Tag: web

My low cost e-commerce stack

Dungeon Adventure
Dungeon Adventure

Since I launched Dungeon Adventure, an RPG for kids, a few weeks ago a lot of people have asked me how exactly I’m selling it. It’s for sale as a digital download and print out board game, or “floor top RPG” as Phil Nelson called it. Here’s how it works:

I have a hosting account with iPower that I have had for about 9 years. It hosts this site, Dungeon Adventure, and almost any other domain I’ve ever had like markgarvey.net. My cost is $99/year, but I don’t count that against Dungeon Adventure because I’d be paying that anyway to host bengarvey.com.

I registered the domain name through iPower: $12.95/year

I looked for a while at different e-commerce / checkout software sites like scribd, PayLoadz, DigitalGoodsDelivery.com, and e-junkie. I decided on e-junkie for the following reasons:
1. Seemed reputable based on reviews and testamonials.
2. Ultra low cost. $5/month flat fee for 50MB storage and no transaction fees.

So far I have been extremely happy with my choice and in hindsight I am so glad I chose a service with no transaction fees. Spread over the cost of all my sales, that $5 is just a few pennies in transaction fees. E-junkie allows people to download the file with a unique link up to 5 times, provides email alerts to me, sends customizable confirmation emails to customers, and allow me to email customers (for a small additional fee). I was setup in about 10 minutes and it has worked flawlessly since day 1.

For payment I use paypal. I’ve used it for a long time and never had any issues with them. I’ve heard the horror stories of account freezes and such, but everything has been great. Paypal’s cut is 3% + $0.30, so on my $5.99 game the cost is $0.48. e-junkie integrated with paypal very easily and it had all the setup info I needed to accept payments through them.

Cost breakdown:
Hosting account: $8.25/month (I was already paying for this, but I’ll include it anyway)
Domain name: $1.08/month (if you’re buying hosting, you’ll get this included with the $8.25)
Checkout software: $5/month
Transaction fees: $0.48 per transaction
Total: $13.25 per month ($6.08 if you already have hosting and just need a domain)
Throughput per transaction is $5.51, so I need to sell 2.4 games per month (or 1.1) to break even.

With a cost structure this low I’ve already covered them for years.

I love the Internet.

Newspapers feeling the heat from craigslist

Most people know I’m a huge craigslist fan and I’ve bought and sold a few thousand dollars worth of stuff through it. I’ve always wondered about how much it has impacted newspapers and whether they’d start to print negative stories about it to make it seem unsafe or seedy. As long as you do everything in person and use common sense (ie. cash), there’s almost no way to get ripped off. I read an interview with Craig Newmark and the CEO of craigslist on the Freakonomics blog and saw this interesting answer:

Q: How do you feel about your own media coverage? I see that Craigslist
often gets reported on as the de facto way of picking up prostitutes.

JIM: We?ve been hearing increasingly from newspaper reporters who confide that they are only allowed to write negative stories about Craigslist these days, because we?re viewed as competition by their newspaper?s business managers. And, obviously, sex sells papers, more so than stories about finding a used couch, so while we do follow our media coverage, most of our attention is devoted to direct feedback from our users.

Read the rest of the interview here.

New version of WordPress

I upgraded my wordpress installation yesterday and the primary difference is the addition of tagging posts, hense my tag cloud on the right. I’ve only been able to tag my last 30 posts or so (1100 will take me a while!) and I haven’t tagged any of the video ones due to a bug with embedded youtube videos. Still, it’s kind of neat to be able to pull up posts that don’t fit nicely into a category.

Fixed Odd Man In problems on the new site

I thought I had everything figured out when I went live with the new WordPress powered blog, but it turns out that everything in PostNuke gets routed through the index.php file. I was able to work around it, so all the problems with Odd Man In and everything else should be fixed. Let me know if they are not.

Facebook v. MySpace

A few months ago Facebook opened their site up to anyone and I signed up, but didn’t do much with it. Since then a few of my friends have added me and I’ve been messing around with it a lot more. It’s so much better designed than myspace it’s scary. Myspace has to be the buggiest, worst looking site on the Internet.

A few months ago Facebook opened their site up to anyone and I signed up, but didn’t do much with it. Since then a few of my friends have added me and I’ve been messing around with it a lot more. It’s so much better designed than myspace it’s scary. Myspace has to be the buggiest, worst looking site on the Internet.

Google Personalized Home Page

I really love Google’s personalized home page. Log in and you can add various little widgets to your home page like a To Do list, calendar, wikipedia search, weather, etc. Check out this screen cap of my page:

I really love Google’s personalized home page. Log in and you can add various little widgets to your home page like a To Do list, calendar, wikipedia search, weather, etc. Check out this screen cap of my page: