McFilter

This panel consisted mainly of representatives from companies offering payment processing, and was geared around questions and answers about eCommerce and related matters.

• David Boventer - chairing the panel, and organizer of the conference
• Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions - a neutral voice
• Sharon Housley of Notepage - another neutral voice
• Guy Wilnai from Plimus
• Daniel Kleinbery, also from Plimus
• Edward Leigh from OSoLiS
• Phil Schneider of Avanquest USA
• Jessy Jex of SWREG

Q: Tony Wieser - Are you afraid of Google Checkout?

Dave: I'm not!

Edward: Not sophisticated enough to compete.

Jessy: l agree. Not targetted at software market.

Daniel: PayPal should be scared but it'll take them time and they might not bother with shareware as the market isn't big enough for them.

Sharon: Branded pages are much better. Upsells are working really well for them - "I saw you're buying X, have you thought about buying Y?"

Dave: Would be concerned with amount of data Google would know as a result. They already know what you're searching for, with Analytics they also know what visitors you get, and with Checkout they'd know how many of those were converted into sales...

Bob Walsh: Why is there no ID standard? Could Google checkout be that?

Phil: Hard to get everyone to communicate on it. I don't think Checkout would provide that.

Bob: How many times do l need to enter my address and shipping address?

Phil: That was Microsoft Passport.

Edward: No-one trusts it. The consumer has to control it. It will happen eventually, but if Microsoft couldn't make it work then who will?

Dave: We live in an age of paranoia. Five years ago he could say that he knew his PC was virus- and spyware-free, but he doesn't know if that's still true today.

Edward: There's a huge growth in fraud through PayPal. Fraud isn't trivial, but it is possible. They've seen 3 cases in the past couple of weeks.

Q: Digital signatures become more of a problem because it makes it harder to deny to your credit card company that you didn't make the transaction.

Daniel: They don't use digital digital signatures yet.

Q: Tony Wieser: What about 'verified by Visa'?

Jessy: The problem is that not all cards use it. Visa have not pushed it enough. SWREG decided it wasn't ready or useful enough.

Phil: They don't deal with credit cards directly. There's still the old purchase order system and that's still the majority of their sales. Only 10% of their sales are online.

Edward: Visa and Mastercard developed SET in the 90s (which was a similar initiative) but never actually implemented it. Verified by Visa is kind of a successor of that. The problem with certificates is that you have to see people physically at some point to issue them.

Q: How do you guys all differentiate yourselves?

Edward: I'm also a shareware developer and use that to test the service. A payment processor should inclue marketing, software protection, etc. They manage mailing lists for their customers. Feed details into Froogle and offer reseller and affiliate programmes.

Daniel: They focus on clever ways to get money for their customers:

• Payment methods: purchase order/phone/fax/etc.
• Upsells and cross sales
• Pricing differences

They're partners, not just a service.

Jessy: It's not all based on price. Look at how platforms meet your business needs: payment methods; different countries; etc.

Phil: You could do it all yourself but you have to look at time savings, etc. and see what the systems provide for the money you give them.

Daniel: With only two minutes its hard to show how its different. You need to spend some time opening an account and delving deeper.

Sharon: Moving towards commodity business. But you need to know what specific needs your business has. No-one will know your software like you do.

Dave: The Plimus guys have good cookies [in their room at the conference]. Sometimes people want too much from their payment provider.

Q: Credit card fraud is a problem. Is it going to spiral out of control? Do you shred all your documents and vet all employees?

Daniel: The credit card companies aren't too worried about it - they make money from it either way. 3-5% of fraud attempts pass the credit card company's checks and they (Plimus) have to catch them. All data is stored electronically and is encrypted. Phishing is one of the big sources of fraud.

Jessy: We're all good at staying on top of fraud techniques. All documents are stored electronically and are encrypted. They have monthly audits.

Dave: These guys aren't the problem. In the UK we're too hysterical about such reports.

Phil: See most of their fraud from a few countries, so they trigger on those IP addresses and force them to bill manually.

Edward: All sorts of things are factors that they include in how suspicions things are. It shouldn't be something that shareware authors should have to worry about.

Q: Martin Szummer: What about micro-payments, pay per-use, etc?

Daniel: We have that. Only applies to certain software types, and isn't very popular.

Phil: They did some tests but didn't have any success with what they were selling.

Daniel: There are other options, for example, Dynamic Pricing - the product itself tracks how it was used and then charges the customer accordingly.

Q: What are SWREG doing to screen affiliates?

Daniel: A lot of affiliates join just so that they can buy your software more cheaply. Initial transactions are carefully tracked.

Q: fraud scrubbing - false positives. Any ideas as to how many losses are made through false positives?

Jessy: No figures.

Dave: No-one can get it perfectly right.

Edward: It's like spam filtering. They review those in the 'grey zone' manually and hopefully minimise it.

Sharon: There's also '2nd-generation fraud' where fraudsters use stolen credit cards to bid really high on adwords. Their ad appears top, so they can sell software as an affiliate on their site and they get their income from their affiliate cut of a legitimate sale. It severs the link to the fraudulent credit cards.

Edward: Resellers are different from affiliates - with resellers there's an upfront negotiation, but affiliates are more ad-hoc.

Q: What sort of commission would you charge on a $99 sale?

Daniel:7%, no fees

Edward: 10% + $0.75

Jessy: 2.9% or 6% depending on the product.

David: Any questions, or closing remarks from the panel to the audience?

Daniel: We listen to our customers. Look at different pricing schemes for different customers. Even look at hire-purchase-style schemes as they're popular in some countries.

Audience: Does anyone here [who isn't from the US] have a US bank account?

No.

HSBC have a US$ bank account with no fees.

Audience: One tip for finding out which payment processor is best is to split your 'buy now' button into strips to send traffic to different processors at random. Then you can find out which one gives you the most sales.