In today’s video, we take a look at merchant accounts and shopping carts, including when you need them, what’s best for affiliate traffic vs. paid traffic and advertising, and lots more.

Mentioned in the video are:

Merchant accounts:

Shopping carts:

Affiliate platforms with shopping cart functionality

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Video Transcript:

Hey what’s up. This is Jason Drohn. I just got a great question from a client and what is the best way to take people’s money basically. We talk so much about conversion, we talk so much about converting leads to buyers, what is the best way to take funds from their account and move them into ours? How do we convert prospects to buyers and successfully take their money?

Now, I know it’s just kind of one of those things that really goes unsaid. Because so much of what we do from a marketing standpoint is turning prospects into customers. But actually taking their money and from their credit card and putting it into our bank account, how does that happen? There’s a couple things, couple ways to do it. The first is to set up your own merchant processor. You’re own merchant account. And a merchant account very simply means something like PayPal. Something that a customer can put their credit card number in, it takes money out of their credit card and puts it into our bank account.

It used to be that there were traditional merchant accounts that you needed to set up first. And they were a pain because it was all phone based stuff. You had to call between the hours of 8:00 and 5:00 and so on and so forth and god forbid they shut down your merchant account and something happens or what not. Now in the last like two or three years, this new breed of merchant accounts has gotten very popular. Things like Stripe and Braintree being two of them. Stripe is a very widely adopted merchant account. It’s also very easy to set up. We use Stripe quite a bit because you can set up a merchant account in minutes. As opposed to needing approval from Authorize.net and then having them take forever and then jumping through risks, the risk department and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Stripe is a good one for your own merchant account.

You can also use PayPal. At the end of the day, PayPal will work fine. As long as it’s tied to an order form. Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Authorize on Net, they’re great from a gateway standpoint. They handle the transaction. They take the money out of credit card and put it into your account. But they don’t have order forms. As Stripe sits, you can’t just set up a Stripe account and then say, “Go pay me through Stripe.” You need an order form. And that’s where pieces of software like SamCart and ThriveCart and even Shopify, that’s where they all come into play because they’re all order forms, they integrate with a merchant gateway. You set them up and then from there they take a customer’s money.

The order form houses the order form, then the transaction gets processed through the merchant gateway and then ends up in your bank account. If you were driving your own traffic then that’s the best solution for you. Having your own merchant gateway. Because funds are deposited in your account within days. Usually two days or three days. As opposed to using a JVZoo or ClickBank where funds are … With JVZoo they’re processed instantly through PayPal. With ClickBank they send you a check or they do a direct deposit so you might wait a week or two weeks or three weeks in order to actually get your money. That’s a problem. Especially when you’re driving your own traffic.

Now, where it makes sense to use a ClickBank, a JVZoo, that’s when you are relying on affiliates to drive your traffic for you. With ClickBank and JVZoo the payment comes in. ClickBank immediately sends your prospect 50% and you 50%. You don’t need to worry about the bookkeeping and making sure that affiliates are paid and all that other stuff. At the end of the day, if you are driving affiliate traffic then JVZoo or ClickBank are the better options for taking a customer’s money.

Where JVZoo falls is JVZoo is very, they’re awesome in the biz op space, in the internet marketing space, business development space, anything business tech oriented is great for JVZoo. They have tens, hundreds of thousands of affiliates that will promote your product for you. If you’re promoting a health and fitness offer or a 4X offer or an investment offer or survivalist offer then you’re better bet is to go and put that offer in ClickBank. ClickBank has, that last I knew, over 200,000 active affiliates. In every vertical and niche imaginable so they’re the better place to get you the traffic that you want for your own niche offers.

But, with ClickBank you have to wait for funds. Whether it’s a week or two weeks, depending on how you set it up, you still need to wait for that check to come in the mail. Which means if you’re turning around and reinvesting that money back into pay traffic, then that’s an issue.

Real quick, just a recap, if you’re running your own traffic you should be processing your own payments so you should be using Stripe or using Braintree or using Authorize on Net tied with an order form. SamCart has fantastic order form software. If you are relying on affiliates to send traffic for you then it’s advantageous to run your order forms through JVZoo or ClickBank. I hope that helps anybody who’s in that kind of a payment processing conundrum.