 Today, we're going to be talking about e-commerce, and this is not so much about e-commerce as how you can deal with your clients, but it's how to help you select the appropriate e-commerce solution for your client. This is who I am, and this is the WooCommerce. WooCommerce is the Swiss Army knife with 276 blades. It will do everything. It's too big to fit in your pocket, and not everybody needs 276 blades. If all you need is a bottle opener, this is a little bit too much for what you need. So what I'm going to do first is give you this link, and I'll give it again at the end of the talk, but I have a checklist, and the slides will be up on my website at twofishweb.com, Talks WCATL 2016. There will be a checklist at the end. I'm going to go through a lot of options today, and the checklist will help you go through these questions that I'm going to present to you to ask of your client or of yourself and help you make a decision as to which is the appropriate e-commerce solution for your site. And the first question, obviously, to ask is what are you selling? Are you selling digital products? Digital products are going to be things like e-books, video or audio downloads. Photography would be included in this for a lot of people who are photographers and want to sell downloads of prints of their photographs. Are you selling appointments, as a massage therapist or a coach might do? Are you selling video courses? Are you collecting donations? We were talking about nonprofits a little earlier, and nonprofits are really good about needing to collect donations, and they don't need a full-fledged e-commerce solution just to collect their donations. So if you are selling, we're going to take a little side trip here. If you are selling only digital products, here are some things to consider. For e-books, video or audio downloads, then you might want to take a look at easy digital downloads, or iTunes Exchange, or PayPal buttons, depending on what your needs are. If anybody has any questions as we go along, feel free to ask. If you want to come and talk to me about your particular situation later, feel free to do that as well. For donations, if you're collecting donations, then Give is a plug-in by a company called Word Impress, and that's what they do. It was built to accept donations from nonprofits. It will also do other things, but that is their main thrust, and that's what they want to be known for. PayPal button also, PayPal has a way to set up a specific button that says donate here, and you can set up recurring donations through PayPal as well as through Give. Give will accept Stripe, which means that they can set up recurring payments through credit cards, so that might be something that you want to think about. If you're selling appointments or selling courses, then PayPal buttons, iTunes Exchange, or if you need to set appointments and get paid for them, then WooCommerce might be the best option for you. Any questions so far? Right. We can do a membership site, or you can... I have some clients who set like eight weeks, and there'll be one thing a week for eight weeks, and then it stops. Some of them are membership sites where it's an ongoing monthly thing, and you get access to new material over those next few months. If you prefer a service, and we'll talk about the difference between self-hosted and services. If you prefer a service and you're doing only eBooks and digital files, then here, too, that are really well thought of and that I have had good experience with, is Gumroad and eJunkie. Now, both of those do require a monthly fee, and in some cases, they will require a per transaction fee. So these are things to think about when we're talking about services versus self-hosted. Let's go back to what are you selling? Okay, we've talked about digital products. I covered it pretty quickly, and I'm glad to talk about it later if anybody's got specific questions. But let's go on to talking about physical products, which is what most eCommerce stores are about. And there's some different things that you need to find out if you're talking to a client, and the client says, I've got products I'm going to sell, I'm selling things. You ask, is it a simple product? I do an awful lot of work with artists who have a painting, they're not selling copies of it, they just want to sell the one thing. So you've got one specific thing there, or like Etsy sellers who have one particular handmade handbag, that's a simple product. There are variable products with some single price that would be like somebody that makes coffee cups with different slogans on them, or t-shirts with different artworks, something like that. Variable products with price variation would be like t-shirts where you have small, medium, and large, or one price, and extra large is a slightly more of a price. And the reason that you need to know these things is that some of the more simple eCommerce solutions won't handle price variations. They might be able to handle variable products so that you could sell t-shirts in red, green, or blue, but you couldn't change the price if somebody wanted an extra large. You would have to build a separate product for that. The next thing to ask is how are you going to be paid? Are you going to do PayPal only? Are you going to do Stripe, which will allow you to accept credit cards, or do you have your own merchant account? I have a number of clients who are using different eCommerce solutions, and I have a couple of them who have had their own merchant accounts prior to going online and wanted to continue to use them. So that's a consideration. If they're using something that you can run through, authorized.net, then that's great, but it also is another variable you're going to have to deal with in figuring out which eCommerce solution you choose for them. So, so far we've covered what are you selling, digital products and the variations on physical products, and how will you be