If your ecommerce website is using Paypal to accept payments then in most cases the customer will be redirected to Paypal to make the payment and then back to your store once the payment has been completed. When the customer is returned to your store, all the website knows is that the payment has been completed; no other data is passed back by Paypal.
Adding a PDT token to your Paypal account allows your website to effectively become authorised with Paypal for a higher level of information disclosure after a transaction completes. PDT stands for Payment Data Transfer. Effectively, this means that when the customer returns you’ll not only be able to provide a thank you message, but also provide details of the transaction that took place on Paypal’s website.
Here is the flow of a PDT transaction, as shown on Paypal’s website:
What details can be sent back to the website from Paypal?
With a PDT token set up, the website can query the following information from Paypal following a successful return from a payment transaction: the first and last name of the customer, confirmation of the payment status, the payer’s email address, the currency they paid and the amount they paid.
If you are using a cart like oscommerce or zen cart, then a PDT token is essential to your cart’s successful use of Paypal. In other carts, it’s not essential but adds to the functionality.
How do you set up a PDT token?
- Go to Paypal and log in.
- From the main screen once you are logged in, click on the White link “Profile”. Make sure you click on the link and ignore the drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word Profile.
- A screen with a lot of link options appears, in the third column choose “Website Payment Preferences”.
- Turn on both Auto Return and Payment Data Transfer (PDT) token settings. See the screenshot below. Then click save and your PDT token is created.
- You’ll now be back on the home page for your Paypal account. Click Website Payment Preferences again and scroll down the screen to see your PDT token. Save this to Notepad as you’ll need to enter it in to your shopping cart application like Open Cart, Zen Cart or osCommerce in the appropriate place.
It’s not essential to use a PDT token but if your website does it can display more meaningful results. The issue comes when you have multiple websites requiring a PDT token on the same Paypal account – as there’s only space to enter one return URL on the above mentioned screen.
The successful prosecution of the company Allergy Pathway by the ACCC demonstrates the importance of reading and reviewing any testimonials posted on Facebook pages by you.
In the case concerned, customers of Allergy Pathway posted comments about the company on their Facebook page. The company knew them to be false as they had previously received a probationary warning from the ACCC from previously making similar comments themselves about their products. Because the comments weren’t removed by Allergy Pathway, they were deemed by the court to be the publisher of the material and therefore responsible for that content – as if they had written it themselves.
The case points to the importance of monitoring what is written about you on your Facebook page or on other social media pages that you control. It also acts as a good reminder that it’s important to know what people are writing about you in all forms of media.
Some steps you can take to monitor what is said about you
When you come in to your office each day, the first things you will probably do is have a coffee and check your email. Add check your Facebook page to the list of things you do. It’s best to play it safe: if there’s a comment about your business that appears to paint your business in a way that you wouldn’t paint yourself, then delete it. This was the main point of the ACCC’s case: it was not so much that people were making these representations, it was that the material was not deleted even though they were able to when the company became aware of it.
This should be extended to affiliate marketers. In the United States, the courts there are moving to hold companies responsible for what affiliates say about their business to their customers. It’s more than likely that this type of ruling will spread to other countries of the world, including Australia, so it’s a good time now to check what your affiliates are saying about you.
Sign up for Google Alerts with your business name as the keyword. This will give you a lot of false positives if your business has commonly occurring words in it, but it will give you a good heads-up on what people are saying about you, right in your inbox.
If your business is big enough to get media attention, then you should be paying for a media monitoring, website monitoring or media clippings service. If you have a public relations company working for you they will often be able to do it for free. Look for a service that does positives and negatives scoring preferably using a weighting system for the level of exposure that is generated (e.g. a page one headline mention or breaking news mention online has more weight than a page 20 inner section mention).
The music game “Guitar Hero” which took the world by storm only six years ago is now set to be axed by it’s publishers Activision. It’s an important lesson for any software, online or offline business that even when you have a super-successful product, you can never bank on it’s popularity forever. A strong brand will only stay strong if it is kept fresh.
The reasons given for axing the game are the cost of licensing fees and the production costs of the music hardware – together with falling popularity for these types of games.
