Invoicing

There are tons of businesses that sell products on the internet and the vast majority force-fit themselves into a business model that works with shopping cart software that is available. Slight variations from the standard model can mean custom solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

But the standard "Pay Now" button on a web page does not fit into most business scenarios. There are millions of businesses selling special kinds of goods, services or combinations thereof who could do so on the internet if they simply had an online way to invoice customers, take payment and administer payment and people history. Because the standard "Pay Now" button on a web page is a poor fit for most business the vast majority do not have any kind of ecommerce effort and the rest are having lots of problems force-fitting their product or service into available and often expensive ecommerce software products. Let me describe a custom solution that would be the nirvana of charging and taking payment from a customer:

• The customer visits your webpage and confirms that they want your product or service
• You engage in a dialog and negotiate a price and delivery
• You login into the administration area of your dreamsite and add a record to the people database for that customer
• You add an invoice and link it to that person
• You click a button and the customer is emailed the invoice along with instructions on how to go to your private payment page to make payment (a record of your message is added to an activity log table)
• You receive notification that payment information has been given on your control page or as an email.
• You proceed to a payment administration page and click a "Process Payment button" beside their payment information and then blind the credit card number
• The payment page notifies them that payment was either successful and they will be hearing from you or that it was unsuccessful and they should try again).
• The invoice is marked as paid and you ship the goods or provide the service and mark the invoice completed
• You continue to log interactions with that customer in their email-enabled people record at your dreamsite.

A key to all of this happening is having an invoice page in the administration section of your website. It looks like a standard invoice and you simply add lines and fill in products, services and prices, discounts, shipping information, notes, etc. Since it is linked to a person recorded in the people database on the site, the invoice page has a button you simply click to email the invoice.

Having an invoice page means you can invoice anyone for anything you want. Couple that with a payment page and you can sell any product or service you want on your dreamsite! It seems so logical that every business should have something like this? But have you ever seen it? Yes, you can send invoices from PayPal and take payment there, but do you know the risks? And the PayPal solution is very limited compared to what a dreamsite could do. Do yourself a favor and take credit card payments directly as a merchant (see this page for more information).

You can probably figured out by now that if you want an invoice page you will have to have it custom written to be exactly what you want. I can do it. Contact me below.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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