Paypal in South Africa

37
Posted on 18 October 2006 Internet Marketing Rants South Africa

Performancing launched an advertising network for bloggers today. I was pretty interested to find out how they would implement this system, but more so how they would pay us bloggers.

So after reading a couple of reviews on the new Performancing Partners, (most notably Problogger.net), I logged in to my account, hit the partners program, and the ugliest word stared me in the face…

Paypal

I love Paypal and the simplicity of paying and receiving money online, as well as the endless opportunities it offers on the web. The big but in this is Paypal is not accepted in South Africa, thanks to SARS. We can setup a Paypal account to use it to pay others or transfer money into other Paypal accounts, but we cannot have anyone pay us.

The reason SARS won’t allow Paypal, is the fact that they want their share of the pie, for when you get paid. If you are using Paypal, they cannot track money coming into our country, and therefore cannot get paid.

This is just another reason to add to our online problems (along with Telkom’s ridiculous bandwidth pricing etc).

Think about this scenario. I’ve decided that I want to sell funky designed T-shirts online. Something along the lines of Threadless.com. I design a simple website with pictures of my T-shirts. I have a hosting account setup, which is lank cheap – R20pm (or even find free hosting at worst), and that’s afforable right?

Step 2. Now I need to be able for people to buy my T-shirts online! I’m an American, so I pop into my Paypal account, create a shopping cart, pop that into my small website and now it’s gone all e-commerce! Cool I say! Paypal takes 2.5% to 3.5% of every transaction, as well as 30c. The big factor in this is, if I don’t sell 1 T-shirt, I won’t have to pay a cent. No risks = no loss.

Now imagine this scenario in South Africa. There is no free online credit card processing shop that I can use. So I have to fork over at least R100pm for this functionality. What started as a small hobby, now means if I don’t sell, I’m losing money every month! That American guy is smiling because although he isn’t selling, at least his hobby isn’t costing him anything, and if his site all of a sudden takes off in 6 months time, he hasn’t wasted more than R600 on credit card processing.

The moral of this story is that not being able to stick a simple Paypal button on our websites, means dozens of budding entrepreneurs in SA are being put off the whole e-commerce thing, and will try to apply their trade elsewhere. Some will pay the bucks to start online businesses, but others just don’t have the capital to start, but they do have somre really awesome ideas.

I love this country, and everything it has to offer, but sometimes I really feel we are moving backwards, rather than forwards when it comes to the internet and e-commerce. Just for interests sake, the co-founder of Paypal, Elon Musk is South African. Imagine Paypal was a South African company. How much would SARS be making off them? A globally accepted form of payment processing is raking in billions of dollars annually, of which SA is seeing zero. It really is a shame.

Update: Check out the list of countrie’s Paypal supports. SA is in the Send Money to Anyone in the Growing PayPal Network group.

ADSL

4
Posted on 12 October 2006 ADSL Raves

Ok folks, this is official. This post is being written from my home, sitting on my coach, with no cables lying around me (well except the mouse), and me keeping 1 eye on the television…. ADSL at home rocks! No, wait. ADSL with a wireless router at home, rocks!

After ordering my telephone line around 5 weeks ago, and then my conversion to ADSL, around 3 weeks ago, I finally have a always-on internet connection at home. I bought a Netgear wireless ADSL router from Digital Planet (which is 10 times better than the wireless router that Telkom offers), which connects me to “broadband” internet. It also makes my entire home wireless, so I can connect to the internet, or my home network from anywhere in my house.

Our ISP is Web Africa, and I say “our” because I’m sharing the connection with my office. Web Africa give you 4 concurrent connections, so that you can connect from work and from home, without having to pay extra ISP costs. That truly rocks!

So goodbye dial-up, hello broadband!

I spotted a real UFO!

13
Posted on 11 September 2006 South Africa

I might sound like a weirdo, but my Dad took a photo of an UFO! A week ago, my Dad was taking photos of the farm he stays on. He asked me to take a couple of the photos and join them so as to make it look like a panoramic shot so that he could print and frame it. I went ahead and started joining the photos in fireworks, and when I zoomed into one of the photos, I saw something in the sky, that looked out of place. It doesn’t look like a bird, or a plane for that matter. I don’t go around looking for UFOs, and I don’t believe in life outside of earth either, but this is really strange…

A UFO isn’t always an alien or a spaceship, it is an Unidentified Flying Object, and this really is one! Here is the photo that my Dad took. (I’ve made it smaller to fit.)

Barrydale_UFO_512x384.jpg

Have a look in the sky. You see that silver dot? Ok, so it doesn’t look like much when you look at this photo, but download the original photo (2.39mb), which was taken with a 4 mega-pixel Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20EB camera. The original size of the image is 2560×1920. Here is the UFO cropped from the original.

zoomin.png

I can’t make out remotely what it is, so I’d have to put it down as a UFO. The photo was taken outside of Barrydale, in the little Karoo, so it’s literally in the middle of nowhere. Not sure about this fact, but aren’t most UFO sightings, normally spotted in remote areas? Well, the Karoo is as remote a place you going to find.

