What are the Terms and Conditions?
What can I sell?
What are the average sales on CrafterWeb sites?
What about VAT?
Where do I get information & pictures to put on my web site?
Supposing I want to close my CrafterWeb site down after a while?
How do I find out about new orders?
How do I get paid?
What about cancelled orders and refunds?
How does the shopping cart on my website work?
What payment methods are acceptable?
What about overseas customers, how do they pay?
What currency should I use for my prices?
Doesn't PayPal charge a commission?
Can I set up and use my own ecommerce?
What is a domain name?
Why should I have a domain name for my web address?
How do I choose a domain name?
Can I take the domain name with me if I want to go to another web host?
Are there any additional costs?
What optional extras are available?
Supposing I need to update or amend my web pages?
Can I design. maintain and manage my own website?
How will people find my website?
How secure is the personal information I give you?

A:

Any products or services that are not spam-related, offensive or illegal. there's a list of things you can't sell on the PayPal site if you are interested, Mainly we won't accept spam products (e.g. drugs, marital aids), adult material, weapons, or anything that smacks of discrimination or hatred.

It goes up every month as more sites join and as the sites gain more visitors, but more than anything it depends on the product range and the unit prices of the goods. But here are a couple of examples.

A website selling handmade name badges at around £4 each is currently taking about £400 a month resulting in overall profit of roughly £250 per month. It has taken about 2 years to reach this position.

Another site selling individual oil paintings at an average of £150 each is currently selling about £450 a month after only 4 months. Profitability in this case is very high as the overhead (not counting the artist's time) is less than £50 a month.

The biggest website in the group has been online for 11 years and turns over an average of about £1200 per month.

But the real answer to this question is: You will sell as much or as little as you want depending on the quality of your products, the competitiveness of your prices and the amount of promotion you do for your site. If you have poor product, high prices and don't do any promotion you will sell very little. If you have great product at attractive prices and work hard at your promotion, then the sky's the limit.

CrafterWeb doesn't charge or collect VAT. We are a small business and our turnover is well under the VAT threshold. If you need to charge VAT on your products you should include it in the retail price and say so in your product descriptions. How you deal with the vatman is your own concern, we will not get involved.

You should develop your own text and pictures. Existing sales, corporate or promotional materials are often useful.

You might like to contact your suppliers, subcontractors or even your customers for suitable material that can be included - with their permission of course.

If you do not have any such resources at the moment, you will need to produce them before the project starts. Don't worry if you are not too confident about grammar or spelling, we will tidy that up if you like. Same goes for pictures, we can clean them up, resize to fit your pages and add captions - there's no extra charge for any of that work.

Please bear in mind that all text and pictures belong to someone. If you did not commission them or produce them yourself, then they are copyright to the originator. This is true of any published work whether it is on the web, in books, magazines or even giveaway leaflets and brochures. Always ask permission before copying anything.

So the answer to this question is: use your own resources to produce the content, develop your own pictures, and only use information from other sources if you have written permission from the owner. The result will be an original web site that is unique to you.

Just give us as much notice as you can. We will settle up with you and close your account. If you are going to start another website on your own we can help you transfer the pages to your new location.

You will get an email from us with all the information about the order within minutes of someone making a purchase.

You can view your online statement any time by visiting your own password- protected membership administration pages. The statement shows all sales, less the 10% commission deducted and the balance owing to you. You can carry the balance over or you can get paid right away. We will send you a cheque or transfer the money directly to your bank - your choice.

If you have been paid for the order then we will have to deduct the refund amount from your balance, or ask you to send the money back if there isn't enough in your account. When that has been settled we will refund the customer by the same method they used to make the original payment.

Most CrafterWeb members leave a bit in their account every month in case that happens, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to. It would just mean the customer would have to wait until the funds were available before we could send the refund.

CrafterWeb use the PayPal ecommerce system. It's the biggest, most secure and most widely-used system globally.

There are 'order now' buttons for each product on the web pages, and customers can select any options (e.g. size, colour, style, etc.) for each item. When they are finished shopping they complete the transaction by entering up their details and authorising the sale.

Customers can pay using a PayPal account, any major credit or debit card, by sending a cheque, or by a direct bank transfer.

PayPal allows payment in GB Pounds, US Dollars and Euros. Customers in some other countries can use their own currency (e.g. Canada, Australia) and PayPal automatically convert it into GB Pounds before crediting the CrafterWeb account.

But you will find that 99% of your orders will be paid in one of the three major currencies. In any case, you don't have to worry about that, we will convert everything into GB Pounds before updating your CrafterWeb statement.

Depends where your market is. If you expect to sell mostly to UK customers, then of course you should use GB Pounds. But if the appeal of your goods/services is likely to be worldwide, US Dollars is the best choice. About 90% of all credit card sales are transacted in US Dollars.

These days, even UK online customers don't balk at buying in dollars as they know the amount will be converted to pounds by the bank or card company without any additional charges.

But we can easily set up the shopping cart on your pages with order buttons for Pounds, US Dollars, AND Euros, then the customer has the choice.

Yes they do. But you don't have to worry about that. The 10% commission we deduct for each sale includes PayPal's commission as well as the CrafterWeb admin and site maintenance costs. 10% is all you have to pay.

A domain name is a specific web site address that you choose and register with one of the official web name organisations.

