Merchant Account Basics

This article should give you a good working understanding of how secure credit card processing works.

If you are not quite ready to boost up your website with e-commerce functionality, don’t worry, the following information is valuable in evaluating your needs. If you are considering getting secure credit card processing on your website for the upcoming holidays, now is the time.

The internet represents a tremendous opportunity for your business – whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to market and sell your idea or a large corporation searching for new ways to increase sales.

Selling goods and services on the internet presents its own set of challenges — like how to set up and maintain a secure, reliable, cost-effective system for authorizing payments and managing transactions. If you don’t know what you’re doing – and sometimes even if you do – that can be a difficult, complicated, and expensive task.
Credit card processing removes the barriers that might prevent you from doing business on the internet.

You’ll need an automated payment system, a credit card merchant account, and a computer with an internet connection. You can do everything within your web browser.

Overview

What is Credit Card Processing ?

A real time credit card processing system is a transaction processing system that functions as a payment service using a secure transaction server on the internet. Merchants with a valid merchant account can use the system to submit, authorize, capture, and settle credit card or eCheck transactions without the need for a separate transaction terminal or processing software.

Methods Of Processing Transactions

Virtual Terminal

Virtual Terminal is hosted completely on our transaction servers, where merchants simply login using their favorite web browser and perform live transactions using their merchant account. A merchant can enter a transaction manually and a virtual terminal will process the transaction in real-time just like a physical card terminal would.

Web Link

Web Link allows a merchant to link their web site to the system in order to accept credit card payments from customers in real-time with complete automation.

ADC (Automated Direct Connect)

Automated Direct Connect provides a simple and straight forward mechanism to link more complex web sites with the transaction gateway server, including support for the merchant’s own custom programming.

Merchant Accounts

The system is separate from your merchant account. The terms and conditions of your merchant account are between you and your bank or merchant provider, and should be consulted for specific information related to your merchant agreement with your bank or merchant provider.

A merchant account is required to accept credit cards. A merchant account is a special account with a bank that is a member of the Visa and MasterCard associations. Such a bank has been certified by Visa and MasterCard associations and can provide you, the merchant, with all of the services related to your merchant account.

Once your merchant account is setup and “live” on the credit card system, you can accept credit cards from customers generally as follows:

1. A customer presents their credit card for payment

2. Using their credit card number, you submit an electronic request to the processing network for “authorization to capture funds” from the carholder’s credit card account in the amount of the purchase.

Traditionally, one would submit this request by swiping a credit card through an electronic transaction terminal provided by the bank. With the system, this request is provided electronically to our payment gateway servers, which then route the request along the processing network.

3. The processing network immediately receives your electronic request and determines if the carholder’s account is valid and if the funds are available. If they are, the processing network returns an electronic response to your terminal or computer. This response is called an “authorization code”, and is your guaranteed authorization to capture the funds. Typically, this code is a six-digit number. The transaction and its associated authorization are stored in a “batch”, where other transactions for that day reside.

4. You print a receipt for the customer using the electronic terminal or your computer and the customer signs the receipt. As far as the customer is concerned, the transaction is complete. As far as you the merchant are concerned, there is one more step to complete the transaction.

5. At the end of your business day (usually), a final request is submitted to the processing network to go ahead and “capture the funds” that you obtained authorizations for during the course of business that day. This is called “settlement” or “settling your batch”. With a traditional physical credit card swipe terminal, this settlement process must be initiated manually. One of the key advantages of our system is that this settlement process is initiated automatically every day on our end.

6. At settlement time, the processing network immediately receives your response electronically and determines if the capture amounts contained in your request match the authorizations for each item. If so, the request is granted and an “Accepted” response is returned to your electronic terminal or computer. A settlement report can be printed showing the grand totals by card type (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, etc) for the settled batch. Note: any corrections to your batch, such as voiding a transaction, must be made prior to settlement.

7. Within 48 to 72 hours (usually), the funds associated with the batch you settled are deposited electronically into your business bank account. Typically, the discount rate you pay to your merchant account provider are deducted from the deposit before it transferred to your bank account, resulting in a “net deposit” of funds.

8. At the end of the month, your merchant account provider will mail a statement to you, detailing the credit card activity for the month and the associated fees you have been charged for such.

Now that you understand the basics of how a credit card merchant account works, you can see the role that the system has in the processing of your credit card transactions.

Every visitor runs through your checkout process with ease and getting your goods to consumers is a breeze… The dream of every ecommerce shop owner. Abandon rates in the checkout process are costing merchants thousands of dollars. Often times checkout processes are more complicated than they have to be, with little to no help given to the consumer are the most common reasons for consumers not to complete the checkout process.

Here are the TOP 4 ways to eliminate shopping cart abandon rates:

1. Design

By extracting the checkout process as far as possible the user can´t be distracted from any other content. A look Amazon’s checkout process will show you that they don´t even allow consumers to click “back”. The only way to go back is to use the buttons of your browser.

Not all ecommerce shops extract the whole checkout process, but the idea of Amazon is to tempt the user NOT to break-off.