Anyway, take it like you want, and don’t be jealous folks, because I spotted a UFO! :-)

Is life in America like it is in the movies?

5
Posted on 25 August 2006 South Africa

Watching DVD’s, movies, mini-series and sitcoms that come out of Hollywood always has my subconscious thinking about what life in America must be like. Is it really like it is in the movies?

There are always small parts in movies that everyone can spot is completely far fetched, like the touch-of-a-button, do absolutely everything without you actually doing anything, super-computer. But what about the subtle things that are in almost every movie….

Do kids in high-school, prep-school whatever you want to call it school, all drive on those yellow magic school buses? Also, does every college student have a car? And especially, does the college *insert American accent* “quarter-back” have 3 best friends that always drive in a convertible sports car or jeep together?

Does every postbox have one of those flags that goes up or down if there is mail inside? By the way, how the hell do those things actually work?

What about all the sports betting? Do all middle aged american men bet every single week on their favourite football, ice hockey or basketball team?

What about when its the end of the school day, does every single class in school / college have a clock on the wall above the chalkboard that is perfectly synchronised with the bell?

Enough about school, what about every morning, the folks that walk to work, do they always stop at Starbucks and know exactly what coffee they are about to order? “Can I have 1 Tall Cafe Grande Decaf, low-fat milk, foam, 2 sugars. Make it quick, I’m late for work.”

Does every bell boy at every hotel / block of flats wear a maroon suit with one of those square hats?

Lets not get onto cab drivers. Every single one of them have a photo of their family on the dashboard, and a sandwich on the seat next to them. They also all seem to be South Americans!

Mom’s always make flapjacks or pancakes for breakfast, and theres always enough time for the entire family to sit down at the table and order their breakfast, except either Dad or college teenager is late and has to grab a slice of toast and run. What about those huge bottles of milk? Do you even get 5 litre milk bottles anywhere else in the world?

I could go on forever, but are Americans really like that? Or are all these situations I’ve just mentioned, “only in the movies…”. Could I be that short-sighted?

Linux almost saved my day

4
Posted on 21 August 2006 Personal

Last week Tuesday, my pride and joy, decided to stop booting, and nothing i did helped. I couldn’t get into Safe Mode, and worst of all the fail-safe method of booting the Windows CD and “repairing” Windows didn’t work. It would boot, load the drivers, and just before the format or install Windows menu appears, the PC just hangs.

Worst of all, I had got pretty complacent about doing backups, and because of that, I had files on this laptop that I had nowhere else. :-(

Linux to the rescue

What to do? Defza came to my rescue and gave me a Live Linux CD. ( For those less informed, its Linux that runs of a CD, straight out the box. No installation needed.) So here I was, a Windows user, quickly learning Bash syntax, mounting and unmounting USB flash drives, and copying all the files I forgot to backup off the laptop and onto another PC.

I lost 2 days because of this laptop, and we still don’t know what is wrong. I formatted the hard drive from Linux, and the Windows CD still didn’t give me that menu I was oh-so-wanting to see for 2 days. So I started up the extra laptop that we had ordered, and made it my own. The non-booting Windows laptop is off to the supplier to find out what went wrong. So after all my struggles, it looks like some sort of hardware issue. :-( The only good thing that came from this is I learnt some very valuable lessons.

So here are my 4 tips on how to get your PC up and running again in next to no time after experiencing software or hardware failure.

  1. Backup your crucial files! Use a product like Beyond Compare that will backup all your files off to another networked PC. Backup your emails, critical work docs and all development files daily. It literally takes seconds to do this type of backup, but do you think we do them regularly enough? (Backing up to CD everyday, takes way to long. So hiving your files off to another PC everyday, and doing DVD backups once a month, saves you alot of time and effort.)
  2. Have a Windows CD, Linux CD or a Recovery CD handy at all times. You never know when your PC will crash and you are going to need to recover something off it using some sort of Live CD.
  3. Hardware backups. This is an expensive option, but having a PC that you are able to turn to when your main machine dies, is sometimes crucial. You might just as well take a weeks holiday while you wait for your only PC to be repaired at your supplier.
  4. Have a smart friend proficient in talking the language of PC, only a phone call away. You might think you know everything, but when the pressure is on, you might not be thinking of the most simple thing that might fix your problem.

So there you have it. I’m happy to report that I’m backup again, pun intended.

Work with me

Would you like a blog like this? Does your brand need a mobile presence? Want to know more about Social Media and how you can benefit from it? Get in touch with me!

All content is mine, so please don't steal, mmkay? :) RSS | Sitemap