Our web site address "http://www.crafterweb.co.uk" is a domain name. It is 16 characters long. A domain name cannot be any longer than 67 characters. All characters (including hyphens) after the "http://www." are counted towards the limit.

You can't begin or end your domain name with a hyphen and you can't have spaces or symbols, it has to be letters, numbers and hyphens only. Domain names don't have upper and lower case, so you might just as well register it all in lower case. Web users have got used to typing everything in lower case, anyway.

There are a lot of endings available these days apart from the usual ".com" and ".co.uk." There are ".net", ".biz", ".org", ".tv", ".ws", ".cc" and various combinations of these with "uk". New ones are introduced from time to time, like the ".eu" ending for European sites introduced in 2005.

The alternatives are getting pretty common nowadays and no longer have the "second division" reputation that they had a few years ago. But it must be said that for Britain ".co.uk", "org.uk" and "me.uk" are the most popular and carry more prestige in this country.
 

We include .co.uk domain name registration in the package for one very good, simple reason. Without one, your website address will be connected to someone else's domain name. So you would have no control over access by visitors.

Starting off with your own domain name is far better than beginning without one. Changing your web site address at a later date can be costly and time consuming. It involves re-promoting your site both on-line and off-line, reprinting your business cards or promotional materials, and much more.

Also bear in mind that a catchy or descriptive domain name is easier for people to remember, and more likely to produce "hits" from search engines and people who search in the address bar.

Short and snappy names that people can remember easily are best. Of course, if it's a great name it's quite likely someone else has already registered it, so we have to check on availability first.

If the name you want is already taken we will look at alternatives, such as putting a hyphen in, putting 'my' or 'the' or '1' in front of the name, adding 4U at the end, etc. We will also look at 'org.uk' and 'me.uk' names as well as the common co.uk type.

Crafterweb will do all that checking in answer to your initial enquiry form and before you make any payment to us, so you will know what your domain name is going to be before you sign up.

The best type of name is the name of your business, one that describes the business, or perhaps the field in which you are operating. For example if you were selling silver jewellery  then 'silver-jewellery.co.uk' would be a great name (that one is taken), and if you were selling fluffly toy animals, you might choose 'fluffyanimals.co.uk' (that one was available last time we looked).

A play on words or a joke can make a memorable name: 'Knightyniteclub.co.uk' for a night club, 'maxitaxi.co.uk' for a cab company, 'stickystuff.co.uk' for wooden products, etc. Rhyming names (like maxitaxi, smileawhile, partysmarty) and alliteration (like stickystuff, marvelmagic, betterbuns) are easy to remember and easy to type, you get the idea.

Yes, but there are fees to pay for the transfer. How much depends on your new web host, the type of domain, and its expiry date. We will quickly advise you of the costs involved. We will even handle the transfer for you if you need help.

No. There are some optional extras available, but your site will be up-and-running for the setup fee and there is no further obligation to pay anything more than the 10% commission on sales.

If you want to increase the number of pages on your website there will be a small charge for preparing and publishing them - see the next FAQ.

Another thing that might come up is renewal or transfer of the domain name. The CrafterWeb set-up fee includes the cost of a .co.uk domain name for the first two years. After that it has to be renewed. The current renewal fee is £4.99 but that will probably go up over the years.

At the moment you can order additional pages (see next FAQ), extra email addresses, server access so you can update your own web pages, special photographic or artwork services by our web designers, and automated promotion campaigns operated by us. New optional services are introduced from time to time.

There's no additional charge for changing existing pages, the commission on sales covers the cost of site maintenance. But please try to keep the changes down to once a month if you can. If we get too many changes going on we might have to think again about providing the service for free.

If you want to increase the number of pages on your website there will be a fee of £3.95 for each additional page. The charge will be debited to your account and you will see it on your statement.

Yes, but there are additional costs. First there is a set up fee of £9.95 for your password-controlled access to the server. Then there is an annual charge of £24.95 to cover our verification checks and your bandwidth usage when uploading or downloading files to the server.

CrafterWeb will need to carry out verification checks regularly to  look for scripting errors or illegal content. Any discovered illegal content would be deleted immediately. Persistent offences would result in permanent cancellation of the site without refund. For information on illegal content please see the second FAQ "What Can I Sell?".

For prospective customers to find your site it needs to be listed by the WWW search engines. There are a dozen major free search engines that most web-surfers use all the time - like Google, All the Web, Alta Vista, AOL, MSN and Yahoo. There are another dozen or so pay-for-listing search engines, but using them can get expensive.

As soon as your CrafterWeb site is up and running it will be included in CrafterWeb's basic promotional activity. This means your site will be linked from as many as 50 other websites, and that will be enough to get you listed on Google, the biggest and most-used search engine on the WWW. Initially, your ranking will be quite low - unless you are very specialised or very lucky. So the more links you can get from other websites, directories and search engines, the higher your ranking will go and thus the more visitors you will attract.

There will also be any number of search engines and directories that deal with your own specialty. You need to find them and submit your site details in order to get listed. The best of these do not charge for a listing, they get paid by advertisers and sponsors. We recommend that you pass by any engine or directory of that type that wants payment up front.

There are three main options for making submissions to directories, websites and search engines:

On the whole we have found that method 1 is the most successful, but it does take more time.

That was the last FAQ. If you have a question not featured here, please email us.