 16th of October 2007 brand innovative Affiliate Marketing Network - Click2Sell has launched! Now you can start selling products online without any aditional costs. Great thing that it is absolutely free for Affiliates and there is only small commission fee per transaction for Merchants (1-3 USD). So now merchants can sell products online using integrated online marketplace. Affiliates - promote products from marketplace and earn money online without any signup fees! Below you'll find comparison of Click2Sell and Paydotcom. Enjoy!

People who currently use PayDotCom and wish to use Click2Sell service to sell their products online may want to know the differences between two networks and how Click2Sell compares when stacked up against the PayDotCom service and what it offers that isn't available with PayDotCom. Listed below users are some certain features that have been compared and the advantages that Click2Sell has over PayDotCom in these areas.

Account Costs
PayDotCom claims to offer free user accounts for both classes of members whether they are affiliate or merchant account holders. The truth about this offering however is that while affiliate accounts are free and you can get a free merchant account, the nature of the service provided on such merchant accounts is limited. Merchant users are only allowed to upload a limited amount of products via the website. Anyone who wants to sell more products will need to pay costs for a premium account ($29).

Click2Sell on the other hand provides both merchant and affiliate accounts to all its users without charging a fee for operating these accounts. Merchants may also upload as many products as they wish without being billed for doing so.

Payment Options
PayDotCom offers a limited amount of payment options when compared to Click2Sell. The service exclusively recommends to use PayPal and doesn't provide any other options other than the occasional use of cheques to withdraw and deposit money into the service. This is as much a limitation to affiliates as it is to merchants who appreciate the needs of having various payment methods in order to receive money from customers for selling products online.

Click2Sell gives its affiliates the dual option of withdrawing with either Moneybookers or the use of PayPal. Merchants have a wider option and can receive payments from various payment systems. Some payment systems which Click2Sell uses to process merchant payments are: WorldPay, Google Checkout, PayPal, Moneybookers and Authorize.net

Customer Support
PayDotCom clients regularly complain about slow customer support whether in their forums or e-mail based support systems. Queries and requests may take between 3 weeks to 9 weeks to receive responses from contact staff. It also takes an equally long period for forum posts on the website to get approved by the forum administrators. When you start selling products the only wish you have is to make a sale as much faster as it is possible, so such delay from Paydotcom staff is very annoying.

Click2Sell has a free forum and e-mail support system that prides itself on prompt responses to users of the service. This helps users who want to make enquiries about any problems they have which may not be answered on the FAQ page.

Server Speed
When processing queries on PayDotCom the servers are often slow to respond and this can be annoying especially when a lot of requests have to be processed. Though PayDotCom has reportedly made some efforts to address this issue, it is yet to be fully resolved.

Processing queries through Click2Sell on the other hand is a fast process. Despite the fact that the service is new users may process any queries they may have on their sales or commission related figures and receive this information faster than they would with the PayDotCom service.

Processing Affiliate Payments
Processing affiliate payments from PayDotCom merchants has to be done manually. If the manual process was on servers functioning at full speed users would hardly have a problem. The slow servers of PayDotCom make it stressful for merchants who wish to process payments for affiliates. Affiliates on the other hand are made to wait a long period of time for a system that is somewhat unreliable before they receive their funds from the merchants using the PayDotCom system.

Click2Sell offers a semi-automated payment option on their fast servers helping users get their money promptly while merchants retain some form of control over the affiliate payment process as well.

Reporting, Statistics and Sales Tools
Both Click2Sell and PayDotCom provide their members with advanced sales and statistics reporting tools, however the sales information offered by PayDotCom is not categorized in a user friendly manner. Users constantly have to click from one link to another trying to find the precise link that gives them the desired information to monitor their progress.

Click2Sell organizes its links in two-tier bars. The main bar is for general account information such as: Affiliate Account, Merchant Account, Payments , Reports, Marketplace, Promote Click2Sell and Support. Clicking on any of these links will reveal the secondary bar with the necessary information. This organization level is user friendly and helps you find what you're looking for without breaking a sweat.

Click2Sell also provides Affiliate Tracking Reports with information such as conversion rates for sales under the links provided under the link for Reports. Such information is extremely important when you start selling products online and don't have enough money to advertise on multiple channels. With PayDotCom some of these statistics have to be extrapolated by manual calculations. Click2Sell provides the necessary statistics without overtly focusing on statistics of little interest to either affiliates or merchants.

PayDotCom certainly has its benefits but its flaws are a debilitating factor and hamper the progress of both merchants and affiliates alike.

Click2Sell provides as many benefits as PayDotCom and more, it also provides a service that suffers from none of the crippling factors affecting the PayDotCom service and people with accounts of that same service. On the other hand since Click2Sell is a new service it has fewer affiliate groups to choose from, unlike PayDotCom which has a more diversity in this are due to the fact that it has been in existence for a longer while.

This situation however will change in the near future the level of users currently flocking to enjoy the advantages of the Click2Sell option. Some of these added advantages and features are listed below:
* Advanced statistical tracking - Merchants can easily see how many views their sales page has recorded as well as the number of visitors and sales they've gotten as well. They can also determine other statistics as well such as the real product conversion rates, refund rates as well as income derived from their marketing campaigns
* Create different tracking channels - By using different tracking channels for different products, you can determine the amount of traffic and the profit generated by a particular product.
* Track your sales page referrers - You can easily track all your traffic sources. With this you can easily find out which websites and search engines are bring in the visitors and how many visitors you get per traffic source. You can also track your traffic sources separately as well so you can determine conversion rates per traffic source.
* Track keywords which bring you sales - You can discover the particular keywords that bring in the money. There's no need focusing on every single keyword in the book. You can use the Click2Sell Keyword Report to simply find out the keywords used to attract certain visitors to your site and what particular keyword brought in what sales.
* Track your Pay-Per-Click campaigns - Members can find which keywords used on Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and FindWhat will bring in the most visitors and sales. You can also determine the conversion ratio per keyword as well.

