(apple)mac geek

Quirk have released an eMarketing textbook (which was supervised by the University of Cape Town) under the Creative Commons license (which means it’s a free pdf download!). Well done, guys! I’ve already referred a client to it to help him think through his marketing strategy.

This also ties into the philosophy of Open Education – the idea that “everyone should have the freedom to use, customise, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.” Nice

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I’ve posted a topic on the drupal groups site asking people which payment gateways they use for their South African ecommerce clients and have got some great feedback. It would be great if we could all use PayPal – but the taxman won’t allow us to.

I’ve only used Virtual Card Services before – commentators on my post have used NetCash and Setcom.

The issue isn’t just choosing the right payment gateway (and balancing monthly fees with percentages taken per transaction) but also how you access your money. Usually that means setting up a merchant account with a local bank (which means a sorted business plan) and being prepared to pay the monthly fees which go along with that. In addition, the bank will take between 5 and 7% per transaction.

Explaining this to clients is fun! That sadistic side of me enjoys watching their face drop…and then I share their sadness. It would be great to have a PayPal-like payment gateway which has no monthly fees, interfaces directly to any South African bank account, and takes a small percentage (is 3% too much to hope for?!).

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::flexes fingers:: This is going to be interesting. I am an avowed Apple lover and this is in spite of the poor Apple presence in South Africa – not to mention the after-sale service. Core IMC is the company which runs ZA Store – the unofficial official online shop for Apple (authorised by Apple South Africa, whoever they are). Core do the imports for South Africa due to an agreement with Apple and recently published an advertisment in the local newspapers saying that other shops who import Apple products through different channels are not “official” and people shouldn’t buy from them because Apple won’t support those products. (Read the article)

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