Hideho folks. I’m taking a bit of a break from progress updates on the 30 Day Sprint (not progressing as much as I wanted to but I have Saturday blocked off with a designer buddy to get some stuff together) in order to answer a common question.
I love e-junkie, the service. So much so that I have been called Robin’s local sales rep. And that is probably closer to the truth than I would like it to be. But I really, really can’t stand the name — it says absolutely nothing positive to my customers about my business. So I go to some pains to avoid them seeing it. Since it will help other uISVs and e-junkie, I thought I’d give a rundown.
Issue: Customer lands on e-junkie page after checkout, to receive CD key
Resolution:
1) Go to your e-junkie product settings.
2) Click the box next to “Product Requires: … Redirection”.
3) Click Next.
4) Fill in the Redirection URL. Point it to a page on your own web server.
5) On the page on your web server, you will want to display the CD key and instructions for installing it, plus regurgitating all the other stuff you put in your thank you mail. (Make it big and bold because people do not read this page unless you give them a darn obvious reason to. Getting them to read it saves you support costs, trust me.) You can handle the content. If e-junkie has a CD key, for example if you uploaded a list to them or they run a script to generate one for you, they’ll put the CD key in a URL variable “key”. So if your URL was http://www.example.com/thanks.htm, your customer will end up seeing http://www.example.com/thanks.htm?something=here&somethingelse=here&key=yourkey . Your mission is to get that key onto the displayable page. If you can do server side programming, for example in PHP, this is pretty trivial. If you can’t, you can grab it with a bit of Javascript.
Either way, please secure your website against ye-olde insert-arbitrary-content-by-rewriting-the-URL trick. You’ll thank me later.
Issue: Customer’s mail server is throwing out your mail
1) e-junkie generated mail originates from one of (as of the last time I checked) three e-junkie.com servers. It carries your name as the sender. Bad news bears, this means that many automated checks on that email will say “e-junkie.com is spoofing honestmicroisv.com, oh no, its spaaaaam!” What you need to do is publish an SPF record telling the world that e-junkie.com is a legitimate source of email for you.
2) You’ll probably want to read the docs for your individual web hosting company on how to do an SPF record. GoDaddy‘s interface is rather sweet.
Issue: You have links to www.e-junkie.com all over your page.
1) You aren’t using the Fat Free Cart? OK, fix that right now. (And watch your conversion rise!)
2) You might be worried about folks seeing the links by looking at their address bar really closely after clicking on the links. Personally, I doubt my customers are nearly that savvy, but maybe yours are. What you need to do is publish a CNAME DNS record, aliasing store.bingocardcreator.com (example) to www.e-junkie.com . Then, every time the GoDaddy docs say e-junkie.com, you just subsitute your local alias. This will not work with https (customers don’t know what that is, either) but it will get rid of the e-junkie.com in the URL bar in most browsers that I am aware of (some might resolve the CNAME and then update — I don’t know which off the top of my head), and it will get rid of the URL on hover in every browser.
And that is your tip for the day. Check back this weekend, I’ll be back to coding and writing up a storm.
Patrick,
I am partially responsible for E-Junkie keeping their name. I talked with Robin when he wanted to change it… His new name was bland, boring and completely forgettable. I can’t even remember what it is.
I told him to keep E-Junkie because it’s more memorable. It’s still not the ideal name, but at least it stands out in my mind.
-Yakov
Mixed In Key
Hey Patrick,
Thanks for this! This will be very helful for developors who have have asked for a solution to hide the domain name.
As for point 1 .. even if you don’t set the SPF records, the way we send the email is not considered sppof as we are still in the Sender header field. Merchant email in in “From” field and as per the RFCs, that is the legit way to do it :)
So essentially, adding us in your SPF records will make things better but not doing that will not make things worse.
– Robin
Some nice tips there Patrick. Have also been looking into doing some stuff like this myself but you’ve taken it to the next level. Another quick fix is to use a form instead of the buy now link so it at least hides the link when you hover the mouse over the button.
Hey Patrick,
Thanks for the guide :) On the SPF issue, the way we send the email, we keep our address in the “Sender” field and merchants email in the “From” field, thus it’s not considered spoofing, so if you don’t have us in the SPF, that is perfectly ok.
To test that, just send an email to a yahoo or gmail address .. one of those show you the result of SPF. Also, on yahoo, you can see we pass the domainkeys thing too.
– Robin
Isn’t it something fundementally wrong when you have to go thru hoops in order to hide the name of the services that you build your business upon?
I would say that you should have been listening to Robin.
