I’ve been getting quite a few emails asking about my shopping cart and payment processor setup. I wanted to shed a bit of light on my current business practices.
Shopping Cart for Internet Marketers
My shopping cart provider is Nanacast. They host all my shopping carts, coupons, upsells and they also manage my content delivery and memberships. Nanacast also boasts the most powerful affiliate management system. I initially started with DLGuard but I quickly outgrew it. Wishlist Member was also used briefly, but I required a central way of managing everything.
Payment Processor for Internet Marketers
For payment processing, I’m using Paypal and a merchant account at PowerPay. Paypal is an obvious choice…but PowerPay? PowerPay came at the recommendation of Mike Filsaime. I chose them because they allowed me to accept all major credit cards for my business with ZERO upfront costs and no long term contracts. They also handled the Authorize.net gateway setup themselves which made it very easy to plugin my credit card processing directly into Nanacast. Theoretically, I could also plugin my merchant account details into DLGuard, Wishlist Member, 1ShoppingCart, DigitalAccessPass or any other shopping cart solution that uses Authorize.net.
Alternative to Paypal
The more important question is….why am I using a merchant account at all? Isn’t Paypal enough? Why do I need an alternative to Paypal?
There are several answers to this question.
- Backup. I don’t trust Paypal (and neither should you). I’ve seen fellow business owners get their accounts frozen overnight. One of them had $15k tied up for 6 months. This meant that affiliates and JV partners could not be paid and customer refund requests could not be honored until the funds were released. As a business owner, that scares the daylights out of me. As a Techie geek, I always need redundancy and backups. On a related not, I still remember Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Everyone was desperate for gasoline, but gas stations couldn’t pump gas because they didn’t have electricity. Now nearly every major gasoline station has a diesel generator behind it “just in case” a hurricane strikes. Lesson: Having a backup lets you stay in business during disasters.
- Transfers: Imagine this: you build a membership site that’s making good money. You’re collecting subscription payments via Paypal. A few months down the road, you decide to flip the site for a profit. Unfortunately, you can’t transfer ANY of the Paypal subscriptions to the new owner. They must all be cancelled and re-enrolled under the new Paypal account. Guess how many members will be upset and/or won’t bother re-enrolling? With a merchant account, you can transfer the subscriptions.
- Options: Some customers simply hate Paypal or don’t have a Paypal account. My PowerPay Merchant Account offers customers an alternative to Paypal.
- Webinars and Events: Planning on hosting a large webinar, seminar or event? This is the number one reason Paypal will freeze your account. The next time you host an event, process all the payments via your merchant account to avoid getting frozen by Paypal.
- Nightly Deposits: Every night, my merchant account deposits my earnings directly into my bank account on auto-pilot.
There you have it. My business currently runs on Nanacast + Paypal + PowerPay. It’s taken me years of testing and learning to figure out this perfect combination. I highly recommend Nanacast and PowerPay for your online business.
Want to talk to PowerPay before signing up? Call them at is 888-639-9670 or email their team at team208@powerpay.biz.
Edit: Ironically enough, I just tried to buy something from a merchant. Here’s the error message I received when I tried to pay via Paypal. Right now I’d hate to be in this person’s shoes…
