June 6th, 2014 by Elma Jane
In business, Your website is often the first place consumers will go to find you. Your site is your chance to make a good first impression on potential leads and bring back existing customers, it’s important to make sure your website keeps its visitors interested and engaged.
Most brands are aware of the need to create an engaging Web presence, but smaller ones typically don’t think they have the time or resources to create a website at all. A trend among smaller business is to create just a Facebook page with no website. This is a great place to start, but to gain “customer trust”, having a website is important. It shows you’re an established company. A company’s website can be its “number 1” driver of business with the right tools and strategies. Building a great website doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming.
Optimize your Web presence for maximum customer engagement
Make your website experience match your customer-service experience.Consumers have come to expect the same type of experience with a brand online as they would in-store, enabling features on your website that allow visitors to complete as many interactions as possible for a seamless customer-service experience. These features can include detailed descriptions of each of your products and services, easy-to-access contact and purchase information, and a way for customers to reach you quickly, such as a live-chat function or links to your social media pages.
Personalize your website in ways that make sense for your business.Enhance customers’ experience on your website by customizing it to their needs. Use personalization tactics that make sense for you. Big Data analytics and voluntary surveys can help you send customized offers based on consumers’ past shopping habits and preferred contact methods which can help with sales conversions.
Use social media as a communication tool.The role of social media for businesses has evolved considerably. A way to share and promote content on your website, social media can and should be used as an extension of your customer service. Your website should be the focal point for your brand’s information. If you can get beyond that, social media should be a way to reach out to clients in a cost-effective way. By using Facebook, Twitter and other sites as a line of communication between your brand and your customers, you can drive them to your website in unique ways, such as by sharing a blog post that will help answer a customer’s question.
Posted in Small Business Improvement Tagged with: big data, Big Data analytics, blog, communication tool, consumers, customer service, customers, Data analytics, Facebook, leads, live-chat, products and services, resources, sales conversions, social media, tool, tools, twitter, website
May 23rd, 2014 by Elma Jane
Before making a purchase, there are several devices that consumers may use to help them make a decision: Use a specific store’s mobile app on their smartphones. Visit the store’s website on a tablet or computer, or just pick up the phone and call customer service to ask a question. Whatever the case, omnichannel is an important buzzword for merchants.
Here are ways to ensure a seamless and secure retail experience to turn browsers into loyal buyers.
Ensure Channels Work Together
Even in historically single-channel retail sectors such as grocery, more than half of customers now use two or more channels before completing a purchase, shown in a recent study. Retailers must therefore offer both traditional and digital channels. However, before investing in the latest mobile-optimized website feature or app, retailers should learn how existing online and physical channels can together enhance the customer experience. What customers value most is not the number of channels offered, but how these channels support each other.
A merchant’s website might encourage visitors to take advantage of a special event in-store, while sales assistants on the floor can use Wi-Fi enabled tablets to access additional product information.
Help Customers Find What They Want
With Internet access ubiquitous, cost-conscious customers are just a click away from being able to compare prices and find special offers. Many take out their smartphone or tablet in stores to compare prices, a trend called Showrooming.
Online retailers can take advantage of this trend by encouraging shoppers to compare prices in-store using a mobile app. In-store retailers, on the other hand, could provide greater value through targeted offers, price match guarantees, expert advice, convenient delivery choices and personalized customer care.
Optimize The Checkout Experience
Businesses must be sure to have a quick, streamlined checkout process once they have converted an online browser into a customer or else they risk facing shopping cart abandonment. This can be done in a few steps:
1. Assess how the checkout experience can be customized for its customers. Keep the mandatory information required from new or first-time online or mobile shoppers to a minimum and shorten the process for returning customers by securely storing their payment details and other personal information.
2. Develop a dedicated mobile app or other innovative functions that can increase long-term satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Test different payment methods to find those that are most convenient for customers. These payment options may include paying with reward points, using a digital wallet or providing a digital offer or coupon at checkout. There is a balance to be found between having additional payment methods to meet customer expectations and choosing methods appropriate to a merchant’s business model.