paid? The next two questions are really important and they can get really in-depth, so let's look at those. Sales taxes. You're going to have to collect sales tax in almost every jurisdiction, and this varies wildly. Sometimes you have to collect sales taxes only on physical products. Sometimes you have to collect it on digital as well as physical products. Sometimes you have to collect on shipping. Some places you don't have to collect on shipping, and there are a few jurisdictions that will actually charge sales tax on services. One of the jurisdictions in Alabama, not all of them, but one of them charges for shipping and for delivery. Like if I ordered a washing machine from Lowe's and it was delivered to my house and there was a $25 delivery fee, I would pay sales tax on that $25 delivery fee. And so you need to know things like that before you start setting up. Taxes can get a little involved and we'll talk about some of that a little bit later. Do you need to collect stacked taxes? That's a case in almost every jurisdiction where you have state tax, which I believe in Georgia is something like 4%, and then you have city tax, you may have county tax on top of that, all kinds of municipalities, and if you're inside the city of Atlanta, the tax rate is going to be eight point something. I can't remember now what it was, but you're gonna have to have that set up so that people inside the city of Atlanta are charged at the full rate and someone who is in Athens, Georgia would only be charged at the state of Georgia rate, and somebody who's in Nebraska wouldn't be charged sales tax at all. So it gets pretty complicated. Another thing to think of, if you're dealing with digital products only, and these are auto-delivered digital products, is the European Union's VAT. That is something that came about a little over a year ago, and if you are selling a digital product that is auto-delivered, that is someone will go to PayPal, put their money in, and immediately get a download link so that there is no, sorry, so that there is no intervention, no human intervention. I'll go back and start over, sorry. Sorry, the photographer had asked me to step out of the way, so that was a reason, I'm good, okay. Okay, I'm good. If you're selling digital products that have no intervention, that is if someone clicks a link on your website, goes to PayPal, pays for it, gets a link and immediately is able to download it without any human person having to interact with it, then those sales are by law subject to European Union VAT. So if you're selling to someone, if it is a possibility that someone in Germany could purchase a digital file from you under these situations, then you would owe money to the European Union. So be aware of that. It's not something to panic over, but it's just something to be aware of when you're talking to someone who is selling software licenses or something, eBooks, something like that. It's a little bit involved. Shipping is the other big thing. How are you going to handle shipping costs? This, again, this is physical products only, but there are several ways that you can do it, and I have them listed here. That can be included in the product price, which is the simplest way. And then you can actually advertise free shipping. It's not really free, but we'll pretend. Flat rate is also pretty easy to put together, and that's where you have like $5 per order or you have this item costs a dollar to ship because it's flat and it's fairly small and can put it in an envelope. And this product that I'm selling is going to cost $7.50 because it's larger and needs to go in a box. You can do a per order shipping rate, and that's where all orders get X amount slapped onto them as the shipping cost, and the advantages of that are that your customer who comes to the website can immediately see $20 shipping on all orders, and if they're ordering something small, that might be too much, but at least it's a known thing. They're not immediately having to check out and then see, oh, $25 in shipping? It was only a $17 product, and I'm sure you run into that. The last way, and this is the most precise way of dealing with shipping, but it's also the most complicated, is when you have some module in the program that will phone home to the Postal Service or to FedEx or to UPS to get the actual rate for that particular product in that particular size box. It's more involved because you're gonna have to do weights and dimensions on every single product, and then the module will, in a virtual sense, pack the box and say, okay, we've got a box going to this zip code, and it's this long, this wide, this high, and it weighs 14 pounds. How much is that gonna cost to ship? So those modules are a little more involved, but it's going to be the most accurate, the most precise way of figuring the exact shipping on an order. Something that you and your client both need to know. Do you want a site or a shop that's hosted on your own site or do you want a service? And the three C's here are the things that you need to consider when you're talking to your client. That's control, cost, and convenience. And what I do when I'm talking to a client about a shopping situation is find out by series of questions which is most important. Are they most concerned about convenience? Are they most concerned about a low cost method? Are they worried about control? Control in this case is can you make it look like the rest of the website? Are they gonna stay on the site when they check out or are they gonna go off to another site to check out and then come back to your site to finish up the order? So these are things that you need to know about. And we'll talk about pros and cons next. What I have, the logos that I have on this particular slide on the left are some of the self-hosted and on the right are some of the services. We're not gonna have time to get really in depth with each of these options. But as I say, I'm