Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Ping: Alchiba and Other Instabill Users

[spcover]

Alchiba,

I followed your signature to your site (nice site!) and noticed you're using Instabill. I recently signed up with Revecom (who recently bought Instabill). They have a very nice system that is similar.

My question to you and others who might use similar services is how you integrate the online payments system into your signup process on your website. I'll be designing my site within the next few weeks and can use the insight.

Now, at your site (linkstream.net) and mine too when it's done, there is a list of web hosting plans with links to a Signup Page.

At this Signup page you list your plans sequentially and each one has an Instabill Quick Buy button. This takes you to a payments page that asks for your name, address, and credit card information.

What's missing is any mention of what domain name the user is planning on hosting with you. So I'm assuming that after the Instabill page, the user is redirected to a "web good page" back at your site where he queries the customer for more information.

What information would that be? That's all I want to know. And maybe the URL of a web good page so I can see the implementation.

What information should you require from your users for hosting their sites?

Revecom allows me to add custom fields to the online order screen. I added "Domain Name" and "Comments". I'm wondering if this is sufficient. See

http://secure.paysystems.com/sale.as...AC2AECBD3547DA
(Can that URL be any longer?)

Go to the second page and you'll see my custom fields. I'm wondering if that is enough. Is there anythign I'm missing?

Alchiba, my apologies for singling out your site. It's great, clean, professional and informative. I'm always looking at everyone's sites to see how they're built. As a newbie, I'm just looking for some advice by someone whose using a similar payment service.

Any help or comments would be appreciated. Everyone else - feel free to chip in with some advice too.

Thanks in advance,

Sean

[CRego3D]

God .. posts like these reming me of how happy I am I got my merchant account

[akula]

well, looks like you all happy with revecom services.

[GordonH]

With Instabill you can add extra fields to the payment form to include any other information you need.

I used them for a short time and they were OK, but I have my own merchant account now with real time authorisation gateway (worldpay.com) which is much more customisable.

Gordon

[alchiba]

spcover, thanks so much for the kind remarks about the site. I don't mind being singled out as long as it's for good reasons! :-)

I think your payment page is sufficient and don't see a problem with it. My sign-up process isn't better, just different.

I don't use custom fields on the Instabill page, so my payment page is the first of two steps in the sign-up. Once Instabill clears the sale, the customer is sent back to a domain order page on my site. Here they fill out the domain name, comments or special instructions, and whether it's a new domain or a transfer. I also require an off-network email address. This page kicks off a process that emails me with all the data (including IP addy, date/time of order), verifies the customer's email address, inserts the customer/domain info into a database and displays a "Thank You" page with some additional info.

I would much prefer a single-page order form that does the same thing, but this is how I chose to do things for now.

Carlos, it isn't as bad as it sounds. There are merchant systems out there that are far more difficult to integrate.

[Edited by alchiba on 10-30-2000 at 08:39 AM]

[teck]

i use revecom and cant figure a way out to charge a setup fee. if i include the setup fee in total cart, the customer will be charged that fee everytime the card is charged...

[JayC]

Teck, are you using a shopping cart -- where the customer adds items to a cart and then "checks out," or the "Quick Sale" service?

The shopping cart is intended for tangible items, so it doesn't have a setup cost. If you use Quick Sale items, there is a field in which to enter the setup cost.

[teck]

I believe it's the quick sale. I think I missed the setup cost option. Let me take a look again.

[teck]

Originally posted by teck
I believe it's the quick sale. I think I missed the setup cost option. Let me take a look again.

There it is! How did I miss that?