4. Establish a one-click online checkout process. Chase for example, is currently developing a Chase Wallet and Quick Checkout solution. The Chase Wallet will allow customers to store and access their Chase cards and ultimately, any branded card for a quick checkout. It will also update Chase-branded cards when a customer replaces an existing card and use tokenization to securely process payments with select merchants.
Merchants also face the challenge of ensuring that the online and in-store checkout experience is secure, while at the same time eliminating as many false positives as possible. False positives are a hindrance to any business as they may reduce sales, increase chargebacks and frustrate customers. A quick-checkout solution may help reduce false positives because customer information is automatically populated rather than manually keyed into the checkout page.
Acquirers should also work with online retailers to provide a conditional approval code for a transaction. This code allows the fulfillment process to move forward while authentication is taking place. The additional time for a thorough authentication also helps reduce the number of false positives.
Use Data to Build Loyalty
Customers will likely return to a retailer if product marketing reflects their past purchases or interests. Therefore, taking advantage of data including a customer’s purchasing history, loyalty, behavior or social media interests may help retailers to better understand their customers as well as personalize their shopping experience.
According to a study released in March 2013, Chase Paymentech found that 32 percent of merchants use their payment data to help craft their multi-channel sales strategy and 42 percent use it to improve the online customer experience. In addition, further analysis of payment methods, chargeback rates, fraud rates and authorization rates may improve the customer shopping experience and drive overall profitability.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: approval code, authentication, branded card, chargebacks, Chase, Chase Wallet, checkout process, computer, customer service, data, digital channels, digital offer, Digital Wallet, In-store retailers, internet access, Merchant's, merchant’s website, mobile app, mobile-optimized website, omnichannel, online retailers, payment, payment data, phone, physical channels, Quick Checkout solution, reward points, shopping cart, Showrooming, single-channel retail, Smartphones, social media, tablet, tokenization, transaction, website, Wi-Fi
May 21st, 2014 by Elma Jane
There are no enforced standards in the card processing industry regarding rates, fees, and contractual terms. It is possible for two providers to offer seemingly the same rates and fees that result in different processing costs.
Excessive Monthly, Annual, or Quarterly Fees
There are numerous monthly, annual, or quarterly fees merchants may see on their statements each month. Many merchants pay far more than they should for these fees. The fees may have names like statement fee, service fee, membership fee, regulatory fee, PCI fee, and host of other names. The fair amount each merchant should pay for these fees varies by sales volume and merchant type. Also, the amount a merchant pays for any given fee isn’t as important as the overall processing cost. These are general guidelines; some merchants should pay far less. If you are currently paying more, it may be a good time to review your overall processing cost including your pricing plan, rates, and fees.
Excessive Payment Gateway Fees
A payment gateway route transactions from the merchant’s website to the provider. Some retail point-of-sales devices require a gateway to route the transactions. Merchants generally pay a per-month and a per-transaction fee for use of the gateway. As a rule, the direct cost to process through the gateway is a few cents per transaction.
PCI Non-compliance or Non-validation Fee
Many providers now charge a monthly non-compliance or non-validation fee if the merchant is not PCI compliant. This fee may be in addition to a monthly, quarterly, or annual PCI fee. Supposedly, providers charge the non-compliant or non-validation fee as an incentive for merchants to become compliant. Nonetheless, some providers use this fee more for revenue generation, than as an incentive. Some providers do not charge this fee at all.
Merchants should not change providers because of this fee. Instead, the merchants should become PCI compliant to eliminate the fee and reduce the probability of being breached, which could easily result in huge monetary penalties – tens of thousands of dollars. To become compliant, merchants should complete the PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire and adhere to the PCI requirements, which may require quarterly scans. In short, if a merchant is being charged a non-compliance or non-validation fee, it is as much the merchant’s fault as anyone else.
Visa FANF Fee
In 2012, Visa started charging providers a Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF). The actual fee charged by Visa is dependent on the merchant type. The fee for customer-present retail merchants is based on the number of locations. The cost for ecommerce and fast food merchants is based on the volume of business. Customer-present retail merchants that have non-swiped transactions can also pay an additional customer-not-present FANF fee.
