Following on from the previous post about my rant over giving a company carte blanche to debit your credit card, it seems that the same applies to Facebook advertising. Now I particularly wanted to try an advertising campaign on Facebook because it works so differently from Google adwords.  So a solution to my objection had to be found.

My objection is very simple - I don’t like giving anyone the authority to debit my card without my express permission. If there is a dispute, they still have your money while you are arguing, and if it is a large company, the bureaucracy can become nightmarish.

Eventually, I decided on a rather crude approach: I give them a credit card number that has a very low credit limit. If this somehow spirals out of control, at least the damage will be limited. The downside of this approach means that I will have to check the status of the card more often. It requires that the card is signed up with the bank to receive Internet banking facilities which will then allow a daily check on the account status.

That’s my solution. If anyone has a better solution to this dilemma, please leave a comment.

The way that Fundisi handles money is similar to that of the casino. In the casino, you first go to a secure area and purchase your chips with real money. Then you move into the casino with “money” that is valid within the casino, but isn’t real outside the jurisdiction of the Casino. There are two reasons for this:

• Psychologically, you aren’t playing with real money so you tend to gamble away your money more easily.
• You have physical uniform chips that the different machines can recognize and operate with.

With Fundisi, the result is the same, but the reasons behind it are different. You first need to buy Tuskers with a credit card. Your currency may be different to the previous customer, so how on earth would we list price the courses? In 99 different currencies? Not very practical. So we needed a single currency which wouldn’t disadvantage or offend anyone. Our site currency is therefore called the Tusker and is exactly equal to 8 South African Rands, or, at today’s exchange rate, is approximately equal to ¾ of a US dollar or nearly ½ a British Pound or roughly …

Each Tusker buys one course. Your credit card banker does the conversion from South African Rands invisibly and all very accurately, so you never get ripped off. All our “real money” shopping cart pages are distinctively violet and yellow in colour and are of course located on the secure part of the site.

The second reason why we need to have two shopping carts is because the courses are so inexpensive. The bank-charges and commissions become proportionately too high when you are spending less than one US$ per transaction. So we have to make the minimum number of Tuskers at least three in order to be economically viable.

The third reason for this dual shopping cart system is so that we can offer discounts and specials for customers who wish to buy many courses.

So, having bought your Tuskers, we need a different Course Shopping Cart to enable you to buy the courses with Tuskers. This also takes place in the secure part of the site, but this time the pages are in the usual grey/orange/white combination that runs through the theme of the whole site. The unspent Tuskers are kept in the customer’s account for future use. The Fundisi Elephant won’t forget about them!

So, it’s a little more complicated than at first glance!