Comparing Card Processing Rates As a Merchant: Getting the Best Deal

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• Comparing Card Processing Rates As a Merchant: Getting the Best Deal
• “Dead” Customer Reactivation Done Right: Zombie Kicking 101
• Swiftly Offers Same Day Design Alterations for $15
• 4 Plugins to Create an Article Quality Checklist
• Twitter Ads In-Tweet Report Button to Combat Abuse
• Wellness Programs: Improve Workforce Health, Reduce Health Care Costs

Comparing Card Processing Rates As a Merchant: Getting the Best Deal Posted: 15 Aug 2013 02:00 AM PDT Sponsored Post If you're a merchant that accepts credit cards, you undoubtedly know exactly what your card processing rate is. You know it's called a merchant discount rate, and it's some percentage of the total bill, maybe a flat fee per transaction is also attached. If you did a little research, you would even know exactly how much you pay each month toward this merchant discount fee. But do you know where that money goes? Or what, exactly, you're paying for? Probably not, and you're not alone. Credit card transaction fees are made up of many different elements, so they can seem, at best, confusing. To help you better understand this fee, we break down the merchant discount rate into three key pieces: interchange fees, card brand fees and what we will generally call "everything else." Getting to know these pieces will help you to compare rates among processing companies and to know where you can haggle for a better rate. Interchange Fees You've probably heard this term knocked around quite a bit. It is often used as a synonym for credit card rates in general. In reality, it is only one piece of those fees, albeit the biggest piece. The interchange fee is the money that your merchant bank pays to the cardholder's bank to help cover the risk of nonpayment or fraud and the operational costs related to moving funds to your bank. It helps to pay for things such as transaction monitoring and the technology it takes to make a payment happen instantly. Tip for a better deal: The interchange fee will change based on the transaction type (for example, card present vs. card not present), the type of card used, and the type of business you are in (the riskier your business is for chargebacks, for example, the higher the rate). The lowest interchange rate you can get is called the qualified rate, and there are varying requirements to get it. Talk with the card processor about what those requirements are and then strive to meet them with every transaction. Card Brand Fees Credit card brands charge a variety of fees for transactions that involve their cards. The payment industry sometimes refers to them collectively as "assessments." These assessments are how Visa, MasterCard or Discover get paid – they get a percentage of all transactions involving their credit card. Tip for a better deal: Unfortunately, there's little room for negotiation here. These fees are published, however, on each credit card brand's website, so you can keep your card processing company honest. Everything Else The money from this piece of the merchant discount fee is divvied out to the other entities that play a role in processing a credit card transaction, including the processing company and the acquiring bank (i.e. your merchant bank). While a portion of this money covers operational costs, there is also a portion of this fee that covers mark-ups for the processor. Tip for a better deal: This mark-up portion is where you have the possibility of negotiating a lower rate. Keep in mind too that card processing companies may offer different rates for different services. Make sure you don't pay a higher rate for a service you don't need. No Time to Compare Rates? No Worries. So now you have a better grasp on that merchant discount rate, but who has the time to do all the research needed to get the best deal? Don't worry. Community Merchants USA, in partnership with FeeSeeker.com, has an online tool that will send you rates from various processors. All you do is fill out some information regarding your business, and this site will come back with a list of processors and their rates. The best part – it's free. You're saving money already. Credit Card Photo via Shutterstock The post Comparing Card Processing Rates As a Merchant: Getting the Best Deal appeared first on Small Business Trends.

