In other words, the more online payment options you offer, the more online payment processing you'll do on your site and the more money you'll make.

Here are the online payment options you could offer on your site:

1) Credit card

Credit cards are still the most popular way to pay for goods and services online.

To set up credit card processing on your website, (MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover), you need to get an Internet merchant account through your local banks.

Wherever you get your Internet merchant account, you will have to also purchase an Internet gateway service. The gateway verifies information, transfers requests and authorizes credit cards in real time.

2) PayPal

PayPal is now also an all-in-one online payment solution. Their Website Payments Standard program lets you accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express credit card payments as well as bank transfers and offer PayPal as well – with no monthly fees, setup or cancellation fees. PayPal charges you a fee of 1.9 to 2.9 percent of transaction plus 30 cents per order, depending on your company's sales volume.

PayPal also offers an upgraded version of Website Payments Standard called Website Payments Pro, where customers check out right on your site rather than on PayPal's (currently available only in the U.S.).

They also offer a PayFlow Gateway and PayPal Express Checkout for businesses that already have Internet merchant accounts.

3) Debit Cards

The debit card is one option that allows your customers to pay for goods and services online directly from their bank accounts. It’s convenient and secure for customers because they don’t have to share any of their card numbers or financial details when making a purchase; payment is completed through their own financial institutions.

4) Give Them Offline Payment Options Too

Some of your potential customers are people who just aren't comfortable with any of the online options outlined above or people who want to talk to a live person. If you want to fully monetize your website and make all the sales that you can, it's important that you give these people ways to pay too. Include a toll-free number and an order form that customers can fill out and email or snail mail if they prefer.

The More Online Payment Options the Better

The success of your online business depends on sales. So why deliberately decrease your sales potential by limiting the ways potential customers can pay for your products or services online? Make as many sales as you possibly can by offering as many online payment options as possible on your site.

We are pleased to announce a new partnerhship with Athletic DNA, a new high end line of tennis apparrel geared for competitive players.  in addition to creating a state of the art website to advertise the product, Vinasource will be working in conjunction with Athletic DNA over a variety of ongoing initiatives such as statistics tracking, recruiting and general internet marketing.

Recently, Vinasource signed a one year contract to work with Active.com.  This contract includes three dedicated resources that will help manage the official rankings for the NCAA in conjuction with the Intercollegiate Tennis Association.

This new deal will expand the ranking system built by Vinasource seven years ago. All code will be upgraded to .net 3.5 and new feeds will be provided, enabling the use of college tennis scores on various websites such as www.itatennis.com.

Vinasource is looking forward to a long partnership with Active.com as tennis as sports are very dear to the hearts of our founders.

A deal was signed today between VinaSource and Bridge Partners LLC to work together to build a comprehensive product launch managment tool for the Microsoft Dynamics Group.  This project entails putting together a string of logic that helps Microsoft Launch managers better plan their training programs during the various stages of a product launch. The application will be done in .net 3.5 with a touch of Silverlight for training videos. All data will be stored in a SQL Server 2005 database.

This two month engagement will go live on October 30, 2008.

As part of the larger momtourage initiative, Vinasource launched into production two new applications for Facebook, momtourage and the momtourage Quiz. The main momtourage application allows moms to connect with the people closest to them who provide support through the daily job of motherhood.  The app includes a question and answer forum, picture gallery of kids and a shout out section.

The quiz application will allow iVillage to quickly build multiple quizzes. The first quiz launched into production is called What Kind of Mom are You.  It walks users through a series of 10 questions.  At the end, it tells them the type of mom they are and shows them the results of their friends.

So, despite an extremely hectic workload, I made it down to F8.  Some interesting stuff from the profile changes to Facebook Connect. Of course, it means more things we need to do to properly code applications and adjustments that will be required for past apps, but hey, that's why we love technology right!

Facebook F8 was a good time.  It was fun seeing the different apps that were being funded by the FB 10 million dollar fund.  Weddings, travel, games and carpooling were popular apps.

I mostly spent my time in the user interface track with one session on advanced application development. There are some cool new things we can do now with performance and iframes which is nice.

The new profile is better I think.  Now as we build apps, we need to code for four things:

1. Tabs
2. Profile Boxes (same as before)
3. Info Box (if you have pertinent info that applies to a users profile, like your astrology sign)
4. Canvas Page --- pages that can be viewed without adding the app.

