The Lockwood Letter

When you put a product online for sale, you should make a test purchase before advertising the site, to make sure everything works smoothly.

Even if you have done this many times, it’s easy to make a mistake that leads to problems such as people not getting what they ordered.

If you’re using PayPal, there’s another issue. You have to make the purchase from another PayPal account, since an account cannot buy from itself. This leads some to get 2 accounts (which can get you in trouble if not done right), try to get friends to make the test purchases, or just skip this important step.

PayPal has provided a way around this. It’s called the sandbox, and it lets you make test purchases with just one account, without charging your credit card or anything like that. It takes you through all the other steps a customer would experience.

I don’t hear this feature mentioned much in the marketing world, maybe people don’t know about it. It is documented on PayPal’s site, but their directions get to be too technical for many people’s taste.

Fortunately there’s a new video series that will walk you through using the PayPal sandbox step by step, no engineering degree or programming skills needed.

I’m getting ready to go on a short trip, so for the next week or so I’m making the videos available at an even lower price.

In case you’re not sure how to make PayPal buttons, I’m adding another video covering that, as well as one that teaches how to make a custom payment page.

Get the PayPal video series here

You’ll also get access to any other PayPal videos I add in the future at no extra charge.

Testing your order process properly will save you many times the cost of these videos in lost sales and customer support issues.