Single Item Ecommerce
One of the reasons I'm so excited about Bitcoin as infrastructure (see this Scoop: http://sco.lt/5rrn05 ) is the real possibility of adding single item ecommerce.

Why is single item ecom so important?

One of the last big castles owned by abusive middlemen is the web's payment gateways. Auth.net is a pain. Such a pain small single item ideas can't generate ROI. Problem is BIG IDEAS often start as tiny ones.

This means the block to setting up online commerce retards innovation, slows ecommerce / social synergy and makes product development and testing harder than it needs to be.

Sure you can use a scaled "print on demand" site such as Zazzle or Cafe Press, but NOT if you want to print on something other than currently supported media.

What if we want to sell our Cure Cancer cycling socks? We don't want to go all the way to a shopify store since that feels like overkill. We want to put up a Facebook image with a little story and a payment gateway or throw a link into a tweet that does the same.

WHY CAN"T WE DO THIS?

Or can we and I just don't know about it? I looked into https://www.shoplocket.com/ and problem there is they use THEIR cart. Linking to the cart I saw six months ago with limited white label capacity would be like shifting the link OF OUR OWN PRODUCTS across an affiliate link.

I took a look at https://www.simplify.com/commerce/ earlier today and will put in our routing information and EIN numbers when I get home. If anyone knows of a great single item ecommerce engine that allows enough customization that the cart looks like YOU and isn't a holy PAIN in the you know where to create please share.

Bitcoin, while intriguing, is at least a year away from any kind of easy installation and use (at least). Need a an easy to use payment gateway by Christmas or these trips to Ohio are going to break me (lol).

More on G+: https://plus.google.com/102639884404823294558/posts/CMhU6qUQB34

Teams I've managed have made more than $30M online, but I never had to worry about our #ecommerce backend because we had a great team and it never came up. Not knowing what I don't know just cost me and http://www.curecancerstarter.org .

My mistake was in thinking Auth.net was both "payment gateway" and "credit card processor". NOPE. Auth.net is a "payment gateway" meaning they encrypt the transaction (for security reasons) and ship it over to a bank or credit card processor such as Sterling Buying Group or Elavon across a secure "bridge".

So when you put your Auth.net account into "test" mode you are really only testing if you have a valid and verified Auth.net token. You are NOT testing the entire roundtrip.

My friend and #ecom mentor Eric Garrison just let me know you can pay for a one time round trip to test (sure you aren't limited to once but each test would be a fee) to test both payment gateway and CC processor.

Setting up your Auth.net and payment gateway is a series of inter-connected forms (something I do so well anymore since it takes patience and detailed diligence). I trust Eric and his amazing wife Cynthia to help set up my accounts.

In fact I told someone from the Sterling Buying Group recently to think of Cynthia Garrison as my sister and tell her whatever they would tell me. If you have that kind of relationship with your website HOST then you may not ever need to know about how payment gateways relate to credit card processors.

And how when you are "testing" auth.net you aren't testing much, but if you don't have a "sister" like Cynthia you may want to read the linked post on GPlus. Did I just learn this lesosn the hard way? Yep, like most lessons.