If you're lost with all these details there's really nothing to worry about, Click2Sell provides very detailed user guides which will help you every step of the way and with every single feature and benefit described here. With this information you could be well on your way to enjoying the efficiency of the service and reaping the benefits within hours of signing up.

So, my choice is Click2Sell Affiliate Network with integrated online marketplace and cool reporting tools. I already started selling products online using this affiliate network and already made 14 sales in two months. Hope it will go better and better.

Recently Click2Sell.EU introduced updated system with some new important features. In this post I will speak about one new feature which will be very beneficial to affiliates for selling products online as it provides new opportunity.

Until now affiliate links that were used for selling products online pointed to merchant's provided products sales-pages. This saved affiliates from having to create their own websites for affiliated product.

However, more and more affiliates use the method of creating entire blogs with rich content dedicated to promote certain products and then put "Buy-now!" buttons or links with their affiliate links there.

The problem is that when an interested in purchase reader clicks on this affiliate link, in most cases, visitor is redirected to the product's sales page, where all the 'story' about the product is provided again. Some potential buyers might loose the interest in product just because of poor sales letter or any other reasons.

But.. wouldn't it be great if you (affiliate) could create your own landing page for your promoted product and then place your affiliate link as a DIRECT buy now button?

Such feature would forward all potential buyers directly to checkout page from your landing page. When you have a great landing page and an ability to forward the buyers straight to the checkout page, the poor merchant's sales pages won't affect your promoted product's conversion rates.

When you have a total control over presented content on your landing page, you can easily tweak it to increase sales conversions, get better PPC campaigns scores, create a feeling that you're a direct seller of a product.

So... From now all Click2Sell.EU affiliate marketing programs network's affiliates can just add a certain variable in to their standard affiliate link and make it pointing directly to promoted product's checkout page. They can start selling products online within seconds!

For example affiliate link:
http://AffiliateUsername.ProductName.click2sell.eu/

Visitors who come through this link will be redirected to merchant's provided sales page.
Now, if you add "?checkout" variable at the end of that link:
http://AffiliateUsername.ProductName.click2sell.eu/?checkout

such link will redirect your visitors directly into product's checkout page.

So, for real example I'm promoting Adwords in detail product. It is a compact STEP-BY-STEP instantly downloadable online Adwords private lesson that reveals to you insider secrets to generate unstoppable traffic in 48 hours or less from now and how to monetize it into cash easily - even if you're a complete beginner or have tried and failed before!

If i had my own very good sales page for this product, I could paste just the same link with "?checkout" addon and it could look and work like -> Adwords in detail

That's all. Nothing more to configure. All you have to do is just to add a ?checkout variable at the end of your affiliate link and your visitors will be redirected straight to the product's checkout page.

You can also add "&checkout" variable into tracking channels.

Example tracking channel:
http://AffiliateUsername.ProductName.click2sell.eu/campaign?id=11111

Tracking channel link to checkout page:
http://AffiliateUsername.ProductName.click2sell.eu/campaign?id=11111&checkout

Please note that here is "&" symbol, not "?".

So from now on all Click2Sell.EU affiliates have a complete control on how to promote and sell products online. You can create your own product's landing pages and drive visitors straight to the checkout page through your affiliate links. Or you can use merchant's provided sales-page. So there will be no more lost customers!

I think that is very useful feature and it will help to many affiliates in selling products online.

The prevalence of selling products online is increasing by the day. Why? Because even when you are peacefully sleeping, you can be assured that your product is being viewed without you having to do anything.

Of course, this is not always the case especially if you have just started promoting your product. There are still a lot of things that you need to do to get your product or service to the online market. Most often than not, a tremendous effort on your part will be required.

Selling products online can be done in several ways. In fact, there are so many ways that you will have no excuse for not succeeding in the business you want to venture in.

One way of selling products online is by joining subsisting domains like the widely known amazon.com. You can list as many items as you wish to sell and for every sale, you give the site a percentage of it. So, there is mutual relationship. They help you and you help them.

Another way is through auction sites such as eBay where you can post your products and allow people to bid for how much a product will be bought for.

Now, if you do not want to join any other website, then you can opt to set up your own online store. However, this may cost you a big amount of funds. You will have to spend for registering a domain name, website hosting, software for e-commerce, website development and maintenance, internet access among many others. You also need to hire a professional to work on your website design and everything else that is needed. A lot of time and effort is required if you choose this option.

You do not always have to spend a great deal just to sell your products online, though. You just have to learn to be resourceful and strategic in finding means to get your products online. One way is through direct mail. Nowadays, it has become almost impossible to make use of email to introduce your product to prospective buyers because of spam filters. However, there is actually an option to buy or rent a mailing list that will help you reach potential customers.

Another is through blog. If you have one, you can actually make use of it to advertise a product or products that you want to sell. You just have to build traffic to your blog so to make sure that your product is being viewed. Get more subscribers as much as possible. You may also use your blog to inform people about your product.

Ezines could also work for you. If you can make quality write-ups about your product or service, submit them to any popular ezine sites. It can also help if you write about other interesting and unique topics. Just make sure that you have your signature box ready with your product name, URL and a brief description. By writing free informative information that might be of interest to more people, you are at the same time promoting yourself and your expertise to thousands of online business persons online. You will build credibility and they will trust that your products are good.

Selling products online should be easy. You just have to find the right technique to get potential customers and successfully make a sale.