Hello,

I have T-shirts of my website to sale on my website.

But I have no clue how. I want a credit card option so the buyer could buy it through credit card.

Anyone want to help me get started??

Anthony

instabill.com, revecom.com

IMHO avoid: ccnow

Hey

I heard a lot about Installbill, I went to the site and read what it was about and all but how does it work?

They use there SSL and do the CC processing, and then do I have to send the T-shirt (or whatever your selling) when I approve the transaction? or do they send the content

Anthony

What does your site do now? Can you just add it as another product on your site?

If you already have a merchant account and SSL setting up a simple order form shouldn't be hard.

Well, our website debuted this late Oct. and we haven't sold anything yet. We are planning to sell T-shirts and this is our first time selling a product of ours online. I just wanted to know how Instabill and those companies work.

get a merchant account if your t-shirt sales is gonna go up.Maybe one day you gonna have a t-shirt company.

Lol ;')

Well its a T-shirt of my website so I don't know about a acutall t-shirt company, but thanks

Cya

if you do get popular give me a 30% cut since i gave you the idea

First, you may find this link interesting. Just one of a few places that do this: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/home/

But, if you want to go the more traditional route of printing up t-shirts, instbill, or paypal.com is something that would work for you. Getting a merchant account for *possible* t-shirt sales seems a bit much. If you start selling enough to justify the monthly expense, then yes, merch-it. Otherwise...

You put a picture and/or description of your product up on your site, and a link (can be a text link, image, buynow, etc.), and when the person clicks on it, they get to your instabill secure order form. They enter in the details, cc number, and submit. You get an email that tells you that some poor sucker bought a t-shirt :)

You send it after you verify that the order went through.

That http://www.cafepress.com/cp/home/ link is very interseting.

But why they do that? I'd mean how do they make money, and if its off banners, its kinda obscene since I seriously don't think banners could acutally cover for t-shirts and the printing and the other stuff they offer.

Thanks.

Originally posted by Chicken
First, you may find this link interesting. Just one of a few places that do this: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/home/


Very nice Chicken, thanks for the link, is it the same as vstore.com? You have referral ID there?

I'm not sure if CafePress is what Tanger is looking for.

CafePress is a company that creates an e-storefront for you, you load the images you want available on t-shirts and other merchandise, you get to mark up the price as much as you want, and CafePress actually prints the t-shirts and mails them to the buyer, giving you the profit based on your markup.

An imprinted t-shirt may have a base price of $13.99, If you don't mark it up, the buyer buys your t-shirts at $13.99 and you get nothing. CafePress imprints your graphic on the shirt as per your specifications and ships it out. They obviously have their pricing set up so they make a profit on anything sold in their shops.

If, on the other hand, you think someone might buy your shirt for $14.99, well then you'd make a dollar on every one that was sold.

I have a client who is a musician (RayBalconis.com). He and his band LOVE their CafePress stores. And they've sold quite a few t-shirts from them too.

You can see links to their CafePress.com sites below (one for each bandmember and one for merchandise with the cover of their CD):

http://www.cafepress.com/raystore
http://www.cafepress.com/mo
http://www.cafepress.com/markberry
http://www.cafepress.com/problemgirl

Once there, click on the special links to view the back of the t-shirts. They've kept the t-shirt fronts pretty simple.

I recommend CafePress for those small design clients like musicians or websites with a high sense of community who want easy self-created merchandise to help build word-of-mouth among their fans.

If you own a CafePress site of your own, then for each new CafePress store opened up that you refer you can get a commission on sales from those stores.

Sean

I will recommend going with one of the services mentioned here. Either paypal or revcome will do fine. Once your business starts moving and you feel you can clearly justify for the payment, then can get a merchant account. Merchants accounts are expensive to get right off the bat. Weigh your options and see how your business kicks off. There's always time to upgrade. Good luck.

There is an excellent resource on this subject at http://www.merchantworkz.com . Merchant Workz is an independent reviewer/evaluator/comparer of merchant account providers. It's an excellent resource.

But before you get involved with a company, make sure you know the general risks involved with MOTO (Mail Order/Transaction Order) credit cards. Many companies will try to charge you an 8-10% discount rate (for those who haven't looked at this closely, that's the percentage of transaction that the credit card companies take for themselves), based on the myth that credit card transactions done over the Internet are of a higher risk than those done over the phone or fax. In fact, the risk is considered by banks to be identical. The only instance where there may be a higher risk is in the case of a business (the sex trade as an example) where the rate of chargeback is high or the merchant him/herself is considered a "credit risk."

If you want to save money on your discount rate, mention to your bank that you spoke to a representative from CardService International and they offered you a rate of 2.65% (this is verifiable over the Internet), and see if they'll match or beat it. Then if they do, go to another bank and say "XXX bank offered me Y% rate", and so on and so on. A friend of mine did this for his mail-order catalog company and ended up going from a 5% discount rate to start to a 1.5% rate in the end. (Note to Canadians: this doesn't work in Canada. The only thing that will get the Canadian banks to lower their rates is if you're a member of your local Chamber of Commerce.)

Can you tell I know WAYYYYYY too much about this particular topic? :) Six months of research and studying and helping my American friend come in real handy sometimes.

I know there are more place like CafePress out there, but I don't have links to them. Might find slightly better pricing. I think it might work for you for two reasons. One, you don't have to go out and have t-shirts printed up at a cost to you (and possibly get stuck with 500 shirts that no one wants). Two, they handle all the payment processing and shipping.

Will you make money off it? Doubtful, as the base costs are pretty high. But if you're just looking to provide a quick and easy way of offering items to your visitors, and you don't want to worry about payment processing and shipping orders, then I think Cafepress (or similar), is a decent, quick and easy thing that anyone could use to build up a little community.

I wouldn't recommend marking it up either at all, or much, since GAP can charge $45 for a t-shirt with their name on it, you can't. :)

No referal link, or ID from me.

I agree that PayPal is easy to work with. But one down side is that buyers have to be members of PP inorder to use the service. You may have non-members who want to purchase but don't want to sign up for PP.