Click & Convert with Maria Sparagis

Scaling your Shopify store? Get a merchant account built for growth → directpaynet.com/checkout-pod I’m Maria Sparagis, founder of DirectPayNet, and I’ve spent 20 years on the payments side of direct response brands doing eight and nine figures. In this episode: 5 Shopify checkout tricks that make you more from every order, including the upsell pricing change that made one client 23% more per cust...

Get your backup merchant account before Black Friday → click here Black Friday is your biggest sales day, and the day your payment processor is most likely to freeze your money. I'm Maria Sparagis, founder of DirectPayNet, and I've spent 20 years in payments and direct response. In this episode I share the story of a home goods store that went from $250K to $600K in November, then had Stripe hold...

Is Shopify Payments the same as Stripe? Not exactly. While Shopify Payments uses Stripe's payment infrastructure, there are important differences in fees, payout holds, account control, and payment processing flexibility that every Shopify merchant should understand. In this video, I break down the differences between Stripe and Shopify Payments, including how using multiple payment processors cou...

Free trial customers signing up but not paying? Before you blame cancellations, check your payment setup. Some of those failed rebills may be declines you can fix. If you run an ecommerce or high-risk business and offer a free or discounted trial on digital or physical products, this episode covers three payment issues I’d investigate before spending another dollar on customer acquisition. In this...

Which online business bank account is best for your business? In this episode, I compare Mercury vs Slash vs Airwallex vs Novo, including their banking partners, features, and what ecommerce businesses need to consider before choosing one. But there's something most business banking reviews overlook: how your bank account affects your payment processing. Your payment processor doesn't just deposit...

Chargeback prevention starts before a customer disputes a payment. Learn how to prevent chargebacks, reduce dispute losses, and protect your ecommerce profits. A $200 chargeback can cost your business far more than $200. Between lost merchandise, advertising expenses, chargeback fees, and administrative costs, the financial impact adds up quickly. In this video, I explain three ways online busines...

Scaling your Shopify store toward $1 million in revenue? Your payment processing setup may need to change before your sales do. As ecommerce volume grows, payment approval rates, routing, reserves, funding speed, fraud controls, and backup processing become increasingly important to the stability of your business. In this video, Maria Sparagis explains what Shopify store owners should review befor...

Most online business owners know how much revenue they're generating. Far fewer know how much money they're unnecessarily leaving on the table. After more than 20 years working behind the scenes in payments and ecommerce, I've seen profitable businesses overlook surprisingly small things that can add up to tens of thousands of dollars. In this episode, I'm breaking down some of the numbers, costs...

In this episode, I compare Whop and Skool for online courses, coaching programs, communities and high-ticket offers. We look at the differences in features, pricing, transaction fees and payment processing — including what a $5,000 sale can cost on each platform. I also break down where Whop and Skool differ when it comes to international payments, financing, payment flexibility and what happens a...

Shopify or WooCommerce—which is the better choice for your ecommerce business? Shopify offers an integrated, easy-to-manage ecommerce ecosystem, while WooCommerce gives you considerably more flexibility and control. But the differences become more important as your business grows. In this episode, I compare Shopify and WooCommerce from a business owner's perspective, including ease of use, customi...

Your ROAS might look great—but your business could still be leaving serious money on the table. The problem may have nothing to do with your ads or traffic. In this episode, I reveal an overlooked way to increase ROAS without increasing ad spend by focusing on what happens after the customer decides to buy. We’ll look at checkout optimization, payment declines, approval rates, fraud settings and p...

If you're a non-US resident with a US LLC and Stripe suddenly puts your funds on reserve, holds your payouts, or shuts down your account, finding another US payment processor may be harder than you expect. In this episode, I explain why finding a Stripe alternative for a non-resident US LLC can be challenging; and what you can do before a Stripe problem leaves you scrambling for another payment pr...