2. OnPage or Multipage?

Best practice is to split up the checkout process into several steps. A complete checkout on one page will overwhelm many visitors. It´s easier for most visitor to break down serveral small barriers instead of one big barrier.

A great example how this is done using web 2.0 styles is the Magento Shopping Cart.

3. Gain trust, answer questions

3.1 Help your customers

Don´t let your visitor alone during the checkout process. Most of all visitors are worried to do something wrong. Every step needs a description. For big problems, offer an easy to use hotline or a live chat service. But it´s also important to describe pricing and shipping details directly on the page. Don’t make your clients guess.

3.2 Gain trust

To gain trust from your visitor you first need a professionally designed shop. The keywords here are quality and security. Use security seals from BBB, eTrust or McAfee. Use SSL certificates to give visitors a secure environment to do their shopping.

Show them also which payment methods you accept. Most importantly, accept all payment options. Not allowing your visitors to pay with American Express Credit Cards will decrease your sales.

4. After-Sale Service

The order is sent, and now?

Inform your customer about the next steps. Send a order confirmation email. Tell them when the product will be sent and when it will be delivered and where the customer can contact you if there are any questions.

This also is the best time to ask for feedback.

5. Summary

There many placements in the checkout process which can be optimized, but there are just as many things which can go wrong. Analyze the exit pages of your ecommerce shop and find the problems on this sites. Try to understand your target group and collect feedback.

Facebook and its community is growing every day. When we can trust the numbers of Facebook´s statistics, there are more than 400 million active users on Facebook.What a great place for companies to interact with customers and to promote corporate/product branding.

In this arctile we want to show, how easy it is to create a Fan Page for your company and brand. So, let´s get started!

Common Mistakes

Many companies want to use Facebook for branding, that´s great, if you do it right! A very common mistake is to create a group or a private profile for your company.

Facebook has designed Fan Pages exactly for companies, so why not use them? There are many advantages we can extract from Fan Pages, which you’ll find outlined below.

How to create a Facebook Page

If you´re currently logged in to Facebook, log out now. Go to facebook.com, at the bottom on the right you can see “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business.“. Click on it or use the link given here. Now you can select the category of your page and also the name of your page. If you select “Do not make Page publicly visible at this time.” no one can see your page now, you can design it and publish it, when you think you´re ready.

Info, Picture, Tabs and more

Info

Logo

To show your fans who you are, create an amazing logo, you can also add your phone number and your website to the picture. Not to small, but: your images should not be larger than  600px (height) x 200px (width).

Tabs

Beyond the standard tabs, like Wall and Info, you can create your own Tabs and also create your own content for this Tabs. Use this feature to build a well-designed landing page! Here´s a how-to guide which will help you with this steps: Mashable: Build a Facebook Landing Page

Share your content

So everythings fine, but your Wall looks like the Sahara dessert. If you have running a Business Blog or a Twitter account, connect them your Facebook Page to fill your Wall with great blog posts and tweets. To share your blog content add the app NetworkedBlogs and click on “Register a new Blog” and fill out required fields. To add your Twitter account to your page, use this link and click “Link to Twitter”.

You need Fans

First rule: Ask all your friends! Why not? It´s  your business which you want to promote. Also add a Facebook-Badge to your Blog, so every blog reader can also become your Faceook Fan. Some Forums also have groups called  “Facebook Fan Exchange”. That´s another way to get friend on you Facebook Fan Page.

And if you share high quality content, your Fan group will grow constantly.

Another hint: When you have reached 25 Fans you can create your own Facebook Fan Page URL. Goto http://facebook.com/username and click on “Set a username for your Pages“, but be careful, once created you can never change this name.

Here you can see the Social Business Bank Fan Page, hop on the link and become a fan now.

Good Luck!

For startups and established companies alike viral marketing is a highly recommended way to boost brands and generate the sales. But what exactly is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is a marketing technique where companies and organisations use social networks and other media resources like TV or Radio to broadcast an extraordinary or profound message. With this message, companies call attention to a product or a service they offer or promote brand recognition. It´s called “viral marketing” or “viral advertising” because the marketing campaign is designed to be forwarded from one viewer to the next. Viral campaigns can be spread out via many services, the most common services being Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, E-Mail and word of mouth.

Sounds great? Finding a unique and amazing – often humerous – message which triggers so much attention that viewers republish it takes some thinking “outside the box”. In many viral marketing campaigns the product or brand is harldy mentioned at all. We have collected some great campaigns for you to give you some ideas how to create your own amazing viral marketing campaign.

Guys Backflipping Into Jeans – Levi’s

“This video gets major points in the “wow, that’s mad” department, which is a tactic that seems to consistently go well with viral videos. Plus, Levi’s understood the importance of being understated in this video. Try to be subtle, if that’s hard on you – try to be a bit more british in your viral ad campaign. People really dislike the shill.”

Million Dollar Homepage: Pixels for sale on an “online billboard.”

“This campaign offered advertisers the unique chance to buy a spot on the MillionDollarHomepage at $1 per pixel. You could buy as many pixels as you want, and once all 1,000,000 pixels were sold the site would stay like that forever. Well this 21 year old college student quickly sold every pixel, earning a million dollars to comfortably live the student way of life.”

