PayPal Alternatives in Pakistan and Countries those are Not Supported by PayPal

by Aqeel Syed on July 19, 2009

PayPal is an awesome international payment method that can be used online effectively by freelancers and businesses to send/receive payments. It is the most widely used payment method. But unfortunately, PayPal do not support Pakistan and  many other countries.

If you are from Pakistan or any other non supported country, you cannot send/receive payments through PayPal, the most unfortunate and frustrating thing is that you cannot even pay using credit card if merchant is only accepting PayPal. So you often cannot buy that useful piece of software, some great ebooks or you cannot get paid by many online programs.

I lost business of thousands of dollars online because of unavailability of PayPal. So I hate PayPal and on other hand also want it badly :P

Leaving all the sour discussion why PayPal is not available in Pakistan either because of lame policies of State Bank of Pakistan or because of high fraud rate, whatever it is :( I’m going to discuss few PayPal alternatives those can help you survive and in some cases thrive online.

Payoneer.com

I love Payoneer and its at top of my list for a PayPal alternative. I was first introduced to Payoneer by my parnter and mentor David Daniels in 2007. We selected Payoneer for our company as a payment method over Western Union to pay freelancers and employs.

Payoneer gives you a Master Debit Card. Funds can be withdrawn from ATMs, in Pakistan Payoneer card can be used at MNet ATMs (MCB, Standard Chartered and Citi Bank).Your clients can load money to your card using credit cards and US ACH. With Payoneer you can also accept ACH. Low monthly maintenance fee and fast availability of funds makes it an ideal choice.

However getting a card is a little tricky process for newbie freelancers, you cannot  apply directly at Payoneer’s site for a Master Card, you can get a card if you are affiliated with one of their partners like Guru.com, 2CO and GetAFreelancer.com (etc).

2CO

2CO or 2Chekcout is a long standing and respectable payment solution. Lots of websites on the Internet use it including some Pakistani sites. You can accept PayPal payments using 2CO. 2CO has a handy feature of “customer invoicing”. You can send invoices to your clients by email. 2CO also offers Payoneer Master card, you can withdraw funds from 2CO using Payoneer Master Card or through check/wire transfer to your bank account.

The downside of 2CO is that you have to pay $50 sign up fee and its difficult (almost not possible) to implement one 2CO account on multiple sites. Also you cannot sell many products using 2CO including web hosting.

However for one site and for invoicing clients through email, 2CO works great.

MoneyBookers.com

MoneyBookers can be used for receiving and sending funds (person to person and person to business transfers). MoneyBookers can wire you internationally, you can receive funds in MCB and UBL in 3 – 4 days. However very small number of merchants accept MoneyBookers online, it means you cannot have access to good web hosting companies, big stores and other services if you use MoneyBookers. An other downside is that MoneyBookers do not accpet Maste Card, payments can only be made using VISA cards (I don’t understand why they are not solving this issue).

AlertPay

AlertPay can be used for receiving payments from clients. It is a Payment Processor that is mainly used by Paid To Click (PTC), Paid To Read (PTR) and High Yield Investment Program (HYIP) type sites…And more recently for multiple large business and financial transactions across Europe and Asia.

There are 3 types of account – Personal Starter, Personal Pro and Business. All are free to join. For a quick start you can get a personal account for free and you can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer.. The downside with AlertPay is that you cannot load funds to your AlertPay account from Pakistan.

CCNow

CCNow is a merchant account (credit card processor) that also accepts PayPal payments, same as 2CO. You can get start accepting payments with CCNow for only $10. You can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer.

Plimus

Plimus is an other payment processor same as 2CO. Plimus is free to join, you can implement it on multiple websites and take payment from PayPal. You can withdraw money via Check, Bank Wire and Bank Transfer after paying Plimus commission.

Payoneer, AlertPay, MoneyBookers and 2CO are very good for newbie freelancers and if you are an expert and have several sites where you want to sell your products then go for CCNow and plimus.

If this article was of any help to you, please share your opinion through comments section.

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SINGLEHOP You Should Revise Your Sales Policy

by Aqeel Syed on July 6, 2009

I’m so disappointed with one of the best dedicated hosts, SINGLEHOP. Yes they are the best but they have a lame sales policy. I ordered a dedicated server yesterday and today SINGLEHOP sales team informed me that they cannot process my order due to high fraud risk. High fraud risk? Yes, high fraud risk because I live in a 3rd world country, Pakistan. I offered them identification documents like international passport, drivers license but sales representative only provided a rude response. “No, we cannot process this order.”

In last 4 years, working as a web entrepreneur, I partnered with several web hosts, from shared web hosts to dedicated hosts, and some cloud hosting platforms but no other host had such fraud prevention policy. Some of these hosts had confirmed my identification by requesting passport copy, drivers license but no one had given such response, “best of luck finding your new host”.

