Lesson 10:
Order Your Automated Sales System
Or Shopping Cart
By Daniel Janal
Founder, Great Teleseminars
I don’t think you can do this business effectively without having an automated shopping cart and credit card processing system. The service we recommend is MyEasyOnlineStore.com (Click on that link for a low-cost trial of the service).
A shopping cart will let you do nearly everything necessary to automate nearly every step in the ordering process, so you can save time and money!
Here's what a good shopping cart will do for you:
- Take orders over the web
- Notify customers the transaction is successful
- Send them information, like sign-in codes for the teleseminar and the instructor's handouts
- Send reminder notices the day of the event
- Send follow-up messages after the event
- Provide "Upsell" information after they order to induce customers to buy more products
- Track different ads so you can see which ads work
- Provide ad-tracking reports so you can see the number of clicks, number of orders, sales, dollar volume and cost per click
- Create comma-delimited files so you can import the file to Word to produce labels if you need to send products like CDs or cassettes to customers
- Manage your affiliate sales program
- Calculate shipping costs
- Calculate taxes
When you include a merchant services program that can process credit cards, you have a complete automated solution to handling your orders and giving you marketing information. In other words, when people read your sales material and decide to order, here's what happens.
They:
- Click on a link
- See an order form
- Fill in the order form
- Select their seminar or seminar product
- Enter their credit card info
- Hit enter
Your sales system then processes the card, verifies it is good, and confirms the order to both you and the customer. If there is an error, or if the card doesn't process, the sales systems will notify both of you as well, and will prompt the customer to enter correct data.
The best part is that you don't get involved in the process, or the time-consuming tasks involved in normal order taking. Taking 25-30 orders over the phone is an administrative nightmare. You’re going to play phone tag with people as well, which takes time and racks up long-distance phone charges. So you really want to have a shopping cart service.
A shopping cart will also give you reports of each order that you can print, so you have a paper trail to balance your checkbook and provide information to the IRS.
Just in case I haven't make this point clear, there are two products you need:
- A shopping cart
- A credit card processing system
The credit card processing system works with your shopping cart to:
- Accept the card
- Verify the card
- Collect the money and send it to your bank
You need to get a shopping cart to automate your sales and a credit card processing system to handle the money.
Action Step:
* Order the shopping cart and credit card processing system.
I use MyEasyOnlineStore as my shopping cart and I heartily endorse it. You could pay thousands for a custom built shopping cart, but I pay only $800 a year to automate the sales process, which saves me countless hours. It more than pays for itself. You can’t hire a college kid to come in and sit by the telephone and do all this stuff for less than $75 a month.
MyEasyOnlineStore will work with most credit card processors and even with PayPal. It is very easy to set up the services to work together.
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