Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

When you’re about to log into an e-commerce site like eBay, you should make sure you’re actually on eBay, rather than one of the hundreds of phishing sites designed to look like eBay. You cannot rely on the content area to determine where you are, because the appearance of a site can easily be copied. In Firefox, look at the address bar to determine where you are; see the section below on hostnames for how to interpret this information.

Phishing usually involves forged email, so be especially careful after clicking a link in an email that appears to come from a site like eBay. When in doubt, close the window and use another method to reach the site.

Firefox has anti-phishing that detects about 80% of phishing sites, mostly by maintaining a list of known phishing sites. Since the people who run phishing scams frequently have tens of thousands of compromised computers on which to host phishing sites, the 80% figure is unlikely to improve. So while using Firefox protects you from some phishing scams, you can’t rely on it and you still need to check what site you’re on.

Not too long ago, 2Checkout added Paypal Express Checkout to their checkout process “by popular demand“. The essence of this blog post is to examine the impact of this on the web hosting industry.

Online payment systems are very popular with web hosting [and domain name registration] companies. Paying online speeds-up the order process for getting a new web hosting account and leading the pack of online wallets is Paypal. Aside Visa and Mastercard credit/debit cards, online wallets like Paypal have become increasingly popular online. What makes Paypal even better is that it can function as a 3rd-party credit card payment processor. Paypal has thus been enabling several Small-Office-Home-Office [SOHO] businesses worldwide to accept payment online.

That said, Paypal is not available in every country and available in some countries on a “Send money only” basis. This makes accepting payment online via Paypal very difficult for online merchants in such countries where Paypal is not fully functional or not available at all. The fact that 2Checkout now includes Paypal as a checkout option empowers millions of online merchants [web hosts included] to accept payment from Paypal’s over 130 million users. Several leading global brands have increasingly been adding Paypal as payment option on their respective websites, in recent times.

According to 2Checkout’s blog post on this issue:

This will allow customers to pay for products and services with the funds in their PayPal account, even if the supplier does not have their own PayPal account and only uses 2Checkout.

The PayPal payment option will be available for all non-recurring orders in the following currencies:

* Australian Dollar (AUD)
* Canadian Dollar (CAD)
* Euro (EUR)
* British Pound (GBP)
* Japanese Yen (JPY)
* U.S. Dollar (USD)

2Checkout is much easier to join and use though they would verify your information if they have any reason to suspect you/your business.

In case you’re a web host helping your clients with e-commerce solutions, the e-commerces scripts under Fantastico (if you’re using CPanel) have modules that allow merchants to accept payment via 2Checkout. CubeCart, OSCommerce and Zen Cart are all available for installation via Fantastico and there are several other equally good e-commerce shopping scripts out there that integrate well with 2Checkout.

Do you run a web hosting business? How do you accept payments online? Has the addition of Paypal to 2Checkout’s checkout process had an positive/negative impact on your web hosting business or online store? Share your thoughts here and now.