available to talk later if anybody has a specific question they want to ask. Okay, control is usually the biggest issue. And in this case, your client wants to make sure that everything is hosted on his or her website. That the person doesn't get whisked off to PayPal to pay and then have to come back to finish the checkout. They're worried about things like Shopify or Gumroad or eJunkie and it doesn't match the branding on their own website. That's a big issue for a lot of people. And a lot of cases you cannot do a great deal toward customizing the checkout page on a service. So if they need to have custom branding, if they need to have everybody checking out on their own site, if they need to have some kind of custom programming, then you're looking at a self-hosted solution. Otherwise, convenience and cost are probably going to be the hallmarks of a service rather than a self-hosted program. Here we go. Yes, do we have a question? No problem. It just, when the hands are waving, I assume that there's a question back there. Okay, convenience. How technically savvy is your client? How technically savvy are you if this is your store? Is the store something that you're willing to maintain or pay somebody to maintain or do you want somebody else to handle all that mess? That's just some things to consider there. If it's on your own website, you've got more control, but it's gonna be less convenient to maintain. Cost is the third thing. And actually, this is often the first question that somebody wants to know. How much is this thing gonna cost me? On self-hosted sites, self-hosted shopping carts, there's often an initial fee and often ongoing annual renewal fees for the software itself, for any add-ons that you may need, for maintenance, for having a consultant to come in and keep track of things for you. You're going to need an SSL, and in many cases, you're gonna need a dedicated IP for your shop. SSL is the Secure Certificate. That's the little green lock up in the website bar so that somebody will know that their transaction is being encrypted as they send information to you. The dedicated IP is a technical requirement which may be going away, but for right now, that tends to be the case. You will need a dedicated IP if you have a Secure Certificate. And you can tell your client or know for yourself that that's going to add somewhere around $50 to $100 a year to your hosting cost if you need a certificate and a dedicated IP. If your client is on shared hosting and they need a fairly complicated e-commerce solution, they may end up having to be bumped up to a larger hosting plan. So just let them know that that's a possibility. And you may not know whether they'll need a bigger hosting plan until you get into it and start looking to see what their needs are. If they choose to go with a service like Shopify, E-Junkie, Gumroad, something like that, there's usually a monthly charge to access the service and there may be a per transaction charge. PayPal, for instance, charges per transaction. They don't charge a monthly fee for basic. There are some levels of PayPal that do require monthly fees. Shopify requires a monthly charge and may or may not charge per transaction. So those are some things to look at as well in terms of cost. Questions so far? Yes. That's on my list to start. Everybody that I'm working with right now is using a certificate that has been purchased and is ongoing. So I haven't had a new one to set up Lux and Crypt but that is definitely on my list to work with the next time. Yeah. Yes. Authorize.net is your payment gateway and that is how the information gets from your website to the bank, which issues the credit card. It goes through the payment gateway and that's your Authorize.net. It goes through the payment gateway, talks to the bank, gets the information. The bank says, yes, it's okay to make this charge against the credit card. It goes back through Authorize.net and back into your website. Self-hosted in this case is the actual software that you're using, whether that's WooCommerce, iThem's Exchange, or any of the others that would be on your website. Does that make sense? Okay. Yes. I'm sorry. So here are some recommendations and these are not the best recommendation in every situation, but these are just some recommendations, some things that you can look at. And again, the checklist that you're gonna be able to download is going to help you decide which of these is gonna be the right one for the answers to your particular questions. I'm not gonna read through all these and I'll leave it up there for a minute in case you want to look at it. For the major point I want to make here is if you're looking at very simple products like my artists who are painters and they have 14 paintings on the website and they're going to include shipping in the cost of the product and they're not gonna worry too much about sales tax. We can do sales tax for in-state but we're not gonna worry about the rest of it. Then you just really need something really simple and a lot of these people are perfectly happy with just PayPal buttons. I mean it can be that simple. If you're looking at really complicated products or you've got a lot of product variations or a lot of products or complicated tax rates California and North Carolina are two of the most complicated in terms of tax rates because we talked a little bit ago about the various municipalities having different rates in both California and North Carolina. There may be other states as well with those two I've worked with. You are required to collect the sales tax for each jurisdiction. So if you are in Asheville, North Carolina and you're selling to somebody in Winston-Salem you have to collect the local tax rate for Winston-Salem and then distribute it to all the municipalities that are affected. In that case you're gonna need a robust WooCommerce solution because they're the only ones that can handle taxes like