Facebook connect will be interesting... it's basically using a facebook login on an application outside of Facebook which will let you tap into their social graph.  There are some interesting applications to this.  They demo'd City Search with reviews and moveable type for blogs.  There are two things I think are really cool about Facebook Connect:

1. If you have a small site and want to pop in a social networking component, Facebook will allow you to let a user login to their facebook account and access information like you would in facebook.  This allows you to then display friends amongst a wealth of other things.
2. If you want to advertise your site within the Facebook news feed (which they are REALLY emphasizing now with the new design) you can allow user to publish their actions to facebook when they do something on your site like, post a comment, review, picture, etc.

http://developers.facebook.com for more info on Facebook Changes.

It was a good day here at VinaSource as we were retained to do two projects for iVillage.com. Both projects are in support of a new initiative launching mid August.  Stay tuned for more info!

Just announced, VinaSource will be the sole developer focusing on the relaunch of judysbook.com.  With this project, three developers will be staffed along with project based PM and test resources.

The purpose of the relauch is two-fold.

1. Give the site a new look and feel better tying together the Deals and Reviews components

2. Plan for great new features that will enhance the user experience.

Stay tuned for the launch and more!

Just announced ---- VinaSource.com will be building multiple Facebook applications for the Microsoft corporation, working in conjunction with top Ad Agency, Heated Details! The applications will be focused on Health and Fitness and Search.

More coming!  Stay tuned as the apps launch, they will be hot!

Blog tools, calendars, galleries, all these "pieces" of your website are components that were built out as web applications. Most people really confuse development, graphic design, and UI and thus, do not always make the best decision when hiring a company or companies to do their project.

So, to keep it simple for you:

1. Graphic design is the art of making something pretty. In most cases, your graphic designer should NOT be even doing your website User Interface (UI), forget making an attempt at even installing web application components. As a customer, you should have the flexibility of finding a designer that matches your style, whether it's in the same company or not and simply having them pass off the graphics files to those who know best what to do with them, the coders.
2. Web Application Developers are the techie people you see in the back office with 8 cups of coffee, candy bars and thick glasses (which, are slowly being replaced by lasik). They skill sets are very different from designers, left brain vs. right brain.  They are logical, they hate beautiful things and they love to code. Now, why does that matter to your website?  A basic application has three parts, UI, Business Layer (the part that manipulates things around, uploading pictures, articles, calculations, etc) and database layer.  It is important for the purpose of performance that these work well together and are fully optimized for speed and memory usage.  Sometimes, all they do is integrate existing components, like a blogger tool, other times, they write complex calculations.  It is critical that these are done right or down the road, you'll have bugs, unhappy users and bad performance. If a designer says they can code your site, ask them what the business layer of code is and if they can't answer, have them just do the graphics.
3. User Interface (UI) Developer - They are the glue that puts the puzzle together.  Typicaly, web application coders are "above" UI work, they don't normally like it because it is tedious, time consuming and not techie enough as HTML and CSS are really mark up languages, not programming.  But, none-the-less, UI Developers are critical.  They understand SEO and how a search engine reviews your site as well as users and how a user will access your site. They can work with cool stuff too like ajax and javascript to make the user experience easier. Ask your designer how they write their UI.  If they have a blank look or say, "The HTML is generated from photoshop", tell them to just give you .jpg files so you can take it to a developer!

What does this mean for your project? 

• Make sure you understand your business needs, what your website should be doing and how you want it to look. 
• Your next step should be to engage a real project manager that can help you fine tune your requirements and get them to the right people to build. A good project manager will help you figure out how a website should layout and help correct mistakes that designers make with respect to code interaction. They will also help you determine what Web Applications you need to make your site work to your requirements.
• From there, at the bare minimum, have a real UI developer finish the project if it's not too complicated in code. Make sure they understand HTML/CSS standards and can create your site for cross browser functionality. If you've got a lot of real "code" in there, ecommerce, etc, get a Web Application Developer involved and get it right the first time
• Find a company that can do the process for you as opposed to a cousin sitting in their bed will save you time, headaches and money over the long haul.

And your off!

The talent level in Vietnam is growing every day. Compared to India, which has a literacy rate of under 50%, Vietnam's literacy rate is over 90%! Another exciting fact is that 70% of the country is under 30 years of age. This means the talent pool is young, open minded and eager to learn.

English is fast emerging as the second language of Vietnam. Students typically begin learning English at the high school level. Any tech employee has usually had 4-8 years of English language study. Technology classes typically use resources from the United states and students are taught how to leverage online forums, blogs and English based learning references.