So much for Pay Pal being "safe"

At the recommendation of dozens of shareware authors whom have all told me that Pay Pal increases business and is "totally safe," I decided to add Pay Pal payments to one of my sites. Within hours I actually had a Pay Pal order. I fulfilled it, and went along my happy way. About a week went by, resulting in one more order from the online payments giant - not really a surge in business, but acceptable. Overall, I was happy that I had integrated Pay Pal support.

Today, I received an email from the Pay Pal team. My first order - the one I received within hours of implementation - was apparently linked to a bogus bank account. My fraud rate is now 50%.

Pay Pal closed the email with a friendly, uplifting note: my sale was not covered by Seller's Protection and the funds were deducted from my balance. So, now, not only did Pay Pal help someone steal my product, but I'm out twenty bucks, as well. Nice.

If you read Pay Pal's Seller's "Protection" policy, you'll find out that it's only valid for physical goods:

2. Coverage.
    b. The Seller Protection Policy does not cover:
    i. Intangible goods, services and sales or licenses of digital content.
      Only the sale of physical goods is covered.

And people wonder why I stayed away from them for so long... So much for Pay Pal being "safe."

Flash animated demos at just the right price (free!)

For those of you contemplating tools like Captivate, Camtasia Studio or Turbo Demo, put your credit card down for a moment and look at Wink. While it doesn't have all the nifty features of some of the other "demo" products (i.e., audio, video, quizzes and interactivity), it does what it does very well.

Just set it to record your screen, then demo your product and add captions. Once you're done, you can export the movie to Flash/HTML, standalone EXE and other formats.

Wink works by taking static screenshots of your windows on mouse and keyboard events and simulating mouse movements between frames to make the presentation look like "video." All this results in a tiny Flash file or EXE that your users can download and view in just seconds. You can even export your screen captures and captions to PDF as a "manual."

Tools like this typically cost hundreds of dollars, but Wink is free (if you feel absolutely compelled to pay something, I'd be happy to take your money <g>). Wink runs on Windows and Linux and is only available for download. Get it while you can at http://www.debugmode.com/wink/