Testing demand: How to stop paypal from billing customer?

[johndekay]

Hi

I've added a shopping tab on my facebook page which users can click to order product. Its called payvment... anyway it links to paypal, however since I am still in the demand testing phase, I would like to to stop paypal from billing the customer and say something along the lines of, product out of stock etc etc.

How do I do this?

Thanks....

[AlexMoen]

Don't link to paypal then- link to your page saying it's out of stock (or whatever reason you have). I don't personally use payvment, so I don't know if there are any intricacies to its use, but if you can't find a way around this, it shouldn't be your testing method.

[SeanyG]

John,

The easiest way to test demand is to send people from your facebook page to a 3 page website that you have built as Tim recommends.

Yes you want to sell directly through facebook. Thats fine. But testing on a website will still show you the demand!

The site should have 3 pages:

1) Sales copy, info for the product, guarentee, testimonials, buy button.

2) price and customer info page.

3) Page saying "sorry we are out of stock. your CC info has not been billed or stored".

This way you can test how you sell it and the price you sell it for independently.

I hope this helps,

~Sean

[johndekay]

Thanks alot sean, nice blog by the way, ive signed up to the newsletter too...!

Hey which one would you recommend? Shopify or wordpress? With wordpress I understand its completely free, but you need to host it, so would need to pay hosting fees. Shopify is all in one, but you still need to pay a monthly fee?

What are the benefits/drawbacks of both shopify and wordpress? SOrry for the high school essay question haha.

[SeanyG]

Thanks alot sean, nice blog by the way, ive signed up to the newsletter too...!

Hey which one would you recommend? Shopify or wordpress? With wordpress I understand its completely free, but you need to host it, so would need to pay hosting fees. Shopify is all in one, but you still need to pay a monthly fee?

What are the benefits/drawbacks of both shopify and wordpress? SOrry for the high school essay question haha.

Hey John,

I'm glad I can help! :)

I'm a huge fan of Wordpress. I recommend it 100%!

That being said, for a "test" you could start off even more simple. All you need is three basic HTML pages. You don't need a blogging or online payment solution to test payments.

Just get a designer to do up a sales page in HTML, A checkout page will all of the fields for their personal and billing info (even a link to paypal), and when they submit their info or link to paypal they are taken to your 3rd page, that is just another simple HTML page saying "sorry, orders have been going crazy. None of your information has been stored and your card has not been charged. We will let you know when the product is available next!"

For an actual sales website and payment system I would just use Wordpress (free and awesome for drawing traffic) and Paypal (also free) to start with. If it blows up then you can look at Shopify.

Shopify is a great service but keep it simple at the beginning.

I know lots of people (myself included) that use Wordpress and Paypal or Clickbank and make a killing! :)

Does this help?

[kamakiri]

Yep. The best way is to leave paypal off your site until you are ready to go live. You can see what I am doing on one of my test sites:

gamebrain.us (http://gamebrain.us)

[johndekay]

thanks guys!

so you would recommend using wordpress and signing up to some hosting first, then going shopify later? Could you guys recommend any good places to start for a newbie in wordpress? I've read a lot of people use the thesis theme for shop pages? Any reason why?

hey kamakiri, nice site. I reckon i couldve used some of that stuff back in the old cs days haha. Did you use wordpress to build that site?

[kamakiri]

I paid some guy $350. Put the job on Elance and chose the company that had the best portfolio. It isn't wordpress though.