Twitter is like a forum where the default setting for each user is to ignore all other users. When you sign up, you see no posts, an empty forum. You choose who to unignore by “following” other Twitter users.

Want to know what the CEOs of tech companies had to say this week? Follow CEO of Zappos Tony Hsieh, Virgin CEO Richard Branson, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Now your forum fills up with posts only by those people, interleaved chronologically, and available to read at your leisure. Like a forum, you don’t have to be around when they write, you can read everything they’ve written on Twitter in the past.

When you become “friends” with these people on Facebook, you also see anything they’ve written there. But you also see the replies to everything they’ve written, the immature and rude comments left by teens and trolls, left by users you’re not related to at all. Not so on Twitter, you have absolute control over whose messages appear on your page.

What if you also want to cyberstalk a couple celebrities? You’d love to know what Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, Taylor Swift and Britney Spears are up to every day. Follow them and you’ll see all the updates they’ve made.

But you don’t have to mix up all your celebrity news and business advice from the CEOs. Twitter lets you create “lists”, which allow you to group the people you follow. These are like threads of a forum. Put the CEOs in your “CEO” list, and the stars in your “Celebrities” list, and you have two pages — like two threads — to read, instead of just one containing everything said by everyone you follow.

Twitter is not just a way to keep up with famous people, to simply listen. You have your say too, and all the same rules apply for the other millions of users. The messages you post to Twitter, your “tweets”, can be read by anyone that follows you, and you can be added to their lists.

Update: v1.3.1 fixes bugs with the visual editor and scheduled posts.

Leave a comment if you run into any bugs. I hope to fix up the archive tagger plugin soon as well.

Buyer Complaints, Escalated Claims, Unauthorized Claims and Chargebacks

There are four types of disputes that can be brought against you over a PayPal payment by the sender of that payment (your customer).

Buyer Complaints

Buyer complaints are the simplest form of dispute in the PayPal system. The buyer is unhappy with their purchase for some reason, and asks to dispute the purchase with you through PayPal’s system. They identify the type of purchase the payment was for, and choose from a list of reasons they are unhappy.

An e-mail is sent to the merchant, you, that a buyer is disputing a payment. The funds are temporarily held so that you cannot spend or withdraw them from your account. You log in to your account and have the option of sending the buyer messages, issuing a partial refund and issuing a full refund. The hope is that by sending messages back and forth through the PayPal site, you and the buyer will resolve the dispute without PayPal’s assistance, ending in either the buyer withdrawing the dispute, or you issuing a full refund which automatically closes it.

At no point does PayPal actually step in unless either you or the buyer chooses to escalate the dispute to a claim. Until that point, there is no difference between selling physical goods and intangibles, as PayPal is not involved and their policies aren’t relevant.

Escalated Claims

A claim, which is the result of escalating a dispute, is a whole different matter. Escalating a dispute to a claim is a request for PayPal to step in, review the messages both parties have left, and make a decision in favor of one party or the other, resulting in either issuing a refund to the buyer or closing the claim and leaving the funds with the merchant.

A claim is governed by the Buyer Protection Policy, a policy which is designed to protect PayPal users from being ripped off by unscrupulous merchants — eBay sellers whose descriptions don’t match what they’re selling, or who don’t ship the product at all.

The Buyer Protection Policy explicitly excludes two general categories of disputes — those over the quality of goods, and those over payments for intangibles such as services, virtual goods and downloads.

If the buyer truthfully identified the payment as one for a service or intangible, then the claim gets automatically closed in your favor. PayPal sends both parties a message that the Buyer Protection Policy does not cover that purchase, and the hold on the payment is removed, returning it to your balance.

If the buyer is dishonest and categorized the payment as one of the physical item categories, then PayPal begins its investigation by asking you for shipping details to prove you shipped whatever was purchased to the buyer. Since you can’t fill out any of the fields in the page requesting this information, your best bet for having the claim closed in your favor is to choose “other” as the shipper, and write a message such as “This payment was for virtual goods, not a physical good, and is not covered by the buyer protection policy”. 9/10 times, once the PayPal representative reviewing your case reads that, they will recategorize the claim and close it in your favor.

