For all you business owners out there relying on contracted help to run your businesses – which is pretty much all of you – it’s time to reevaluate the quality of your partnerships to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.

In times of economic uncertainty, the small business owner is often stuck in a position where they are at the mercy of a number of different businesses. Suppliers, distributers, and banks all need paid for their services. For folks selling online, web hosts, ISPs, and affiliates also weigh down the expense column.

As part of effectively running a small business, budgeting for the costs associated with “doing business” is a crucial job of its own that robs precious time from what most managers consider the most crucial business task — marketing and selling their products. So when one of your suppliers or business partners changes distribution standards or increases pricing, balancing costs versus revenue is an immediate challenge.

Within the vast e-commerce marketplace, we are proud of what we have accomplished. 2Checkout prides itself on the fact that in nearly 10 years of doing business, we have never increased our fees, nor cannibalized our service offering to make ends meet.

Businesses that opened 2Checkout accounts in February of 2000 pay the same fees today that attracted them to our e-commerce service nearly a decade ago and continue to benefit from the upgrades we make to our system. We have never added scaled fee structures or tacked on additional costs for the businesses enjoying increased sales and as a result are more reliant on the labor intensive portions of our service — such as our 24/7 customer care center and screening orders for fraud. Growth and the increase in responsibility for appropriately handling your increase in online sales, comes with the territory of being a service-centric business. And when your business succeeds, we are more than happy to grow to meet your needs and demands. That’s our promise.

You know the old adage — you get what you pay for! It’s very true. It’s important to note it doesn’t mean you need to expect an increase in fees to coincide with each year’s cost-of-living increase or be forced to manage more of the responsibilities associated with your online sales. In the world of business, you can compete on price or you can compete on service. Very rarely can you find a business that can do both. We are proud of the fact we have remained a consistent provider of quality e-commerce services at a steady price for nearly a decade. Dependability is a good quality in a friend, but crucial in a partner for your business!

2Checkout.com is proud to announce that one of its treasury specialists and financial institution liaisons, Patricia Hull, will be a featured speaker at the 23rd Annual Windy City Summit, May 20-22, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.

The Windy City Summit features over 100 treasury management seminars for financial executives and treasury managers. This year’s session tracks cover banking, benefits and risk management, corporate financial and capital structure, fraud and compliance, collections, and payments, to name a few.

Hull will be speaking with Lynda Umbreit from KeyBank Thursday, May 21 at 3:55pm, in a session titled Creating Efficiencies Through Outsourcing the Payables Function. The session will focus on the efficiencies 2Checkout has realized by utilizing third parties to outsource its weekly payouts to vendors.

Next week, 2Checkout’s Chief Financial Officer, Kristin Dach, will be a featured speaker at the European CNP (Customer-Not-Present) Payment Forum May 11-13 in Barcelona, Spain.

Kristin will do a merchant case study on managing global payment fraud Wednesday, May 13 between 1:15pm and 4:00pm as part of the Fraud and Risk session of the event. Her case study will provide an overview of 2Checkout and discuss 2CO’s successful fraud mitigation service as well as the partnerships developed to strengthen the fraud net and continue to reduce chargebacks.

The CNP Payment Forum is a relatively new event that has experienced success in building a name for itself in the industry. The event was developed by European-based merchants with support from the Direct Response Forum (DRF), and is also affiliated with the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), due to feedback from its members and advisory board. It offers internationally-based CNP merchants a number of networking and educational opportunities, designed to share best practices while promoting the business interests of the industry.

“M is for the many things she gave me…”

It’s one of those curious things in the world that “Ma” or “Mama” is understood to be our maternal parent. This recognition is nearly universal as some variation can be found from Polish to Swahili, China to Wales. Across the globe we all need to take a little more time to thank our mothers. Given that, I always find myself looking for just the right thing to get my mother on Mother’s Day. What do you get someone who seems to have everything? 2Checkout would like to take the worry out of Mother’s Day for you and offer you the following Ideas.

Recently, COSI (Center of Science and Industry) hosted an Innovation Summit featuring a select group of Central Ohio technology companies to celebrate the opening of its brand new Innovation Wing. 2Checkout.com was honored to participate. We showcased our website and purchase routine, as well as discussed the unique design features that have popularized our system with thousands of online businesses searching for a convenient way to sell online.

Approximately 400 people attended the event, which pleased the COSI staff. According to a recent follow up email from COSI, “…This is an exciting time for innovation in central Ohio, with Forbes magazine recognizing Columbus as the #1 up-and-coming tech city in America, and with COSI’s ranking as the #1 Science Center in the Country by Parents magazine.”

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