Brands that continue to innovate and invest in new technologies and ideas, even in the face of adversity, are the ones that stay successful in the long run. Apple are a classic example. After taking the world by storm with the Macintosh in the 1980s, they floundered in the market for a number of years remaining a niche competitor to the much stronger Windows/PC movement. And then came the iPod, iPhone and iPad and once again Apple sit as kingpins of the computer industry again. And in contrast the former-super-innovator Sony, once a brand of true innovation has found its brand somewhat depleted by allowing themselves to become what we would call too “safe”.
The lesson of Guitar Hero for all businesses is that no matter how successful you are, no matter how much brand power (aka “brand equity” in marketing-speak) that you have, no matter much you take the world by storm, never, ever forget the power of new innovation and new ideas.
This is where the power of online business comes to play. We see many of the major offline competitors of today, the corporate chains, underestimating the power of online, effectively laughing it off and believing that their offline brand value will carry them through online. Online really does level the playing field, as there are different rules of engagement and it doesn’t necessarily follow that those with the most money to spend can dominate the web. A page one ranking on Google for every search term cannot be bought for example. Even the biggest brands in the world have learnt that the hard way by underestimating their competition. A good online brand, good quality service, fast delivery, smart marketing and strong prices can do wonders to an online firm. It’s never too late to take on an industry if you know your customers well and are prepared to use the specifics of online to your advantage. There’s no doubt that with the commitment and innovation, a small home-business can successfully compete head to head with a multinational corporate online. And win!
So if you have an online idea, maybe it’s time to get an online business started, and open an online shop (and if you do decide to do that, we have the web hosting space and the tools to help).
Today’s giant is tomorrow’s has-been unless you develop a culture of innovation, go with your gut. And never stop.
See the news report about Guitar Hero’s demise here.
If a standard user creates an account in your WordPress site, after the registration process is complete or after they return and log back in to your site, by default they will see what is called the Profile page. By default, this page looks a lot like your WordPress admin backend, with none of your site branding on it. What can you do about this?
You could hack the code to force the login process to redirect back to the page of your choice, and there is plenty of help on how to do this on the WordPress forums. But the problem with this approach is as soon as you need to upgrade your WordPress version or make a duplicate of your website on another domain, you’ll need to do it manually. Otherwise, your code hacks will be lost. That means a lot of hard work, comparing files and updating code – every time the core of WordPress changes. If you want to promote your website or are building your blog website to help promote your main shop or information site, then that’s too much hassle that you don’t need.
Fortunately, there is a free WordPress plugin available that makes light work of this task. It is called Theme My Profile. What this plugin allows you to do is to either provide a different look for your profile page if you wish to display it, or block it altogether and redirect people to a different page of your choice (for example, a custom my account page). You can create different pages or block the profile page by user type. (We don’t recommend using it for admin users as you could end up blocking yourself out of admin by mistake).
You can see this plugin in action at our Australian Clothing and Fashion Directory website (and at the same time, submit your website for a free link if it’s fashion related). And if you’re a Geekz business web hosting customer in the fashion industry, please contact us for a little discount offer on your first year’s membership 
One method that spammers use to try and trick mail servers is to impersonate other domains or email addresses. In this way, someone could send out spam emails to hundreds of people and pretend they are you. A problem of many mail servers and web hosting set ups is that they are not protected against this kind of spoofing. The solution is something built in to cPanel, called SPF records.
An SPF record is like an authenticity seal for an email address on a domain. That is, they identify the servers that are authentic for that domain name. When a server receives an email reportedly from an email address they can download just the header part of an email, look up the SPF record for that domain, and determine if it has come from a legit server. This gives them the opportunity of rejecting the message before the rest of it is received. This allows the rejection of spam by email servers before it is even delivered to your inbox.
An SPF record won’t stop your computer from receiving spam, but it will stop spammers from pretending to be you because their emails won’t be delivered. Most modern email servers do check SPF records if they exist, so this is an effective way of helping to reduce spam. If everyone used spf records on their domains, spammers would have a tougher time sending spam and cluttering up everyone’s inbox with meaningless rubbish.
How do you set up an SPF record in cPanel?
1. Log in to your cPanel
2. In the section “Mail”, click on “Email Authentication”
3. In the section “SPF” click on enable
4. You will see a confirmation Screen. On that screen you can click “Go back”.
And you’re done.
Domain Keys are also useful
If you are looking to block spam, it’s also a good idea to turn on the other option on this screen called “Domain Keys”.
