PSA: PayPal.com rejecting connections from Internet Explorer 10 and below!

PayPalThis is just a small public service announcement for any web developers or eCommerce website owners using PayPal Express Checkout to accept payments on their websites: don’t redirect your users to paypal.com, make sure you use www.paypal.com instead!

The reason is quite simple (and stupid): PayPal uses different SSL security configurations for the vanilla paypal.com domain and the www.paypal.com subdomain – and the former is incompatible with a lot of older PCs and operating systems, meaning your users will get an error message instead of being presented with the checkout options!

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Are you Still Manually Approving Online Sales? Don’t!

The whole point of the online sales revolution, and as a direct result, the growth of companies like Amazon, eBay, and dozens of smaller sites like Newegg and ZipZoomFly, is to take advantage of the benefits brought by technology to the retail industry. These advantages include less overhead costs, fewer employees, constant availability, and instantaneous sales. So, please do tell, why is that you’re still manually verifying and validating all sales before they go out!?

This may not be too obvious when you’re selling tangible goods over the internet – after all, there is still a lot of the “human element” when it comes to packaging and shipping the product. But when you’re selling digital products, be it software, music, games, or text, you should never, ever have a human doing the verification. It’s insulting.

With presence of automated purchase validation systems, like 2Checkout and PayPal IPN available which give virtually real-time updates on the status of a transaction and let you know when you’ve received your money (or at least when it’s on its way), there is absolutely no need for a data monkey to press “OK” at the prompt. After all, what’s this data monkey know that PayPal’s IPN report hasn’t already told your system?

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