Most aggregators – i.e., merchant account providers that group multiple merchants into a single merchant account, such as Square, PayPal – integrate the FANF cost into their rates and fees versus itemizing them out separately. Most traditional providers properly pass through the actual Visa FANF fee to their merchants. However, there are a few that treat this fee as another hidden revenue stream. I’ve seen providers charge a flat monthly fee for customer-present merchants and I’ve seen the FANF fee inflated by as much as 50 percent for ecommerce merchants. Keep in mind when reviewing that the fee is generally based on the volume of the prior month. In order words, the fee you see on your statement for April activity is likely based on the March volume, as providers need to know the monthly Visa volume before they can assess the fee.
Unusual Discover Card Fees
For Discover transactions, some providers charge a higher percentage, or higher per-item fee, or monthly access fee.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing Tagged with: (FANF), access fee, aggregators, breached, card processing industry, compliant, contractual terms, customer-not-present, customer-present retail merchants, devices, Discover transactions, ecommerce, ecommerce merchants, fast food merchants, fees, Fixed Acquirer Network Fee, flat monthly fee, gateway, integrate, membership fee, merchant account, merchant account providers, merchant type, Merchant's, merchant’s website, monetary penalties, non-compliance, non-swiped transactions, non-validation fee, payment gateway, PayPal, PCI fee, PCI non-compliance, PCI requirements, PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire, pci-compliant, point-of-sales, pricing plan, processing cost, processing costs, provider, provider's, quarterly fees, Rates, regulatory fee, retail, retail point-of-sales devices, revenue, route transactions, sales volume, service fee, Square, statement, statement fee, statements, transactions, visa, Visa volume, website
February 18th, 2014 by Elma Jane
For Ecommerce Testing, Clarify Conversion Goals
Before you can start any testing on your ecommerce site, you need to clarify your goals. Setting the right goals is the first step to making any improvements. There’s a saying, “Whatever you measure grows.” So, make sure you measure the right thing.
Goals may seem like the obvious part. After all, you already know you want more sales, right? But there’s more to goal setting than just deciding to try and increase your sales.
The Goals Waterfall
Your goals for your conversion-optimization tests should flow from your marketing goals, which ultimately flow from the organization’s overall goals and strategy.
Business Goals – Marketing Goals – Conversation Optimization Goals.
The goals from optimization testing should follow from a company’s overall goals and strategy
Your business goals should determine your website goals, which should be prioritized to determine your leading conversion optimization goal.
The conversion optimization goal for any test should be selected based on how well it supports the website’s goals. This is often an area where there’s confusion about what are the priority metrics to improve. Don’t get off track by following website goals that don’t support marketing goals.
Prioritize Goals
Most sites will have several key goals, so you’ll need to prioritize them. You can do this in three steps.
Rank your goals in terms of their relative value to your business:
Assigning values to goals. The values don’t have to be absolutely accurate revenue-producing numbers to begin. Pick a median goal on your list, and assign it an arbitrary amount, and then estimate the relative value of goals above and below it.
Estimating actual goal values. Now, to get even better results, you can refine these relative numbers with whatever hard data you have, such as average order value, lifetime value of a customer, or the close rate and value your sales team sees when following up on quote requests. Don’t worry about 100 percent accuracy. It’s better to start testing with relatively firm numbers than to delay until everything’s perfect.
Priority Goal
1 Product Sale
2 Quote Request
3 Whitepaper Download
4 Blog Comment
5 Social-Media Profile Activity
Tracking Your Goals
Once you’ve identified your most important conversion goal for your experiment, make sure you track it. Goals are a crucial part of your web analytics setup. If you don’t have keys goals in place, you’re missing out on half the value of your various reports.
That means translating your testing goal into a technical goal trigger that will be tracked by the analytics and testing tools you’re using. The goal you track must be represented by a specific action the visitor takes on the website, like a button click or a visit to a page. Think about an action on the site that the visitors will do only once they have completed the goal.
The key is that it should be an action as close to revenue as possible. So, if your goal is to sell a product, you should track a post-sale thank you page as the goal trigger. (If you also accept phone orders, you may need to tackle some advanced tracking techniques to get reliable test results.)
