We have managed to fix up a few of the little graphics issues and have been working on the subscription/merchant payment facilities.
Business Directory
The guys have managed to get a lot of data into the directory, unfortuantly I dont believe the data is sufficient (ie there is not enough data fields in DMOZ compared to what we would like)
I have put a Scraper project on Scriptlance and have received a few positive responses.
This is what it will be doing
1. Take a list of N categories from spreadsheet or csv and then search google for those categories and take the top 100 results (must be able to change this), crawl to each site and extract the following
url
Description
Site Name
Business Name
Phone
Email
Address
This data needs to be writen to an SQL database under each category.
I will choose someone in the next day to do this.
I think we can leave the business data there until we get a better alternative. Also we could modify the scraper code to lookup the business directory website and extract the data for that site, this way we may increase the size of the index.
Payment Gateways
I have also contacted Versign/Pay Pal today. There are a number of options that could be used, I would prefer to user Verisign/Paypal. They are the most widely accepted and have the most integration of the available gateways.
We also have the option of referring customers to them, which will generate 15% ongoing referral commission for all fees they generate. (I can feel an article coming to show how to do this)
They have a few different solutions in their range. Primarily its PayPal and PayFlow (with different options).
PayPal
Pay Pal is a payment gateway which enables customers and merchants to exchange payments globally. Part of the process of becoming a paypal account holder (both as a merchant and a customer) is a system of verification to help ensure customers are who they say they are.
PayPal setup and ongoing fees is basically free, they have merchant fees that are similar to Amex ie 2.5% approx https://www.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside
They offer a referral bonus as well so if we can help sign our customers up we will get income for it.
https://www.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_web-referrals-mrb-outside
PayPal Advantages
The advantages of PayPay is that it is
- Dead easy to setup,
- It can be done in a few hours,
- You dont have to worry about co-ordinating your bank/merchant facility with Verisign
- It provides both PayPal and credit card acceptance at the same time.
- It is the most widely deployed online payment & merchant solution worldwide with over 100 million paypal accounts
- No one has to worry about providing or handling financial information, this is all handled by PayPal
PayPal Disavantages
- The disadvantage of PayPal is that when you checkout, the payment is conducted on PayPal servers and whilst this can be customised to have a Dynamic Business logo and colors, it wont be the full DB site.
- Also funds are deposited to your PayPal account, it is easy to get them out, straight into your bank account but its not automatic.
PayFlow
The alternative is PayFlow Link or Pro. This product is the more heavy duty payment gateway. PayFlow is Verisigns product for eccomerce sites that want to integrate the payment solution into their website completely. It has a backend management console that allows management of the process and can include increased fraud detection and other add ons.
PayFlow Advantages
- It is the preferred solution for full on ecommerce sites as you can fully integrate it
- Deposits straight into your merchant account.
PayFlow Disadvantages
- The fees are high,
- It takes much longer to integrate to the site and is more complex.
- Takes 3-4 weeks to setup with the providers
- You have to co-ordinate your bank and Verisign
- and did I mention the fees are high.
I have attached sent some docs on them to you via email.
I recommend we implement PayPal immediately and you can make a decision later to add PayFlow if you need to.
