FAQ's - Frequently Asked Questions

Personal Touch Products has developed a comprehensive subscription based retail web-store designed exclusively for our personalized gift retailers. The PTP retail web-stores were created to provide a simple and enjoyable website experience for your customers and allow them to design and order their personalized gifts online. As a web-store subscriber you can customize your online store with your own business name and contact information and select from several color schemes. You can also Activate or Inactivate products based upon your current inventory. Additionally you can set your own standard price and run sales if and when desired.

PTP provides you with a subscription based web-store that will allow you to sell Personal Touch personalized gifts to your customers. You do not actually purchase your web-store. PTP is the owner of the website and will act the web-host for your online store, and maintain your web-store on its servers.

PTP manages the website and online web-stores on its own servers. Doing so allows PTP to manage features, intellectual property and security.

Yes. Online payments will be processed through PayPal. PayPal uses the latest in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology as well as other security features to process payments.

Yes. And this is recommended so you can maintain your own website name indefinitely. This can be performed any time after the completion of the web-store registration process. This option will require that you acquire your own domain name (URL) from a Domain Registrar such as godaddy.com. See the next question.

This option assumes that you already have or will acquire a domain name (URL). Your Domain Registrar can assist you with this process, but here are the basic steps needed to accomplish this. Create a new DNS CNAME record. (You will need to do this through your domain registrar.) Point this DNS CNAME record to your PT Online Store sub-domain. For example: thepersonalizedgift.com/yourstorename where yourstorename = the Store Name that you specified or will specify during the PT web-store registration process. Once the CNAME record is created, login to your PTP Online Store Administration and change your Domain Alias to YOURDOMAIN.com.

PTP does not advertise or submit web-stores to the search engines. We believe that the marketing and advertising your store is best managed by you, the store owner. It is also our belief that search engine placement has become more about dollars (to the service providers) than anything else. In the past, the majority of search engines picked up the best sites for particular keywords and listed them at the top. Today, to get to the top of most search engines you will need pay an SEO expert or bid for pay-per-click keywords (PPC) that you pay for each time someone clicks on your link. This can get expensive but a carefully managed PPC campain can also be effective.

You can promote your web-store in a variety of ways including business cards, email, advertising to existing customers, online advertising, referrals, word of mouth, and of course links from your social media accounts such as FaceBook. We also recommend placing a small address label containing your business name, phone and website address on the back of every gift that you create. That will serve as permanent business card. If you have and existing website(s), you link to your Personal Touch web-store and from your web-store back to your other websites.

Your web-store will be ready to accept orders after you complete the registration, and make any desired changes to your web-store settings such as your shipping methods. Your web-store sales will of course depend upon your marketing efforts. For customers to find your website, you first need to let them know that you exist. Rolling out a new website is an exciting event so be sure to let everyone you know when your site is up and running. Ask them to visit your web-store and share their thoughts with you. We recommend collecting your customers contact information from your offline and online sales from day one (name and email address is all that you will need). Over time you can build a sizable list of happy repeat customers that you can e-mail just prior to the upcoming holiday to let them know that you're running a special. Your web-store inlcudes a coupon feature which can be used an effective tool to bring your customers back to your store. 

PayPal will process all payments. If you don't already have a PayPal account you will need to open one before your web-store can register your webstore and accept payments. If your customers do not have PayPal, they can still make on-line payments using their credit cards. PayPal acts as an on-line bank and will accept payments from your customers and deposit them into your account. When your customer pays for their order, PayPal takes their transaction fee (approx. 3%), and deposits the remaining funds into your PayPal account. You can use your account to pay for other on-line purchases or transfer your balance into your checking account without incurring additional fees.

Your web-store administration control panel will allow you to set flat-rate shipping fees for domestic and international orders. You can decide to ship domestic only or allow international orders. We recommend using USPS flat rate priority shipping which offers you predictable rates, free priority envelopes and boxes and tracking. And you can also request that the Post Office pick up your packages the next day free of charge! Be sure to set up a free account at USPS.com

Your on-line web-store can be set-up and ready within one day. You can open your store after completing your web-store registration and making any desired changes to your store settings. Upon completing your webstore registration you will receive a confirmation email from your webstore with links to confirm that you received your email, as well as links to visit your store, and your store admin.

13. Are there any special requirements that I need to be concerned with?

This offer is available exclusively to Personal Touch customers. If you're not already a Personal Touch customer, you can get started by purchasing a Gifts on Art Start-up kit from Gifts on Art Start-up Kits

There is a one-time $39 set-up fee plus $19 (or less) per month web-store subscription fee. Subscription incentives are available as shown during the registration process.

The webstores are not desiged to sell all of the products. The sample web-store will give you a good idea of the gift types and supplies that you can offer. You will notice that the web-stores are designed to allow your customers to interactively design first name meaning gifts and poetry gifts step by step, and your customers can order Family Tree and Last Name History gifts as well.

It is also possible to sell any other type of gift using a feature that we call “Other Gifts”. Other Gifts do not permit interactively creating personalized gifts, but you can easily upload a photo, give it a description, set a price and a shipping price for anything else that you may desire to sell.

Personal Touch web-stores are designed to be self-maintained. We are here however to answer technical questions or assist with technical issues that you are unable to resolve.