Goals with values attached to them, as explained above, are the only way to find your most valuable visitors, they’re crucial for effective conversion optimization testing.
Be sure to set up ecommerce revenue tracking as well. Increasing average order value can be just as effective as boosting your sales conversion rate, and you’ll want to be able to include that in your results analysis.
A Single Goal
Web analytics tools can provide a ton of information, and it’s not uncommon for e-commerce sites to have a handful of key performance indicators. Example, you may track time on page and the add-to-cart rate, but when it comes to conversion optimization A/B testing, it’s important to focus on only the revenue-producing goals or goals for each test. Always make sure you are tracking revenue for each test variation. Otherwise, you could pick a conversion rate winner that inadvertently sells lower-value products.
Track revenue-producing goals for your A/B tests, but those other goals are still useful too. While not all web analytics goals are the best for A/B testing, they still may be helpful to generate hypotheses and explore new testing opportunities.
By paying attention to secondary goals, you can discover new testing avenues that help you get even more value from your ecommerce website.
Track as many goals and actions as you can with your web analytics tools so you can be free to explore your visitors’ behavior. Within web analytics is where you can do freeform exploration to generate ideas or hypotheses for your A/B tests. Then, validate those ideas through revenue-tracking controlled tests.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Small Business Improvement Tagged with: a/b testing, accuracy, advanced tracking techniques, analytics, business goals, conversion, conversion rate, conversion-optimization, e-commerce, ecommerce, goal trigger, goals, hard data, increase your sales, marketing goals, optimization, post-sale, prioritize, revenue, revenue-producing goals, sell a product, strategy, website
December 19th, 2013 by Elma Jane
NTC’s BIG DATA
Improving Collection and Analytics tools to Create Value from Relevant Data.
Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. And big data may be as important to business…and society… as the Internet has become. Why? More data may lead to more accurate analyses. More accurate analyses may lead to more confident decision making, and better decisions can mean greater operational efficiencies, cost reductions and reduced risk.
With NTC Virtual Merchant product, it captures email addresses at the Point-of-Sale (POS) into a database to assist merchants and consumer stay connected, and for future Marketing.
In understanding Big Data For Merchants, NTC’s President Mark Fravel, provided a general overview of how online merchants can use Big Data. Large amounts of seemingly random data from many sources…can be used to create competitive advantages.
Necessity of Analytical Tools
Collecting Big Data is the easy part. Storing, organizing, and analyzing it is much more complex. One seam of data that several experts identify as a particularly rich, emerging source of information can be as diverse as CRM software, AdWords, and your own website. Mobile communications, including text messages and social media posts such as Facebook and Twitter. Making sense of it can be overwhelming without analytical tools. These tools facilitate the examination of large amounts of different types of data to reveal hidden patterns and correlations that are not otherwise easily discernible.
A good example is NTC, they could analyze data on visitor browsing patterns, login counts, phone calls, and responses to promotions…they can monitor to eliminate what isn’t working and focus on what does. Some of the off-the-shelf analytic solutions are so finely tuned, they can tell a vendor whether it needs to offer a 25 percent discount or if a 15 percent discount will suffice for a particular customer.
Association rule learning is another analytics method that is a good fit with Big Data. This could be, for example, a shopping cart analysis, in which a merchant can determine which products are frequently bought together and use this information for marketing purposes.
Uses of Big Data Analytics:
Big Data can be most useful in analyzing a customer’s shopping and purchasing experience, which can help a merchant in the following four ways.
Become more efficient by alerting you to merchandising efforts that are ineffective, and products that are not selling.
Encourage more purchases by presenting existing customers with complementary items to what they’ve purchased previously.
Enhance inventory management by eliminating slow-moving items and increasing the supply of fast-moving merchandise.
Example: A top marketing executive at a sizable U.S. retailer recently found herself perplexed by the sales reports she was getting. A major competitor was steadily gaining market share across a range of profitable segments. Despite a counterpunch that combined online promotions with merchandising improvements, her company kept losing ground….The competitor had made massive investments in its ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from each store and every sales unit and had used this ability to run myriad real-world experiments. At the same time, it had linked this information to suppliers’ databases, making it possible to adjust prices in real time, to reorder hot-selling items automatically, and to shift items from store to store easily. By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization…the rival company had become a different, far nimbler type of business.
