Finally: Credit Card Processing

On February 8 I wrote the following:

Before I start adding more features I’m going to add credit card processing to the site. The percentage of people that follow through to Paypal to complete their registration is abysmal.

Well, I was lazy and abandoned it in favor of adding some shiny new feature.

After the CNet traffic two weeks ago I decided to take another look at the conversion rates.

To make a long story short: only 10% of the people were completing their purchases. Ouch. I think Paypal is difficult to use for people without Paypal accounts and I think most of them didn’t complete their purchases. There could have been usability problems on my end too, but I think it’s minimal in comparison.

I said enough is enough, I’m not doing anything else until I get this done. So, I spent the last two weeks adding credit card processing to the site. Hallelujah.

I have to thank Ryan Bates from Railscasts for his excellent videos on Active Merchant.  Without his tutorials this would have taken much, much longer.

Here’s what it looks like:

I’d also be remiss not to thank 37Signals, for it was the registration page for Backpack that was my inspriration for this design.

I’m thrilled that its done and that I can get back to adding new features.

P.S. This is a good read: The 5 Things I’d Tell My 21 Year Old Entrepreneurial Self.

TechRadar Article

From TechRadar:

Twitter – in case you hadn’t noticed – is becoming so mainstream there’s now even at least one third-party business dedicated to finding the best available account names.

The Twitter open account search comes courtesy of Domain Pigeon, which previously focused on searching for unregistered URLs, so extending that to the microblogging phenom is hardly a stretch.

Three letters

Naturally, the most sought-after Twitter usernames are the shortest ones – three characters is the minimum, of which about 18,000 are still available, we’re told.

Before you rush off to see if xxx or abc are still up for grabs, be warned that Domain Pigeon requires a one-off membership fee of $40 (£27).

Considering that, maybe your next Tweet can be something like “@domainpigeon You’ve got to be kidding.”

Not kidding. :D

Obsessable.com Article

From Domain Pigeon’s profile on Obsessable.com:

Domain Pigeon is a website that categorizes and makes available unclaimed domain names and Twitter usernames. You can search for specific names or browse through untaken domain and Twitter names by popularity or alphabetic lists. For a fee, you can peruse the shorter and more popular Twitter names of only three or four letters, or look for both Twitter names and domain names at the same time to see if they match. The site also lets you know how many of the sought-after names are left and when the next update will occur.

Domain Pigeon makes it to Digg’s Front Page!

Domain Pigeon got posted on Digg–awesome.

And while I wasn’t here to see it, according to @diggfrontpage the link made Digg’s homepage this evening!

At the time of this writing, it’s currently on page 2:

Here’s the description:

Domainsquatting is one thing, but what about Twittersquatting? Domain search tool Domain Pigeon is now showing users which usernames are still open.

I’m not a huge fan of the “Twitter squatting” association but hey, can’t complain too much.