Unauthorized Claims

A buyer can also identify a payment as unauthorized, meaning that someone other than the account owner initiated it. Unfortunately phishing and password stealing malware does lead to this happening, and it can be a major problem if you’re selling services or virtual goods. You’re an easy target since the criminal gets instant benefit from buying from you — they don’t have to wait for a physical product to get shipped, or reveal that they live in a different location than the address on the stolen PayPal account.

You don’t have the same protection here you have with claims. PayPal protects its customers from unauthorized use of their accounts, and that means someone has to pay when it happens — and that’s you, not PayPal. You have a chance to provide any evidence you have showing that the payment was not, in fact, unauthorized, such as e-mail correspondence with the buyer. If you don’t have any evidence, though, you have to eat the costs.

The only thing you can do to reduce losses to unauthorized claims is to make sure they don’t happen in the first place. Identifying risky payments before you accept them is a challenge and how you do so will usually be specific to what you’re selling.

Chargebacks

Chargebacks operate under an entirely different set of rules, primarily because PayPal doesn’t get to set them. A chargeback occurs when a payment to you was funded with a credit card, and the card holder has called their bank and asked to reverse the payment. Reasons a bank will initiate a chargeback include a claim that the payment was unauthorized, that what was purchased was never received, or that it was materially different from what was advertised.

Technically when a buyer initiates a chargeback through their bank, they are charging back PayPal. It is PayPal that actually placed a charge on the credit card — they did it on your behalf, but it was through their merchant account underwritten through their bank.

PayPal passes on the chargeback to you by holding the funds from the payment, similar to a dispute. They then ask you to assist in disputing the chargeback — PayPal must dispute the chargeback under the rules provided by Visa and MasterCard if they hope to recover the funds. If the dispute is not successful, the chargeback stands, and both you and PayPal lose the funds.

Additionally, if there is a fee associated with receipt of the chargeback, which there often is, that fee is passed on to your account.

PayPal’s Buyer Protection Policy does not come into play here, since they are playing by the bank system’s rules, not their own. The PayPal Seller Protection Policy, however, does. This is a policy designed to protect you, the seller, from bogus claims. However, it only applies to physical goods again, so if you’re selling services or virtual goods, you have no shipping information to provide to make use of that policy.

PayPal will dispute the chargeback with the card issuing bank on your and their behalf, hoping to get the money back. You can help by providing any evidence you have that the service was provided to the right person, or that the virtual goods were received by the right person. Unlike in the case of a claim, you’re on the defensive and anything you can provide can help PayPal with its dispute. Any e-mails, logs of downloads, IP information that shows you provided service/goods to the right person should be submitted.

Tips for avoiding disputes

The best thing you can do to minimize losses due to these types of disputes is to avoid them ever happening. Don’t put yourself in a situation where a buyer can dispute a payment and incorrectly classify it as a physical good by simply providing what they purchased, responding to support e-mails in a timely manner and trying to resolve any disputes outside the system.

Keep records of everything. When it comes to unauthorized payments and fraud-related chargebacks, any evidence you can provide will improve your chances of having the payment returned to you. Record the time and IP address when each order is placed. Match any contact information provided through your website with the information on the PayPal account. Keep copies of all customer e-mails, and log the time and IP address when virtual goods are downloaded.

Also be aware of activity which may tip you off to fraud — especially big ticket purchases or many purchases in the same day, an IP address which maps to a risky country, or e-mails requesting you provide services faster than usual.

If the number of claims and chargebacks you’re receiving gets out of hand, not only will you be losing a lot of money, but PayPal might consider closing your account. Visa and MasterCard mandate that fraud rates have to be below a certain percentage, and PayPal will close accounts that are raising their fraud rates too much.

At that point you need to consider doing more to verify each order before accepting it — require proof of ID be faxed to you before taking an order, or calling each customer to verify they placed the order.

Even if you’re not looking for a new way to track your online advertising and get more sales out of your advertising spend, if you read my blog, you’re probably involved with online business in some way.

Check out the affiliate program for an opportunity to earn 25% recurring commissions — you get 25% of the monthly payment of any referral, every month, for as long as that person stays a customer.