Increase conversion rates by better identification of successful sales transactions.
Is Big Data Analysis Affordable?
NTC Data Storage is also a good alternative for small ecommerce merchants because it is relatively inexpensive and is scalable it can expand as data requirements grow.
Relying on data-driven decision-making is crucial in industries in which profit margins are slim. Amazon, which earns increasingly thin profit margins, is one of the most effective users of data analytics. As more Big Data solutions for small online businesses come to market and more online merchants incorporate Big Data into their business tool set, employing Big Data will become a necessity for all Merchants.
Using data wisely has the potential to boost margins and increase conversions for online merchants, and investors are banking on it.
This is Big Data for NTC we know WHO, WHAT,WHEN, AND WHERE a purchase took place.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: analyses, analytic, big data, communications, competitive, consumer, cost, database, decision, ecommerce, email, internet, marketing, Merchant's, mobile, monitor, ntc, online, orgainizing, patterns, point of sale, POS, profit margins, promotions, risk, scalable, solutions, storing, text messages, virtual merchant, website
December 12th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Virtual Merchant Processing Gateway
Virtual Merchant
A virtual merchant is a website that sells goods and services to the public via online transactions with debit and credit card processing. The end result is a fully online experience where consumers can virtually visit a store to browse goods, purchase them fully online and receive them in the mail several days later, all from the comfort of your personal computer.
Virtual Merchant Element
Virtual merchants are made up of multiple features that basically make a website into an online store. Online stores provide e-commerce capabilities in the form of processing payments for orders and then shipping the goods or services either digitally or physically. Some brick and mortar companies may create a Web presence that only describes the store or displays the goods it sells, but they may not sell anything online.
Virtual merchants are a different breed from simple informational websites, utilizing a merchant account to create a secure online storefront. Merchant accounts create a contract between the store and online credit card processing companies. As part of this merchant account agreement, the virtual merchant pays the processor vendor a percentage of each transaction made via the online store. In some cases, this fee comes out to a monthly rate with a set per-transaction fee.
Virtual Merchant Services
Many virtual merchant services exist that cater to both online and offline business presences, though many that specialize in online retail offer more features and functionalities. These service providers offer virtual terminals to create a fully-functional payment gateway for processing purchases and creating a fluid shopping experience. Companies like National Transaction Corporation stand out as among the most popular of options due to their low merchant account fees and comprehensive virtual merchant services.
Benefits of Virtual Merchant
Virtual merchants expand the functionality of a website beyond a simple informational resource into a usable storefront. As is the case with most any type of online service, a virtual merchant service will help reduce overall work and costs associated with creating an online storefront, freeing you up to run your business as it was meant to be.
Using virtual merchant services for your website can benefit business in the following ways:
1. Easily integrates with your existing website for brand continuity
2. Facilitates more positive sales experiences
3. Improves customer service levels
4. Reduces administration and maintenance times for online retail websites
5. Removes geographic barrier from consumers, allowing for national and international sales
Secure information
Making each transaction as secure as possible becomes a main selling point of any company trying to build credibility through a Web presence. Virtual merchant services become an ideal solution as they offer all the necessary security measures to protect and keep private each buyer’s payment information.
The end result becomes that the payment process is protected through secured-socket layering (SSL) encryption to prevent data interception during an order, and account information is stored in multi-tiered firewall protection.
Straightforward online ordering
The most important part of any online purchasing experience is the ease of the ordering process. Through the use of features like a shopping cart, purchasing all items in the cart and creating an account to remember purchasing information all contributes to customer retention. When a consumer chooses to buy their goods online, a typical order processing form will entail entering credit card and billing address information as well as a shipping address and shipping options.