What happens to your business when you step away? If every important decision still needs your approval, growth eventually becomes harder — no matter how talented your team is. In this episode, I share what I learned helping grow a company from roughly 10 employees into a 9-figure business, where I helped hire the first 90 employees — and what I later learned when I became a founder myself. I brea...

Same product. Same customer. A $900 difference. Two businesses can sell almost identical products to almost identical customers, yet see completely different business revenue growth. One generates $100 from that customer. The other generates $1,000. That's not a 10% difference. That's a 10X difference in customer value. I've spent the last 17 years working with online businesses through my payment...

Every month, I see which businesses are about to stop growing before they even notice it. Most founders blame marketing first. More ads, a new funnel, a better website. But because my company processes payments for thousands of online businesses, I see something most consultants and coaches never do: the actual numbers behind who's growing, who's flat, and who's declining. And marketing is almost...

Someone could be testing stolen credit cards on your website right now — and your payment processor isn't going to stop it. It's called a card testing attack. Fraudsters get their hands on stolen card numbers and run them through checkout pages with weak fraud controls to find out which ones are still active. Most merchants don't know it's happening until the damage is already done — chargebacks,...

Shopify shut off her Shopify Payments entirely — with less than 48 hours' notice before she'd lose the ability to take payments at all. They flagged her account as high risk, disabled her processing as of June 21, and held roughly $100,000 of her funds in reserve until October. Losing the reserve hurt — but it wasn't the emergency. The emergency was that she was about to have no way to get paid, p...

Are Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, or another processor delaying payouts, adding reserves, or asking a ton of questions about your business? In this episode, Maria explains why your payment processor treats you as high-risk — even if you're a legit online merchant — and how that affects your cash flow and shutdown risk. You'll learn a simple checklist to see how processors really see your busin...

You could be losing thousands of dollars a month — and your marketing dashboard would never show it. Most founders respond to slow growth by launching new campaigns, testing new creatives, and tweaking landing pages. But money is disappearing somewhere else entirely: a declined card your customer never mentioned, a processing fee you never negotiated, a chargeback that quietly limits which process...

If customers are reaching checkout but not completing payment, your checkout page may be missing the trust signals, payment options, and clarity buyers need before entering their card. Your ads are working. People are clicking. They're adding to cart. But at checkout, something feels off — the page doesn't match your site, there's no contact info, the refund policy is buried, or the payment option...

You added AI support agents to save money. It might be why your chargebacks are climbing. For ecommerce brands, AI support chatbots are an easy sell — fewer tickets, lower headcount, faster response times. But there's a failure mode most operators don't catch until their processor is already asking questions: when a customer hits a wall with your chatbot — a scripted refund denial, no escalation p...

Your Stripe account closed and Stripe is still holding your funds? Here's what's actually happening and how to recover Stripe money faster. When Stripe shuts down your account, your remaining balance doesn't get sent to your bank automatically. Instead, Stripe moves those funds into a reserve and holds them — typically 90 to 180 days, sometimes longer — to cover any refunds or chargebacks that com...

Your customers are trying to buy. Their cards are valid. Yet the transaction still gets declined. Do Not Honor is one of the most misunderstood credit card decline codes, and for many businesses it's quietly costing thousands in lost revenue every month. Most merchants assume these sales are gone for good when, in reality, many of them can be recovered. In this episode, Maria explains what Do Not...

Take back control of your payments before Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, or Square take control of your business. Many ecommerce brands build their entire payment infrastructure around a single payment service provider. While platforms like Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, and Square are great for getting started, they shouldn't be the foundation of your business as you scale. The biggest risk...

Your account can get flagged long before you ever hit a 1% chargeback rate. For years, 1% was treated like the magical chargeback threshold. As long as your business stayed under it, most merchants assumed their account was safe. But a lot of ecommerce brands are now finding out that low chargebacks alone won’t protect you from reserves, payout holds, or account reviews anymore. Payment processors...