“Dead” Customer Reactivation Done Right: Zombie Kicking 101 Posted: 14 Aug 2013 04:00 PM PDT I have to admit – I’m a fan of horror and zombie movies. And whether you like them or not, we all understand the staple of such movies. You know the scene – someone thinks the “thing” is dead and foolishly goes near.  Predictably (although it still causes use to jump in our seats) the thing jolts back to life and kills, threatens or renews the chase. Interestingly, a similar scenario happens in most businesses. But instead of zombies, it’s “dead” customers. A dead customer is simply someone who used to buy from you and then stopped buying for whatever reason.  Most business owners realize that reactivating dead customers can be a very effective method of improving your financial results without a huge marketing spend. Customer Reactivation Can Be Nice And Profitable – But Wait! What’s nice about customer reactivation campaigns is that you already have key information about your prospects.  You know who they are so you can reach out to them.  And you also know how much they used to purchase from you, what they used to purchase and what they were like to deal with. But before you launch any customer reactivation campaign, please wait. Make yourself pause, roll up your sleeves (or fire up your computer) and do some number crunching first. By jumping into a customer reactivation campaign without first doing some analysis, you may find yourself kicking some zombies and creating a nightmare for yourself instead of making more money. What To Analyze (From a Distance So That Zombie Can’t Grab You) The first thing to do is to look at how much business each potential reactivation candidate did with you prior to becoming a dead customer.  They key is to look at their volume for the last two or three years before they became inactive – not just the most recent year. The reason is that customers often fade away, buying less and less over a period of time before finally becoming a dead customer.  Looking only at their purchase volume immediately prior to leaving can cause you to miss some hidden gems in your customer reactivation pool. For example, a dead customer who purchased $1,000 of your products and services in the last year before they became inactive may have routinely purchased $5,000 each year prior to that.  This would be a much better reactivation target than a dead customer who purchased $1,500 with you in the year before they became inactive, but that was the most they ever purchased from you in any year. What you are looking for is the potential gain in revenue (and gross profit) from reactivating a customer. Good Reactivation Or Bad Reactivation? The second thing you need to analyze is how much effort and investment each potential customer reactivation demands from you.  For example, a customer who routinely purchased $3,000 of products and services before they became inactive may seem like a good reactivation target. But if that customer was an absolute pain to deal with and was slow to pay (therefore forcing you to invest emotional and financial capital into the relationship) they may not be as good of a reactivation target as you first thought. The last thing to analyze is whether each dead customer would be a good fit with your current product and service offerings.  Depending on when a dead customer last had any transactions with you, your business view and approach may have significantly changed since then.  This needs to be considered. For example, a dead customer who used to do a lot of business with you, and was a great customer to deal with may still not be a good reactivation candidate if you have moved your business from a low-priced provider toward a high-priced, high-value offering.  Depending on their reasons for buying back then, there may be a mismatch between what you currently offer and what you were offering when they were active. Know A Zombie Before You Start Kicking It Doing this type of analysis is critical to a successful customer reactivation campaign. Getting old customers back is often surprisingly easy. You just need to ask. But before you invite them back, make sure you aren't inviting customers who will create new problems, generate less potential than you had hoped and not help you improve your financial results (or even worse, make you worse off than before). Reactivating customers can be profitable and rewarding for your business, but it can also result in horror-movie results if you aren’t careful. So do some analysis first and then reactivate customers.  Only then can you be confident that you will actually improve your financial results and move your business toward serving your dream lifestyle. Zombie Photo via Shutterstock The post “Dead” Customer Reactivation Done Right: Zombie Kicking 101 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Swiftly Offers Same Day Design Alterations for $15 Posted: 14 Aug 2013 01:30 PM PDT As a small business owner you may be aware of crowdsourcing and its power to dramatically reduce the cost of many outsourced tasks for entrepreneurs. While certainly a great source of budget services, crowdsourcing is sometimes also controversial in some circles in the small business community. The process uses contests in which designers or other professionals, often small business owners as well, compete for a single project. These designers submit completed work, a logo or other design. Then the person who created the contest chooses (and pays for) only the one he or she likes best. But now crowdsourcing company 99Designs has created a different business model using its existing community of designers and other professionals. The company says the new service will offer same day design services for only $15. Swiftly Provides New Low Cost Option 99Designs claims on its website it has paid out an estimated $60 million to designers in its network since 2008. The company announced its new service Swiftly.com this week. The new same day design service doesn’t offer full projects like 99Designs. Instead, Swiftly offers essentially touch up work. This work might include logo alterations, business card changes, photo resizing and cropping, PowerPoint fixes, photo retouching, banner ad changes and more. Members simply log into Swiftly.com with their Design99 account, and create a task. This is done by filling in details of the changes they want and uploading a file of the work they need altered. A member of the 99Designs community claims the project and makes appropriate changes. The file containing the changes is then downloaded by the client who pays for the work on approval. Image: Swiftly The post Swiftly Offers Same Day Design Alterations for $15 appeared first on Small Business Trends.

