Mercury Virtual Hosting - Linking Your Website to your Virtual Hosting Account

RBS Virtual Hosting is an alternative to purchasing your own hardware and software to operate an Online Backup service. You distribute a white-label version of our industry leading Remote Backup Client software to your customers, and they back up to RBS' data centers. You maintain your own customer relationships, determine your own end-user pricing, and distribute software with your own branding.

Your Remote Backup Systems' Mercury Virtual Hosting account has features that allow you to offer fully automated online registration, payment, and software deployment for your customers from your own web site. It also includes features that allow you to sell Online Backup services without a web site at all.

Many service providers want to personally install the Client software for their customers. In this case, you may not need a fully automated web-based signup system like the one described here. Your Mercury Virtual Hosting Portal fully supports both methods.

For websites, registration typically starts with a button on your web site, on a page that describes your various plans. When a new customer selects the button on your web site, he is linked to a Shopping Cart program or service where he can enter her contact information and credit card info.

The Shopping Cart program can contain features like automatically calculating sales or VAT taxes, shipping, recurring charges, discounts, and many other programmable features. In addition, many systems are capable of accepting E-checks, which draft directly from your customers' checking accounts. If you don't have your own Shopping Cart, RBS highly recommends 1Shoppingcart.com. It already links with Mercury Virtual Hosting, and it is inexpensive.

When your customer's charge is approved, a receipt is generated for your customer, your customer is optionally set up for automatic recurring billing, and you are notified by EMail.

The shopping cart then passes this information (and your new customer's browser) to your Mercury Virtual Hosting Account, which adds the new customer to your account and downloads your customized software to your customer.

The entire process is automated, secure, and takes about 3 minutes. From the user's perspective, he never left your web site.

Some smaller Service Providers who want to offer Online Backup services through their web sites don't want to go to the trouble of setting up a Shopping Cart service or acquiring a Merchant Account to process their credit card payments. Remote Backup Systems can help set you up with one of our partners, getting you into the Online Backup business as an Affiliate with your own branded software.

Shopping Carts and Credit Cards

Virtually all web sites that sell products and services online need a Shopping Cart program. The shopping cart handles the business end of online transactions. It allows your customers to select the products and services they want, and pay for them online.

You will need a Shopping Cart program hosted on your own servers, or a Shopping Cart Service, which you can sign up for online, requiring little or no modifications to your web site. This is, by far, the simplest, fastest, and least expensive way to get Shopping Cart features onto your web site.

The Shopping Cart verifies funds and charges credit cards. It notifies your payment processor to take money out of your customer's credit card or bank account and put it in your bank account (or PayPal account, or wherever you tell it to.) It calculates sales tax and shipping. It can automatically charge your customers monthly for your service. It keeps records of your payments and charges.

You can log into your shopping cart online to print reports and review transactions. Some of them (like 1shoppingcart.com) can also distribute digital content, post transactions to other systems (like your Mercury Virtual Hosting account), import and export transactions to Quickbooks and other accounting systems.

1Shoppingcart.com even has advanced online marketing tools and autoresponders, including a built-in system which can let you set up an Affiliate program, paying your Affiliates for business they send to you. Mozy's affiliate program brought in more than 90% of its 300,000 clients in its first six months.

Shopping Cart services charge various fees. For example, 1shoppingcart.com charges (at the time of this writing) a monthly fee starting at $34/month, and going up depending on the degree of website integration and advanced features. The simplest package is usually adequate unless you have more than 10,000 customers.

In addition to a Shopping Cart service, you also need a company to process your credit card payments. This is sometimes called a Merchant Account. There are many to choose from. PayPal offers a variety of ways to charge credit cards, and 1Shoppingcart.com has its own as well. You can also use 1shoppingcart.com to accept PayPal payments and send them to your own PayPal account.

The company doing your credit card processing charges a fee, usually a percentage of each credit card transaction plus a processing fee. Processing fees can be around $.20 - $.30 per transaction and 1.5% - 2.5% of the total of the transaction. They may also charge for statements and other services.

As of this writing, 1shoppingcart.com's merchant account costs $99 for an application fee (fully refundable if not accepted), 2.20% processing fee, $.25 per transaction, $10 monthly Gateway Fee, and $6 monthly Statement Fee.

An RBS provider charging 50 accounts a month at an average of $50 each would pay about $117 per month for combined credit card processing and Shopping Cart service fees.

Integrating Shopping Carts with your Mercury Virtual Hosting Account
A Boring Technical Discussion

All shopping carts allow you to define a "Thank You" page and a "Failure" page. The "Thank You" page is where the shopping cart sends the customer's browser on successful completion of a transaction. The "Failure" page is called when a transaction fails.

Let's dispose of the "Failure" page before we move on to the really geeky stuff. By default, the Failure page simply displays a message telling the user his transaction failed, and asking if he'd like to try again. It can also be programmed to do other things like send you an email with the customer's information so you can contact him to arrange alternate payment methods. We highly recommend turning this feature on, and to following up. This allows you to save sales that might otherwise be lost.

Typically, when customers' transactions fail because the credit card was rejected for some reason (The shopping cart will not usually tell you the reason) customers will try other credit cards until one of them works. So, you may receive several "Failure" emails, and then a "Thank You" email. In this case, of course, ignore the Failure emails.

Customers whose credit cards cannot be charged will not be passed on to your Mercury Virtual Hosting account for their software download, and will not be added to your Mercury Virtual Hosting account.

Now for the geeky stuff...

Your Mercury Virtual Hosting Account receives information from your Shopping Cart through a POST method from the shopping cart's "Thank You" page. This information MUST be in a specific format for your Virtual Hosting account to recognize it.

If you use 1shoppingcart.com, you have no further work to do. If you want to integrate your Mercury Virtual Hosting Account with your own shopping cart or directly with your own website, you have a lot of work to do.

The following table contains the variable names that must contain certain information required by RBS' Mercury Virtual Hosting servers. A link will be provided for you when you set up your Mercury Virtual Hosting account.