• Plan and Develop the Software
  • Determine what data will need to be collected and stored.
  • Design the database, then convert the schema to SQL/DDL statements.
  • Decide on the major units of modularity for the software, lay out the application structure.
  • Code the model layer classes which retrieve, represent, modify and store the data,
    along with stubs for the controller that are just intelligent enough to start recording
    ad clicks and conversions. Doing this and verifying the queries and the code were accurate
    took over a month (this is the core of what the software does, so it has to be right).
  • Complete the controller code with a basic skeletal UI.
  • Design a proper interface and write complete user interfaces to the reports.
  • Code the CRUD and authentication stuff — logging in, adding campaigns, editing
    ads, importing and exporting data, etc.
• Plan and Design the Website
  • Find a designer to create a logo so I can set up a splash page for the service
    and finish the UI design.
  • Mock up the website layout and pages needed.
  • Explore galleries and directories of other sites to identify what kind of design
    I think will work for this site.
  • Write up a design brief and find a designer to do the work. I ended up doing this
    with a contest at 99Designs for about $950.
    A week and a half later, get the finished design in Photoshop format.
  • Slice and code the design in HTML and CSS, with days spent hacking it for
    Internet Explorer 6 (still not quite there!).
• Write the Website Copy
  • Spend a lot of time identifying benefits to focus on.
  • Write, write and rewrite feature pages.
  • Create supporting graphics, screenshots, etc.
  • Produce a promotional video for the service, highlighting key benefits and features.
  • Decide on initial plans and pricing, considering competition and target customers.
• Prepare Support and Documentation
  • Spend days recording screencasts of how to use the service to track
    advertising, integrate with various sites, import and export data, etc.
  • Convert screencasts to Flash videos, write up the HTML pages to embed them.
  • Write tutorials, glossary, etc.
  • Sign up with ZenDesk for ticket management,
    help desk/knowledgebase, forums, feedback forms, etc.
  • Set up e-mail hosting with Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust), since my own
    spam filters suck. Make DNS changes for the e-mail hosting and help desk.
• CYA & Legal Stuff
  • Write a Terms of Service agreement to protect myself as much as possible.
    Very important, businesses are going to be using this service to make material financial decisions.
  • Write a Privacy Policy with the help of the Direct Marketing Association’s generator.
  • Come up with a backup and recovery plan, and write code to create offiste copies of all
    user data each night.
  • Document all the server software needed, configuration changes to make, etc. in order to
    set up the service on a different server in case the first should crash/die/disappear/etc. Guesstimate
    capacity until I need to upgrade.
• Plan the Marketing Campaign
  • Sign up with an e-mail marketing company to manage mailing lists, autoresponders, track e-mail
    opens and bounces, etc. Set up the lists, confirmation and reply mail text.
  • Write a 12 page guide to optimizing AdWords Quality Score to give away for free to
    e-mail newsletter signups.
  • Contact affiliate networks about support for recurring commissions. Figure out what’s
    reasonable to pay to affiliates without destroying any profit margin. Pay an overly high
    setup fee to open the new account.
  • Compile a list of bloggers that reach target customers and are willing to write a
    sponsored review of the service when it’s available.
  • Start a Twitter account specific to the service and start following people that talk about
    advertising and tracking every day.
  • Start an online marketing blog to establish the service as an authority in the field and
    attract search engine traffic to the site, potentially resulting in new customers. Spend a day
    finding and installing MySQL libraries for PHP 5.2, which is not yet officially supported
    by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so that WordPress will run.
  • Buy SSL certificate not only to secure the signup/payment forms, but to have a “secure site”
    badge to show on those pages to increase conversions.
  • Prewrite e-mails for the autoresponder (drip campaign, automatically sent on schedule).
  • Start writing a press release and comparing wire services.
• Getting Ready to Launch
  • Decide how to handle payments, upgrades, downgrades, overage fees. Look at invoicing
    services for the overage fees beyond the monthly subscriptions.
  • Set up Authorize.net’s Customer Information Manager for PCIDSS-compliant storage of
    payment data for the monthly billing. Write the code to automatically charge customers each
    month. Test test test.
  • Set up PayPal subscription links, IPN script to handle updating the database.
  • Write and test a signup/payment form.

I’m probably 80% through all this work… hope it’s worth it. Using w3roi, I’ve saved myself about
$200 a month by eliminating unprofitable ads, keywords, times of day, countries, etc. But I think I’ve
invested so much time and money into this, it’ll take a long time for that to add up.

The website for w3roi is now well under way, but most of the content will be in the “learning center”, a training and support knowledge base. That’s going to involve lots of writing, screenshots and desktop recording for videos. I’ll have a busy week.