4 Plugins to Create an Article Quality Checklist Posted: 14 Aug 2013 11:00 AM PDT Running a blog on WordPress is a pretty positive experience for any writer. The tools are extensive, the platform itself intuitive, and it is easy to customize even without having any real technical knowledge. If you do need to find someone to help you out you can do so quickly because pretty much everyone who has done blogging work has worked on WordPress in the past. Another awesome feature is the way you can have multiple writers, both regulars and guests, signing in and drafting their own articles. But while this is great for saving time, it also means more editing work. You cant just have guest posters publishing content without you having the chance to look it over and do quality control. One way to cut out how much time and energy this puts on you is to have a thorough article quality checklist. This should list things like article format, headers, spell check and anything else you feel is necessary to writing a post before it is sent in for review. It works as both a way to make the writer’s accountable, and to give them reminders about steps they might overlook in their zeal. WordPress has several plugins available for this process, which makes it even easier. Below are four that you can choose from. Use These Plugins to Create an Article Quality Checklist 1. Good Writer Checkify One of the biggest problems many of us who run blogs have are keeping up the quality of the writing itself. You just get bogged down with the technicalities in running a site, and you lose focus of the creative element that is so important. This is a unique checklist that keeps the writer accountable. It keeps you focused on the content, and not the SEO or formatting. Note: The plugin in no way makes sure the checklist is really followed. It works as a reminder, but it will allow the contributor to submit the post without following the rules. 2. Blogging Checklist Plugin For the technical aspects you can use this blogging checklist plugin. You write in your own steps, like adding in headers, breaking the post into short paragraphs, checking for SEO (search engine optimization) in the title, content and metadata, ect. Then it will provide that checklist with each post so people have to go through it before they sent it in for review. 3. Genki Pre-Publishing Reminder Want to set a reminder for a specific task you tend to forget? Maybe you never remember to fill in the tags, choose a category or add in an image? You can set a reminder to show with each post here, and it will keep you from having to go back and quickly edit anything prior to publication. This one is great if, as the editor, you sometimes forget a couple of steps yourself. 4. Editorial Metadata The little steps are sometimes the most important. Keep track of your metadata with this helpful plugin that lets you put in the step, the type and the description. Everything is on an additional screen, so impossible to overlook. What To Include On Your Article Quality Checklist Once you get the right plugin, how do you know what to include in the checklist you make? Really, this is going to be a matter of your own needs versus the abilities of the writer’s you employ. No two blogs are completely alike, so you will be customizing it to fit the tone of your site. I would suggest having two primary lists: The first is the plugin list that talks about items within the post itself to check. Headers, SEO, call to action, signature, spell check, reading through the post before submitting, links to past posts (if any)…these are all good examples of what should be on the plugin checklist. The second is a physical checklist you send to the writer, or maybe a sticky you keep drafted as a notice in your posts. It should have things like tone of the article, formatting, protocol for linking to outside sources, how to properly quote and credit, photos and anything that is more specific to the actual writing of the content. Having both can really cut down on the time you spend editing, and can be given to all writer’s automatically without you having to explain over and over again. Have any tips for article quality checklists or know of a good plugin for WordPress? Images: WordPress, WPBeginner, Ericulous, EditFlow The post 4 Plugins to Create an Article Quality Checklist appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Twitter Ads In-Tweet Report Button to Combat Abuse Posted: 14 Aug 2013 08:00 AM PDT Twitter is a free platform for the discussion of ideas. But that freedom cannot be taken to irresponsible extremes. Twitter added an in-tweet report button to its iOS app and will add one to its Android app by September. The buttons are an effort to crack down on abuse reported by some users in the UK recently. In a post on the company’s official UK Blog near the beginning of last week, company officials outlined changes being made. What is Changing on Twitter Twitter updated its rules to make it crystal clear the site does not tolerate such abusive behavior. The new Twitter report button for iOS, Android and the mobile Web should make it easier to report abuse directly in a tweet. Users won’t need to click over to the Help Center to file a report. The company also says it will expand resources in its UK Safer Internet Centre (and presumably for other users too). The resources are supposed to inform users on “digital citizenship” and how to stay safe online. What It Means Twitter certainly needed to respond to the misuse of its system. The question is what the effects might be for average users including those in the business community. Twitter has not yet been clear on what will happen to users