SINGLEHOP you should revise your sales policy, not everyone in Pakistan or 3rd world countries is a fraud, people are doing legit business. They have partnerships all over the world. It hurts when you see everyone of us as fraud!

From GoDaddy to ThePlanet, Mosso, DreamHost, Site5, XLHost… (its a long list) everyone is doing business with us, they are huge, large seasoned companies but they are not rejecting orders from Pakistan or 3rd world countries saying we cannot process due to high fraud risk. You should revise this biased sales policy.

Update:

From writing this post to editing this post its only difference of 70 minutes. SINGLEHOP account executive contacted me by phone and email. Apart from initial confusion, they had great support, I’m so impressed. They requested ID documents which I provided and my order is processed with some custom changes from me.
Thumbs UP SINGLEHOP, no doubt you people are the best dedicated web host with best dedicated support.
My Yorkfield 2.8 x 4 GHz server with 8 GB RAM is about to deliver. I’m very excited and will post a review of SINGLEHOP services in next days.

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Can Bing Make The Difference?

by Aqeel Syed on June 30, 2009

Microsoft Bing after its launch on May 28th went ahead of Yahoo in search engine market share and took the 2nd position. But this trend was not permanent, Bing slipped back to 3rd position after 2 weeks. However the permanent thing is this that Bing is increasing its market share at cost of Yahoo and Google losing their market share.

Can Bing pose a challenge for Google?

It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner. Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.

Bing has to grow its index, improve results quality (results are not sub standard but when compared to Google, they are not at the top of this game) and lets see what happens when Bing runs out of its $100 million advertising budget.

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Adsense Now Available on Mobile Apps

by Aqeel Syed on June 30, 2009

If you have a mobile phone where you can download apps, then you may have noticed that some of the apps have ads on them. Mobile application developers use them to make money. Google had been testing AdSense on mobile apps for the iPhone and Android in a kind of private beta with roughly 10 partners, including Pandora, Shazam and Urbanspoon. Now the program is opening up to apps developers and publishers who meet some criteria (among them, a 3 month commitment, 100K+ page views).

On the advertising side, the process by which advertisers select their audiences and bid for placement is largely similar to the Web-based version of AdSense. “Placement targeting” (choosing which app to advertise on), keyword and broad geo targeting are carried over, although placement targeting is still in the experimental phase.
You can apply for Adsense for Mobile Applications by clicking here.

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6 Tactics To Fix Online Reputation That No One Else Has Told You Before

by Aqeel Syed on June 22, 2009

I’d summed up 6 unique tactics to fix online reputation in this post. You should have read about social media, reputation management profiles and other tactics to fix your reputation but these are actually more powerful and robust tactics to fix your reputation.
These tactics work for both individuals and corporations.

Review Sites
One of the fast and powerful ways to spread reviews is to get started with review sites like reviewstream.com
Example review here.
If someone can post negative comments/articles/reviews about your business online then why don’t you find sites where positive reviews can be posted!
These sites rank well with in SE and you can request your customers to post positive reviews about your business there.

Articles Sites
Informative articles with testimonials can be posted to sites like ezinearticles.com
Example article here.
Quality article sites rank very well in SE, articles are read by thousands of peoples, these articles are then picked by other sites and published on their blogs. You can get some good link backs to your sites and also your author profile at these sites rank at the top in search engines.

Guest Blogging
Many blogs have a section for guest bloggers, where a blogger can write and post a guest post. Post should be related to blogs niche. More about guest blogging.
Example here and here.
You can write guest posts, you can also link back to your sites from these guest posts, your name & business name also get published with these guest posts. Quality posts are always welcomed by bloggers.

Freebies
You can offer free books, CDs about your products, free tickets to events. These offers then can be promoted on freebie sites, can create lots of buzz and these items rank well in SE.
Example here,
Or, http://www.thatfreebiesite.com/

Event Listings
Event listings in your niche can be used to create buzz. Promote your business events through event sites and get lots of positive press.
Example here.

Paid Reviews
Paid reviews from established blogs can work magic but they cost good amount of $$.
More here, http://www.apennyearned.co.uk/reviews.html
An example by johnchow.com

http://www.johnchow.com/motive-interactive-shoemoney-contest/

He charge $500/review but you reach millions by buying a review from a site like JohnChow.com
For reputation management reviews can be purchased from Reviewme.com and paidreviews.com

Gifts to Bloggers
Gifts to famous bloggers can also work like.
Example here.

Creating Viral Contents
Viral content is the King! Requires lots of hard work and research for writing a post but it works magic. Read more about viral content.

Do you have a more creative idea? Share with us using comments.

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