that. If it's just simple taxes then you can go with one of the simpler setups like WooCommerce, I mean, I'm sorry, I think it's Exchange or WPE Store which is one that's not very well known but it's simple and it's easy to set up. Yes, there is a plug-in, a service that will manage the money and do it for you. You can do it yourself and they will give you reports but there are services for, there are two separate services. One is called Tax Jar and there is a representative of Tax Jar here somewhere, I've seen her. Her first name's Jennifer. That's one of the ones that will integrate with WooCommerce and it will handle everything for you. If you want to hook your business checking account into Tax Jar it will actually do the payments for you as well. The other one is called Tax Cloud and it integrates with iTunes Exchange so you're looking at two separate services depending on which shopping cart solution you're using. Okay, for donations, PayPal or Give. Give is a little easier. PayPal requires you to set up a different button for every place that you need a different donation amount. So Give has your dashboard inside WordPress and it's integrated a little bit better. So here are some of the self-hosted, some of the services. I'm gonna let you look at those for a moment. And then we will. Yes, they have a Stripe integration so that you can use credit cards. They also integrate with PayPal. They do integrate with PayPal, right. You do and let's say that you have, okay, an example would be I worked, I did some work for a dog rescue group and they had places where they wanted to set up buttons where you could donate $25 as a one-time thing or you could do a recurring monthly thing and you could name $10 a month, $50 a month, whatever you wanted to do. So that's two separate buttons in PayPal. You have to go into PayPal, create those, put them separately on your website. If you wanted to, they had a fundraiser where they were selling calendars and that was a separate thing because they wanted not only the cost of the calendar but also like a roundup, the cost of the calendar and shipping was something weird, like $13.87 and they wanted to give the option to round it up to 15, round it up to 20, round it up to 25. In PayPal, each of those would have required a separate button to be set up. So GIVE will allow you to do that in a much more compact and much more robust way and it will go through PayPal as well as through Stripe if people prefer to use credit cards, yes. In general, yes they will and things like Shopify, Gumroad and eJunkie, if you're doing digital, they will handle the EUVAT problem that I spoke about before. So if you're doing digital and it's one of those that I spoke of where it's unattended, if you will. If there's no human interaction there between the push the button to buy and the delivery of the information, then you might want to take a really strong look at Gumroad or eJunkie because they will handle all that and make the payments for you. I thought I saw a hand over here, I'm sorry. Okay. How do you decide which one to choose? I should have put puppies in here since I just talked about the dog rescue. But here we have gray kitties. So you've got all these kitties and which one are you gonna choose? And here you've got the 276 blades or you've got one single awesome sharp blade that does exactly what you want it to do. And that is where the checklist comes in. It will allow you to answer these questions and then depending on your yes or no answers, there's a little spreadsheet, a little table there and it'll tell you, look at this one, look at that one, look at that one, nope, that's the wrong one. And again, there is the link, twofishweb.com, forward slash talks, forward slash WCATL 2016. The slides are up there. The checklist is up there so you can go out into the main room and download and take a look at it right now. Thank you, that is all I had. The question was, how much is heard as a website developer? How much is your responsibility for figuring out all the tax rates? If you're using something like WooCommerce, a self-hosted solution, and again, remember, WooCommerce is one of the few that will do stacked tax rates, then yes, it is gonna be up to you or your client to provide the rates for the jurisdictions that will need to be handled. That's why when I've got somebody in either of those two states, North Carolina or California in particular, I will very strongly say you really need to integrate with this particular service because otherwise you're gonna be spending all your time keeping books, really. If you are in one of the states where you have stacked tax rates, I'm from Alabama, we have 4% on the state, the city is 2%, the county is 2%. So it's fairly easy to set that up so that the shipping address, what address it's shipped to is charged the appropriate rate. It's just those two states where you have to choose or collect for each of the municipalities in the state that gets really complicated. Yes, I didn't realize it had gone away. Busy talking to you guys. Any other questions? Yes. Memberships are, okay, I think it's exchange, does memberships, will commerce does memberships? Most of the others do not. You can integrate some of them with a separate membership plugin so that you would have a plugin like, I haven't really worked with it, but Jason Coleman is here so I'm gonna mention PaidMemberships Pro and you can integrate with one of the shopping cart solutions there. But it's gonna depend on what is the main thrust of your website. Okay, is membership gonna be the main thing that they're looking at or are products gonna be the main thing with a membership on the side? Does that make sense? So do you choose your e-commerce first or do you choose your membership first? It's gonna depend on the main thrust of your website. Truly, anything else? We finished a little early so everybody gets to go and hall track for a while. Thank you.