Each of these functionalities is ultimately governed through virtual merchant software to ensure a seamless and painless experience. The software is often available in one of two formats, either hosted or in-house. As a hosted solution, the virtual merchant service maintains the payment portal and allows you to edit its look and essentially create your store on their servers and databases. As an in-house solution, you install the software onto your own website servers and integrate the merchant application into the existing website. Both offer inherent benefits from customization to reliable management, but it ultimately depends on a company’s overall needs.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Reader Terminal, Credit Card Security, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Point of Sale Tagged with: credit card processing, debit and credit card processing, digitally, e-commerce, hosted, low merchant account fees, merchant account, online retail websites, online transactions, payment gateway, payment process, per-transaction, processing payments, processing purchases, processor, secure, store, storefront, transaction, virtual merchant, virtual terminals, virtually, website
October 25th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Some brands have managed to pull themselves together to mobilize their online sites…that’s design them to be visually friendly to mobile users.
Earlier this month the quick-service restaurant debuted a new item on its menu…the Smoke Brisket Sandwich…with a campaign that involved a number of social media components. Included among those were a game that awards points based on a customer’s tweets, the online challenges he or she wins and the photos uploaded to Instagram.
It starts with a purchase of the sandwich at an Arby’s outlet. When the customers receives her receipt she takes a picture of it and uploads it to mobile site PunchTab created for the campaign.
What sets this campaign apart from many others is that it is coordinated at the point of sale.
For this campaign, PunchTab created mobile Web onto which Arby’s customers upload a receipt. When users make a purchase, they can take a picture of their receipt and submit it via the mobile website. From there, points are dispersed, the players advance…and hopefully, return to Arby’s for more purchases, err, points.
Helping Business
There’s definitely been a trend in the POS and payments industry to add value offerings by helping businesses better understand their customers. This trend is built on the wealth of transactional data being collected by POS and payments companies, and the goal is to present simplified consumer behavior analyses that can be used by merchants to generate more revenue.
Looking ahead, more and more retailers will understand the value that capturing this customer data can unlock for this business, and will put the software in place to tap into a customer’s purchase history and thus their preferences.
Now the focus is on salespeople delivering a personalized experience to customers. The next stage, will focus on extending to individual customers the inside track on new products that will appeal to them and complement or replace things they have previously purchased.
Pimping Out The POS
Engaging with the customer at the point of sale is hardly a new idea. It certainly is an established practice in traditional brick and mortar operations…think credit card solicitations and offers for loyalty points and cards…as we all as e-commerce sites, where a customer is usually presented with several offers before the checkout is complete.
Now CRM is making its way into the mobile POS and customers are finding that there are a number of unique benefits to the model.
In the case of PunchTab, it ties the receipt-scanning functionality that doesn’t require an app…not to mention several other benefits to the system.
For example, Marketers get greater insight into purchasing behavior because a receipt is usually involved. Consumers are right there and thinking about the campaign…which they wouldn’t necessarily be when they got home to go online, and it is relatively easy system to set up.
Arby’s for example, has 40 POS systems and because it is a franchise, it requires coordinating with multiple owners. For them, mobile is the best and easiest way to engage with customers at the point of sale.
Real-Time Offers
Other companies…such as Groupon with its Breadcrumb mobile app…are adding even more advanced CRM capabilities, such as reporting at the mobile point of sale.
It is a growing trend for all mobile applications and most especially apps in the mobile POS to bring more CRM capabilities into their service platform.
Eventually, some of these CRM-infused mobile POS systems will be able to make offers in real time to customers based on their purchase at the moment and accumulated knowledge about the preferences of other customers that make similar purchases. Example it might be noted that in 20 percent of all purchases of a particular type of coffee the customer also purchase a biscotti, then the server can offer up the option as a reminder for purchase/order.
The example assumes the mobile POS system has access to customer data about purchase and preferences…which is somewhat rare now, but a trend gaining momentum.
Posted in Credit card Processing, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale Tagged with: app, awards, brick and mortar, crm, customers, data, design, franchise, functionality, mobile, mobile pos, mobilize, online, payments, payments industry, point of sale, points, POS, purchase/order, purchases, receipt, receipt-scanning, restaurant, retailers, revenue, social media, transactional, uploaded, users, web, website
