A Forum Full of Payment Processors
Blogs aren’t the only way to make money online and many people have opted for the e-commerce path instead. Even if you are selling virtual goods like e-books, it’s important you have a good understanding of how to accept money from your customers. The best way to learn is by networking with other like-minded individuals.
The Payment Processing forums were erected for this purpose, providing a venue where merchants and other dot com entrepreneurs could discuss all the various aspects of processing payments, processing Credit Cards, and all those other fun ways to get money from your customers. The main reason why they ordered this review was probably to increase the number of users. After all, a forum is only as valuable as its members.
What’s To Know About Payment Processing
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling online, because you still need to find a reliable way to accept funds from your customers. There are naturally countless issues that you may want to investigate, above and beyond the payment options. How do you handle chargebacks? What’s involved in setting up a merchant account? These are the kinds of questions that should make up the meat and potatoes of the payment processing forums.
The first batch of forums revolve around Internet payment service providers like E-Gold and Paypal. Beyond this, there are also forums for electronic payment gateways and e-currencies, fraud and chargeback prevention, business, and site-related issues. The forum that would probably be of the most interest to readers of John Chow dot Com is the one that focuses on making money online.
Unfortunately, I found that most of the topics within this forum weren’t all that useful. People would start threads asking vague questions like how to make $500+ a day. The member just says that they “need it fast” and they want to know what is the “fastest and best way to make this amount of money.” And the forum is filled with questions like this.
Moreover, within the first couple of hours of signing up for an account, I was hit with my first spam private message, offering me a loan of up to $417,000,000.00 (I’m not kidding) at a 2.25% interest rate. Really? And all I have to do is send a certain sum of money to an unregistered account in Nigeria? Sadly, forums like this will inevitably attract the shady types.
Registration and User Interface
Going through the registration process is just like signing up for an account with any other vBulletin-powered forum. You’ll be asked to provide an email address — which then must be verified — as well as your birthdate, username, and password. It’s all pretty straightforward. Make sure you check your junk mail folder, because that’s where the verification message showed up for me.
Unlike most other forums that I frequent, however, the Payment Processing forums do not allow their members to have custom avatars. In fact, they don’t allow avatars at all. Some people may say that this is a good thing, but others may disagree. I’m with the latter group. This strips the forum of any kind of personality. It also doesn’t help that the forum doesn’t really have a distinctive name.
Layout and Monetization
The layout is fairly generic with a standard blue color scheme. There is no homepage to speak of, because the main screen just lists all the forums available through the site. I don’t think that there is too much of an issue with having a generic-looking forum, but it might have been a good idea to have a more distinctive banner at the top.
In terms of monetization, the Payment Processing forum has a single Google Adsense placement — a 468 x 60 banner — in the top-right corner. This appears on every page. I’d imagine that more aggressive monetization could be achieved, but it might be more important to grow the user base first. As it stands, there are 161 active members and 699 total members.
Just Another Forum Full of Newbies
While I appreciate the idea behind the Payment Processing forum, the existing member base is certainly lacking. The questions are either quite basic or juvenile, so intermediate to expert users will likely find little value in this forum. This might change as the site grows.
Beyond the forums, the site also offers a few extras for its members. There is a blog, PayPal fee calculator, and online password generator.
- Posted in Reviews, The Net
- 30 comments what's your take?
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its a popular forum actually
Reply to this commentGoogle Page Rank : 6
anyway nice info about them , registered there
Check it our first. Kinda interesting forum.
Reply to this commentChecked it! The idea is interesting. But it feels like a new forum.
Reply to this commentforums are great resources for sharing ideas and tips! they have safed me quite a bit of time!
Reply to this commentAren’t the first 2 lines repeated couple times in the first paragraph itself John?
Btw the thing i only liked in the site is the paypal calculator
Reply to this commentYeah that maybe the only thing which is good, but too much negative just wants me to close that page right now.
Reply to this commentNice layout.
Reply to this commentI will wait one month and then check how much valuable information on this forum.
Hopefully, the quality improves because, so far, it looks like there isn’t a lot of helpful information on that site.