whose tweets are deemed “abusive.” We’re also not sure what kind of investigation will occur when an in-tweet abuse report is registered. We’ve seen before how Twitter’s aggressive stance on certain kinds of behavior real or perceived can lead to suspended accounts and headaches for users. We’ll have to wait and see. Blue Bird Photo via Shutterstock The post Twitter Ads In-Tweet Report Button to Combat Abuse appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Wellness Programs: Improve Workforce Health, Reduce Health Care Costs Posted: 14 Aug 2013 05:00 AM PDT Take a look at your workforce – what do you notice? Are your workers participating in activities outside of the office? Does your office have a running club or a softball team? More importantly, as your employees look to be healthy outside of work, is your office doing what it can to promote a healthy environment while at work? Though some businesses may be straying from wellness programs in order to control finances, the indirect costs of poor health (e.g., absence at work) can be two or three times the direct medical expenses for companies. Not to mention, for many companies, medical expenditures already consume 50 percent or more of corporate profits and chronic diseases account for many health care issues and costs. Combining the two expenses and the amount of money lost due to unhealthy employees, can your office afford not to participate in wellness programs? With some experts predicting that the U.S. health care system will successfully transition from fixing people who are sick to preventive diagnostic medicine in the next 10 years, this is a great opportunity for small businesses to promote a healthy lifestyle. Not only will implementing a wellness program promote a healthy work environment, but it can also result in a return on investment (ROI). As more companies invest in wellness programs, evidence continues to point to their effectiveness. In fact, a large-scale review of 42 published studies of worksite health promotions programs showed an average of 28 percent reduction in sick days and an average of 26 percent reduction in overall health costs. With 61 percent of workers whose employers offer wellness programs participating in them, according to the 2013 Aflac WorkForces Report (AWR). Small business owners should consider what the reduction in health costs could be with 100 percent employee participation. For instance, 70 percent of health costs among working adults are incurred due to behavioral habits such as smoking, diet and a sedentary lifestyle. Yet only 35 percent of employers are offering wellness programs to combat those tendencies according to the AWR. How to Implement Effective Employee Wellness Programs Make Sure the Program is Comprehensive Make sure it encompasses key areas of employees' everyday lifestyles. It's important to focus on a healthy workplace and community, healthy eating habits and stress management. For example, create an office team for a local kickball or softball league, organize after-work office fun runs or invite local massage therapy students to the office for quick, stress-reducing chair massages. Engage Employees Emphasize results rather than participation. For instance, instead of giving traditional incentives, such as payment for gym memberships, require employees to pass biometric screenings to receive discounts on health insurance premiums and other perks. A recent Gallup study found that engaged employees are 21 percent more likely than actively disengaged employees to be involved in wellness programs offered by their company. Create an interactive, engaging wellness experience though social media tools to form teams and/or inspire them to lose weight, exercise more and, ultimately, become a healthier and happier workforce. For example, create a Facebook group for workers so they can post schedules of different exercise events, healthy recipes, success stories and team progress. Add more incentive by offering the winning team the prize of an extra half or full day off of their choice. Promote Healthy Eating Bring in nutritionists to speak to employees during lunch, organize after-work healthy cooking classes for the office or communicate healthy lifestyle tips. Also, encourage healthy snacking by placing fruit bowls around the office or stocking the office refrigerator with yogurt and vegetables. Market the Wellness Program to Employees Instead of sporadically mentioning the availability of a wellness program, actively promote a culture of well-being and health through outlets and venues that are most popular to them. Post flyers on bulletin boards or send out weekly/monthly emails with wellness tips and exercise events. Promote Financial Health Don't stop at physical health. Encourage employees to become savvy savers, spenders and investors. Help them to truly understand all of the options available so they make educated decisions based on their lifestyle. More knowledge about living a financially savvy lifestyle will reduce stress-levels, allowing personnel to concentrate more on their work rather than fret about monetary concerns. At the end of the day, the success of any wellness program is measured entirely on the level of employee participation. By offering comprehensive wellness programs that entail physical, mental and financial health, small businesses can create an environment that provides not only a happier and healthier workforce, but also a nice ROI. Employee Health Photo via Shutterstock The post Wellness Programs: Improve Workforce Health, Reduce Health Care Costs appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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