Here is a quick tip on how to save paying PayPal fees. I was sending a large amount of euros today, and this would have resulted in about €50 of fees. So I did a bit of poking around and came across this tip, with this method it brought it down the fees to €30.
The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :
open up notepad
enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
save as ASCII .TXT file.
login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
click review, do a review and see the fees.
Click send and save some fees !
Paypal Fee Savings
For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com 1000 EUR
So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge, rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.
It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !
A quick post to say thanks to my few clients who trusted me to get their website back in the index or to tweak their pages to get a few more visitors to their pages. Thanks to those who have collaborated on projects, have shared their code, and even offered their business advice. It was more than a pleasure emailing, talking on the phone, skype or on IM with you. The first year in business was a bit of an eye opener, a challenge at times and a steep learning curve. Thanks for helping me get there.
From time to time you hear of Google tweaking their UI (User Interface). As they have such a large population of users it’s not often you actually get to be in one of these test groups. Below is a video of a recent test they performed, and my main google a/c was in the test. In this particular test Google remove all the surrounding links :
And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.
Google UI Testing Video
Use full screen to see more details.
Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?
Things have been extremely busy here at blackdog.ie but there are a few updates I would like to bring to the few people who read here.
The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend. I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords. A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips
Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D
The guys and girls at google do like to have fun. Yesterday in their robots.txt file the included the following code (in fact it’s still there, but probably won’t remain there for long).
The mediadonis memoribilia ebay auction has ended, and it has been won by the Munich iPhone developer Hans Schneider. Hans has donated €50 to the charity in return for the two items, and we will match the bid to bring it up to a nice €100 for the charity. Thanks to marcus tandler for indirectly supplying the items, and to Julian Dziki for being a good partner in crime