Reply to this commentthat happens in almost every new forum … The big ones that contains over 60,000 posts…. the new ones can’t match those..
Reply to this commentThink it got potential, but as said it needs more users to really get going.
Reply to this commentThat is rite.
Reply to this commentIt’s too bad, but a lot of forums are like that. I remember visiting a “Money Makers” forum a few years ago, and it was FULL of foreign scams. It’s a shame when there are so many ways to make money legally online….
Reply to this commentYeah, it definitely feels a little bit too “spammy”. On top of that, for most people payment processing is secondary to whatever service they’re trying to get paid for, so this forum would likely playing second (or third, or fourth) fiddle for most people. There just can’t be that many people with a hobby for payment processing.
Reply to this commentYes, I was thinking about exactly that when reading the post. I could still be a nice resource for people trying to get help, or more infromation about the payment processors though…
Reply to this commentLikely won’t be visiting it as soon as I heard you got spammed as soon as you joined!
Reply to this commentShucks, spam and scam forum. Mods have to do a better job of getting people to post quality posts and start quality threads, else nobody will join.
http://seventoten.com
Reply to this commentOur business model requires for us to have a full blown merchant account. We tried PayPal, and it was a great way to get started, but when your income depends on CC transactions you have to have something more upscale. It surprises how few small business even explore the merchant route. It really is not expensive compared to the amount of business opportunity you receive.
Great Article,
Matt Sullivan, CEO of Credit Dusters
Reply to this commenthttp://freecreditdusters.com
This sounds like a very useful forum. Seems to be a “hot topic” nowadays the whole payment processing thing. I will take a look into this aspect of the internet/marketing most definitely. Thanks ofr the great review
Reply to this commenti know this forum before also the owner is in my messenger list and also posted for sometime in the forum as a request by the owner… but was really short of topics as there were not much people discussing about
so increase in the quality traffic is the requirement. secondly i saw that some of posts were not unique and was just copy-paste content from other site…
Reply to this commentyeh, sounds like he might be trying to inflate the number of posts/threads. He probably should hire more quality forum posters for this kind of work.
Reply to this commentHe sounds like want to increase the number of subscribers.
Reply to this commentGood Post there!
Reply to this commentThere are already forums like this at http://www.talkgold.com/forum and MMG which are much larger
Reply to this commentThis is an idea whose day has come.
Adult webmasters and heavy-traffic ecommerce sites have used multiple payment processors for years, and we aLL know they’re usually years ahead of the rest of us mere mortal webmasters.
The site owner who allows for more payment options will make more sales, espeically as dis-satisfaction with PayPal grows, and there are more options becoming available.
Good review! Good forum to have now…
Thanks,
Dan
Reply to this commenthttp;//danielmcgonagle.name
A forum for people who want to know what they want to know is really something very helpful.
Reply to this commentWhat a useless site.
Reply to this commentHolly schmolly, not only does this forum they has only a few idiot posters, they are actually stealing contents from other forums.
I found several threads which had appeared months, sometimes years, ago in other HYIP forums like talkgold and others. the entire threads were duplicated here. someone’s been acting acting trigger happy with ICO for vB.
John, you just plugged for a plagiarist
Reply to this commentlol I am not surprised …. paid posting services are crap … Most of them are spam.
Reply to this commentOh wow, this is a new type of forum I may be interested in, but there is one flaw. There aren’t really much payment processors out there and most people use Paypal. There are already enough forums for Paypal, so I don’t know how this forum will go about.
-Mike
Reply to this commentI checked out the forum and they have great potential to do well. I’m not surprised that they chose a niche like payment processing. This is one of those niche that is not receiving a lot of attention because many small businesses think or feel that they know which merchant account providers to use. Having more discussion about which merchant providers to use or not can be very useful for online businesses. Typically, online businesses searched blindly in Google and hope that the #1 ranking website would be their best and final choice for payment processing.
In the end, once they create enough momentum in terms of more subscribers, and highly unbiased mods, I’m sure this website will take off like a superstar.
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