Blendtec: Will it blend?

“This series of online videos were made to demonstrate how powerful these Blendtec blenders really are. They would take common objects we all can relate to, such as an iPhone, and throw them in the blender to show you, well poor iPhone… Many of their videos have gotten millions of views, taking them from a brand most people didn’t know about to an established leader in their industry.”

Nike: A Touch of Gold

“A Nike rep was dispatched to give Ronaldinho his new Nike soccer cleats, with a camera man covering the whole thing. Ronaldinho proceeds to put the cleats on, and perform some amazing tricks with the soccer ball and his new Nikes. Ronaldinho’s performance is the touch of gold, and the people who were smart enough to decide to use this as a campaign made a really smart move. This has become one of the most viewed sports related viral videos online.”

Sheep LED

“Samsung goes extraordinary lengths to show the power of LEDs in one of the most genuine and breathtaking pieces of choreography you are ever likely to see – sheer brilliance (pun intended).”

Crack the code on your card processing bills. Part 1.

No one likes bills, especially those types of bills that are filled with cryptic codes and dozens of line items. That’s a pretty good description of a statement from a credit card processor or – if you already have one – your merchant account provider.

In order to accept credit cards like Visa, Mastercard, [...]

In a recent blogpost we talked about partnerships and their importance for small businesses. Today we will talk about business goals,  and if you don´t  have them yet, how to set up a plan that works.

1. Goals: Define what’s Important

Every business starts with an idea, how else could it be. Regardless if you offer a product or service, no matter which industry or your personal business-growing stage, a great business idea is essential.

Now where you have that, take piece of paper and a pencil and take a moment. Picture yourself in a year, 5 years and in 10 yeas. Call it near-term, mid-term and long-term planning. Be sure that your goals are realistic, but also foresighted. Don´t write down unimportant steps you have to do anyway. Try to avoid your day-for-day workflow tasks. Ongoing tasks are important, but it’s important to keep the big picture in mind. Once finished, you should list no more than 5-10 goals on you paper. Your gloals should be in a chronologic order, so it´s easier to get a feeling for what’s next.

2. Your own Masterplan

Now take another piece of paper and write down your first goal as working title. Think about this goal and how you want to accomplish it. Figure out the exact steps necessary and bring them to paper. You can call them milestones. If you want, also add a date by which you’ll have completed the milestone. Repeat this steps for every goal on your list.

Later you can add details to every milestone and goal reached: Were there problems? In retrospect, what worked and how would you do it differently the next time? What can you learn out of the project or milestone for upcoming projects? Have you reached your goals in time?

With those two simple steps you’ve just created your very own masterplan, a full-fledged action plan for your business to keep you on track and you focused on what’s really important.

We all know that starting a business means a lot of hard work. A one-man show business isn’t much different. Acquiring new customers, bookkeeping, sales,  organizing a merchant account, design a  website, keeping the burn-rate low and balancing a tight budget while expanding the business.

That´s hard work and a lot of new stuff to most entrepreneurs. You can only be an expert in a few fields, a jack of all trades hardly ever is a true expert on any subject. What can we do, to make an entrepreneur´s life a bit easiser?

1. Be social!

Tell your friends your ideas ask them what they think and what they would change. That´s cost-free feedback.
If you’re one of those people who’s afraid that somone could steal your precious ideas, how much is your idea worth if you can’t monetize on it? Good feedback is essential for business success, embrace it. And by the way, never mind competitors – watch them closely and study them – and they will help you to become better at what you do, too.

Ask your friends and business partners when you have an issue at hand. Ask if they may know someone who can help out. Use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. Post your questions to all of your friends, post your services and products as well. People want to know about your business and which services or products you have to offer. A sure-fire way to get help is to provide help. Connect with your circle of acquaintances and help them wherever you can. This creates trust and trust is one of the most important parameters in marketing.

You will meet heaps of new people, keep in touch with the long standing contacts and eventually the one or other business partnership will develop. There are many new customer in the social business cloud waiting for you!

2. Outsourcing is a must!

Another way to redurce your “every day overhead” that prevents you from aquiring new customers or whatever you have to do to keep your business running is to source out some parts of you business. Many start-up entrepreneurs think nothing can be done properly without them. Mistake. Big Mistake.

Why do practically all businesses outsource parts of their business? You have friends and partners they are also experts in some fields. Take the chance and unclutter your every day overhead so that you have time to focus on the really important things: to grow your business.

• If you are NOT an expert in webdesign and SEO, hire experts in those fields. They can do the task at hand faster, better and more often than not, cheaper than you. Meanwhile you have time to do more important things for your business.

• If you are NOT an expert in merchat accounts, do your research and ask as many providers as you can. Ask them all questions you’re interested in, write down the answers and re-read the answers; if necessary give them repeated calls until you find a provider you can trust.

Carefully choose the parts  of your business you consider strategic, source out the parts where you´re the layman. Be social every day, every minute and you will see, life will become easier by the day.

Kind Regards,

Social Business Bank