I mean, if I had to choose from a boring name, and a name containing the word junk for the service that takes care of my money, I sure would have choosen the boring name.
I don’t really know how can the URL of the button affect the buyer’s decision to want to buy your product or not.
Robin K, you wrote: “I don’t really know how can the URL of the button affect the buyer’s decision to want to buy your product or not.”
Robin, many people are scared of shopping online for all kinds of reasons, they are worried a hacker could get into their computer, their credit card data could be stolen, and so on, and every bit of reassurance that they are at a safe place online helps. Having the work “junkie” in the URL does not help with that.
As a potential customer of yours, I’ve been thinking about using your services for some time now, but I have not signed up yet, and guess for what reason? For the word “junkie” in your URL. If not for it, I’d have signed up long ago. But I keep evaluating other solutions. Maybe instead of fighting this question over and over, a better thing for you to do would be to create a neutral alias to the e-junkie URL, and let those of us who think e-junkie is a bad word to use the alias instead.
HTH
Hi:
I am trying to use the Java script you refer to to get the download link and put it in an iframe on my thankyou page. I am a novice at this stuff but cannot figure out how to get the parameter I need into the iframe urlstring. Any tips? or pages I can look at?
If you don’t want your customers to see what you are using, you can use a completely white label service like Cerizmo.com. It’s similar to E-Junkie but you can point your own domain to their servers, and all pages, redirects, thank you, and download pages use your domain and have no branding. The emails are white label as well and are sent from an address @yourdomain.com.
Yeah, you only have to share 8% of your earnings with Cerizmo for that. No thanks Brian.
I’ve also been hesitant to sign up with e-junkie because of the name. It just doesn’t sound professional. I didn’t believe it was a legitimate company when I was first looking for a solution.
Even TechCrunch does not have an issue with our name (yes, they are using us) and we are processing $5MM each month. If your product is solid, our name is the last thing that will affect your sales.
cerizmo went to flat monthly fee awhile back, I don’t think they take transaction fees anymore, which is nice.
and e-junkie is a solid service also, nothing unprofessional…
We would have stayed with E-junkie if we could have used our own domain. Or at least a more professional domain.
I am currently using the e-junkie service, and think the service part of it is great. However, I have had emails from people wanting to buy my products who were unwilling as the junkie name scared them off. I would be prepared to pay x 5 what I pay now to have my potential customers not see the name.
When marketing to sellers I think e-junkie is a pretty good name. I wouldn’t use it my self… but I can see your point about it being memorial. You have built up your brand over a number of years primarily through the quality service so of course it would not make sense to change it.
However, what I’m sure a lot of your customers would like is the option to have the “e-junkie” name appear to our end customers. Have you consulted with your customers about this? I would suggest putting an optional survey withing the user section of your site, or if you are unprepared to do that, simply ask Patrick how many hits this specific page is getting and the average time on page. This would give you a pretty good idea of were this issue ranks with your customers.
On a positive note though, thanks to e-junkie for the great trouble free service.
I hope I don’t sound condescending here but from my experience with online sales I really believe that implementing a change such as this would be largely beneficial for the business of your sellers and even more so for your own company.
I stopped using e-junkie because of the name. I’m sure a certain % of my clients will see the name and choose not to make a purchase. I don’t want to be associated with a junk product.
It’s now a year later. I need to create an affiliate program for a physical product that uses Paypal, which is how I came to your site. I wanted to see if there was any way I can use ejunkie without the name showing up.
I read the comments, and am surprised that ejunkie wants to keep the name. Yes… it’s memorable because it has such a terrible name. I would suggest creating another url that is not branded ejunkie for the newer users. If so, I’ll be back as a customer.
We have used e-junkie for several years and we love them. Their service is extremely reliable and affordable. Their support is fantastic…and they are really nice people. They must have thousands of customers but Robin often jumps in himself. His personal approach means a lot and has inspired me in the way that I run MY company. We are selling financial products (credit repair tools and credit repair software), and none of our customers have ever communicated an issue with the name. Personally, I think it’s memorable and good branding. Besides, our customers don’t even see the name e-junkie until they have made their purchase anyway. However, I do have a suggestion; Maybe e-junkie might offer a white label upgrade for XX dollars a month? Nevertheless, I’ll stick with e-junkie. They’ve grown on me.
what name scares a buyer? paypal? google checkout? authorize.net? cripes, they all scare me. People buy online are taking a risk, regardless of how you slice it, and the name E-Junkie shouldn’t make them feel more or less secure. Trust.com, how about that? Somehow, I still don’t feel better. E-junkie is a fun name. Fun is good. And the service is excellent.