We are pleased to announce that both Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy now support Stripe for web form card payments and Stripe for shopping cart card payments.

Stripe allows you to accept payments by credit card in a way that your customers will find very easy to use. To get started, you will first need to get a Stripe account. There are no setup fees, and the transaction charges are low.

Details of Stripe pricing are here: https://stripe.com/pricing

Once you have your Stripe account, log in to your control panel, follow the simple instructions to “connect” your account, and you’re good to go!

With Web-form-buddy you can defend against form spam in several ways – by rigorous field validation, by using the “confirmation” option, and by choosing one of several different anti-spam CAPTCHA tests.

CAPTCHA tests have their disadvantages. For some users they can be frustratingly awkward to use. To solve this problem, Google have now brought out a new version of their “reCaptcha” that rather miraculously is able to distinguish (in most cases) between humans and spam bots without requiring the human to complete a CAPTCHA test! Magic…

We are pleased to announce that Web-form-buddy is now using this latest form of Google’s reCaptcha. If you have enabled this option, there is no need to make any changes as the upgrade is seamless.

More on the new reCaptcha here: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/

Does your web site use Flash? Flash is frequently used to serve animations, videos, adverts and interactive multimedia content. In order to work it depends on your web site visitor having a browser with the necessary plugin installed. Time was when you could fairly much rely on that. In fact, so widespread was Flash that up until a few months ago YouTube depended on it. However, due to a poor history of security vulnerabilities, and with the growth of HTML5 (which is the alternative to Flash that YouTube now defaults to), the days of Flash seem to be numbered. So maybe now is the time to take Flash off your web site! (If you are not sure whether your site uses Flash, look for the HTML <object> tag in the source code referencing a *.swf file. Or, perhaps easier, disable the Flash plugin in your browser, and see if your website performs correctly).

Fortunately there is a fairly easy and reliable way to convert your existing Flash files to HTML5 using Google’s free Swiffy utility. Check out https://developers.google.com/swiffy/!

If you accept payments by PayPal you are given an option under “Website Payment Preferences” that is called “PayPal Account Optional“. If you enable this setting it means that your customers can pay by credit card without being obliged to create a PayPal account.  To encourage your customers to pay by PayPal,  it’s a good idea to make this excellent feature clear to them. So we recommend adding some explanatory text such as this:

“With PayPal you can pay with most types of debit or credit card. You do not need to have a PayPal account“

Both our web forms processor application (Web-form-buddy.com) and our shopping cart application (Web-store-buddy.com) now allow you to add some customizable explanatory text such as this to your “Pay by PayPal” button.

]]> https://www.smallgreentree.net/466/helping-customers-who-pay-by-paypal.html/feed 0 https://www.smallgreentree.net/463/sell-digital-content-with-web-form-buddy.html https://www.smallgreentree.net/463/sell-digital-content-with-web-form-buddy.html#respond Sat, 17 Nov 2012 17:56:17 +0000 http://www.smallgreentree.net/?p=463

You can now use Web-form-buddy, our web forms application,  to sell downloadable items such as document files (e.g. PDFs and Word files), music files (e.g. MP3), photos, graphics, eBooks and so on.

This new feature provides you with a secure vault for your files. Once your customers have completed your form and made their payment, Web-form-buddy creates a download page just for them. You can set the validity of the download page to a certain number of days, and you can set a limit to the number of times a file can be downloaded.

Web-form-buddy’s file uploads option has a built-in “uploads progress” display. Now there is an option to animate how the progress bar opens – a cool effect that makes the file upload experience easier on the eye for your customers. The options available are:

• Slide in (from the left, from the right, from the top, or from the bottom)
• Open from the center
• Fade in

Of course – there’s also an option for “no animation” if effects like these are not your thing!

We have just added a new payment method for Web-form-buddy order forms and for the Web-store-buddy shopping cart. This new method is to handle the situation when your customer will either pay you on delivery of the order (“Cash On Delivery”), or when they come to collect their order.

To enable and customize this new method, just log in to your control panel and navigate to ‘global options’.

Web-form-buddy‘s date validation & formatting for text fields is now more flexible. As well as creating templates for full dates (e.g. “mm-dd-yyyy“), you can now also create templates for partial dates such as month and year (e.g. “mm-yy“), or even just day of the month (“dd“).

To make  creating new forms on your web site as easy as possible,  we have added a new option “import settings from another form“. This feature allows you to copy settings from one form to another. You can choose to copy all settings, or just specific categories of settings – such as auto-responder settings, file upload settings, and so on.

A good way to get the most out of this feature is to create a “golden form” – i.e. one with all your favorite settings. Then after you create a new form, just import the settings from your golden form, and you’ll be pretty much good to go.

Web-form-buddy is a great productivity tool. It makes it really quick and easy to create and deploy forms on your web site. And now it just got even faster!

We have just launched a new option that allows you to configure the design of HTML formatted emails that Web-form-buddy sends out on your behalf. These include

• Autoresponder emails
• Payment receipts
• Form notifications

You can find this new option on your Web-form-buddy control panel under  “global options” >> “color & style settings” >> “HTML styled email“. There you can configure the color scheme, adjust the banner and frame border, set fonts and font sizes, and so on.

Although you have the option of using plain text formatted emails – it’s certainly a lot more impressive to send an attractively styled and formatted email, especially if it’s something your customers are going to see (such as a form auto-responder message or a payment receipt).

There are so many different ways that folks read their email these days. There’s regular desktop software applications such as Microsoft Outlook (and the various different versions in use),  Apple Mail,  Thunderbird,  Lotus Notes, and so on. Then there are webmail options such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And finally we have mobile applications such as BlackBerry, Android, iPad,  iPhone etc. etc..

It’s an unfortunate fact that not all of these email clients support the latest and best features of modern web page design – for example CSS layout without tables and  Javascript. But you’ll be pleased to know that we have created and tested  our configurable HTML email option to work consistently with all of these different ways of reading email!