Spring Sale! Parts, Gear, and Sail ads are $4 (50% Off)

Did anyone get the "Spring Sale" email this morning? What did you think, was it in your inbox and not in spam? It has taken quite an effort to get to the point where I could safely send out email without being in danger of getting the domain banned or something.

If you got the email, please click on the links inside (except the unsubscribe one!) 

The clicks and interaction with the email tells mail providers like Gmail that the email is relevant to you. It's amazing how many of you have Hotmail emails!

I got it (in Inbox not Spam) and clicked away...nice!

Posted by: @damon-linkous

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It's amazing how many of you have Hotmail emails!

Funny...my ~80 year-old Mother-In-Law has a Hotmail address!  Makes my 1990s Yahoo address seem kinda hip!

Umm... it would be helpful to have the details on how to pay up front, rather than having to go through the process and assemble the ad in hopes of finding out somewhere along the way.

Posted by: @jonathan162

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Umm... it would be helpful to have the details on how to pay up front, rather than having to go through the process and assemble the ad in hopes of finding out somewhere along the way.

Please help me understand how to make it more clear? When you start to place an ad here:

https://thebeachcats.com/classifieds/placing-your-classified-ad/

The prices for various ad types are listed. Then you start the process, select your category, and the specific ad type prices available for the category you have selected are at the bottom. (usually the options of Standard or Featured ad).

Then the payment form at the end, so you can take your time getting the ad just right and previewing it before you pay.

Maybe you missed the link on the first page of "place a classified ad" to the step-by-step preview?
See step-by-step instructions before you start.

Seriously, please help me make this as simple as possible so nobody has any friction placing an ad.

I started at the first page, so I saw the price list.  What I want to see there as well is the description of available payment method(s).

@jonathan162 Ahh, I understand. Would a simple statement like

"Secure Payments by Stripe, Credit and Debit Cards Accepted"

do the job, or something else?

I am working on adding alternate payment methods like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay etc. since these days people have money wasting away in those wallets. 

Something like that.  You see, things are not in other countries as they are in the US.  Although I live just a couple of hours north of the border - and have a PO box on the US side - I've run into situations in which I simply cannot buy from people in the States.  The justifiably-hated Paypal works up here, but Zell and Venmo don't.  For the many (often ebay) sellers who simply don't want to deal with sending things out of the country (and to keep shipping costs down), I usually use my MC - which is tied to my home address in Canada - and ship to my MT address.  But from time to time I'll run into a person/service/company that is uncorrectably stymied by that combination.  One of those cases is trying to buy a prepaid shipping label for an American sender to use to mail something to Montana; it was utterly impossible to pay for that label with a Canadian credit card, for no reason that could possibly make sense other than that whoever built it just never considered that such a thing might happen, and hadn't accounted for a difference as trivial as our postal code format.  And I'm just in Canada, not some place really wacky like one of those across-an-ocean joints.

I could go on, but you probably get the point, which is that you should present as much information as possible on the payment specifics up front, on the very first page, so a guy like me doesn't go through the whole process of filling in pages 1, 2, 3, and 4, only to get to page 5 and discover that the payment won't work and it's all been a waste of time.

Damon:

I raised the question because I actually want to put a listing up; I wasn't just sniffing around.  So I've been waiting for a reply from you on this point.

@jonathan162 Sorry for the delay. After your explanation of the problems Canadian online shoppers have with payments I started researching the problem.

I want all of TheBeachcats.com to work internationally, including the classifieds and calendar. They both use Google map location services so locations worldwide can be added.

For classifieds payments the site uses Stripe for processing and they have a tremendous variety of possible payment types.

So far I have only activated a handful . I also have tickets in with the classifieds software vender (wpAdverts.com) to clarify why I am not seeing alternative payment methods like Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay at checkout, even though I have them activated.

To answer you actual question, the current setup accepts branded credit and debit cards (specific ones depend on country). This is from the Stripe documentation.

Stripe supports accepting the following card brands in Canada:

Visa
Mastercard
American Express
Discover & Diners Club
China UnionPay (CUP)
Japan Credit Bureau (JCB)

Of course, the only way I will know for sure is if I can get a friendly Canadian to try it out. 😉

Besides cards and the three "...Pays" i listed, Stripe supports a ton of other services around the world. Take a look at the list and see if there are some that you would like to see enabled. Note: I am not positive yet, if the Classifieds software can handle all of these, still waiting for clarity on that.

Here is a screenshot of all the possible payment methods available in Stripe. They way it is supposed to work is if I activate, for instance, a payment method only available in France, then it will only appear at checkout for buyers located in France.

Wow - okay, that's really above and beyond.  I'm actually quite a simple user, a guy with one credit card who won't go near crypto, so all should be well as far as the present case is concerned.  You needn't write a thesis on the first page, just say something like "The following payment methods are supported in Canada via Stripe:", and so much the better if the combined software allows you to dynamically fill in the country/locale.

As long as we're on the subject, though, and because someone else in another time and with a different case (like someone who's buying a boat from someone else) may find it helpful, I'm going to toss in a little more info.  Read out of interest or feel free to ignore.

Obviously, for person-to-person transactions, Paypal is the obvious channel because it's internationally ubiquitous.  But they're expensive to use and have had a terrible reputation from the jump (i.e. even before ebay bought them), so there are lots of people who don't like - or refuse - to use it.  As I said, alternative private transfers like Zell and Venmo appear to be limited to the US.  One that works well for transactions between Canada and the States is what my bank calls Global Transfer.  It's a bank-account-to-bank-account service that operates without a middleman, the international version of Interac E-Transfer, which we use a lot up here (I don't know whether it's used south of the border).  Global Transfer is great - I've bought boats with it - but it does need a little setup; you have to exchange some basic bank account and address information with the person you're doing the deal with, and some people are too paranoid for that.  Once it's initialized, the only things to keep in mind are that there's a transaction minimum of $50, and it takes a couple of days for the funds to move.  But it's trustworthy because it's bank-to-bank.

Another thing worth adding is that a couple of years ago I discovered that Canada Post had stopped selling International Money Orders, which (pre-Internet) used to be The Way to make smaller (e.g. under a few hundred bucks, iIrc) payments.  In its place, they've created some proprietary online service, which is insanely stupid - a solution in search of a problem - since we all use Interac E-Transfer already.  No wonder the post office is losing so much money; it's run by idiots.  So in that case (buying an oscilloscope from a guy in Oregon) I had to get a bank draft, but it did raise an interesting point, because he went ahead and shipped me the 'scope and trusted that I'd mail him the payment.  I liked that a lot, because I try to do that as much as possible these days:  Just trust people.

It actually pisses me off really badly that we're surrounded by companies like ebay and Paypal that bark on about our "safety", when all they're really doing is jacking up our mistrust of each other in order to insinuate themselves into our transactions - to their own profit.  That's creepy and bad for society.  I feel a whole lot better about life (and the arguments from economics agree) when I can enjoy trusting the people I'm dealing with.  So whenever I can, I'll skirt ebay and get it done privately, and when I'm using Paypal it's always a "personal" payment to reduce their cut (and btw, their exchange rates are awful).  Sod those companies trying to "protect" us from each other, when it's only really - and cynically - about increasing their cut.

Hope someone finds some of that generally informative.

</rant>

After a lot more investigation I have settled on only accepting credit and debit cards for classifieds and not alternative payment types at this time.

There are technical reasons but it boils down to the need to enable instant verification signals back to the website so that new and renewed ads can appear immediately upon payment.

I have added a Payment Card Types Accepted section to the Placing Your Classified Ad Page.