The past few months we have made improvements, fixed a few bugs, and added some new features. Below are some of the projects our Development Team has been busy working on. I want to take a moment to thank our developers for all the hard work they do every day.

New Features:

1. Suppliers are now able to send order notes to customer in VA and to also copy themselves on those communications.
2. Improvements to the Recurring Billing Process
3. 5 New Purchase Currencies:
   • ARS – Argentina Peso
   • BRL – Brazilian Real
   • INR – Indian Rupee
   • MXN – Mexican Peso
   • ZAR – South African Rand

Resolved issues:

• Fixed issue that prevented suppliers from uploading and attaching purchase page and order page logos.
• Fixed issue that prevented suppliers from sending order comments to customers and themselves in VA.
• Fixed Mark Shipped and reauthorization issues in VA.

We will have more features added in the coming months, more fixes, and more and better opportunities to manage your accounts and make sales. Keep checking back for further updates.

This is the first is a twelve-part series detailing what is involved with PCI compliance. Earlier, Warner gave a very good overview of PCI DSS compliance.

“PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a security standard that applies to companies handling credit card numbers. The PCI level of enforcement differs based on the volume of transactions that a company handles.”

My purpose with this series is to provide the details involved in each requirement. I want to look at this from the point of view of a very small home-based business with a website selling tangible products.

Continue reading…

Years ago, as a financial advisor (CLU, ChFC) I learned firsthand that most people spend more time planning how they’ll spend a one week vacation than how they’ll spend their retirement years.  I don’t think that’s changed all that much despite the recent market fluctuations.

In marketing a small business or professional practice, it’s not much different. People don’t prepare for marketing as much as they “just do it”. Now, Nike’s tagline notwithstanding, that’s just foolish. And no different than focusing more time on planning your one week vacation than your retirement years.

Seth Godin made a great post on this very topic.  He argues that business people are like “kids in a candy store” gazing at all the “goodies” — the myriad choices of marketing tactics that are readily available to us all…Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

Seth’s not saying there’s anything wrong with these marketing options (there isn’t).  But, he admonishes us all to remember that they’re marketing tactics, not a marketing strategy. Tactics are supposed to support your marketing strategy, and if your strategy isn’t already in place…then using any marketing tactic is akin to launching a rocket but forgetting to add the astronauts before lift-off!

You’d scream if NASA did that, but in your own business…you may be doing precisely that if you haven’t chosen your marketing strategy before your marketing tactics.

Point:
It’s not the ‘quick and dirty’ approach to marketing (which is appealing, I will admit!)…but defining and articulating a viable marketing STRATEGY before you begin to consider which TACTICS you’ll use to implement and communicate your strategy is going to set you apart from your competitors and…far more successfully, too.

Bill Doerr is an authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach. You can visit his web site at sellmoremarketing.com

I have reached my one-year anniversary working for 2Checkout. Last year, I was given an outline and a set of general goals that defined the job of Customer Advocate. Most importantly, I was given the room and options to take this position in a number of directions and to build on a sound base of providing vendor-centered assistance.

My most obvious contribution has been providing useful content for this blog space, but there is much more to Customer Advocacy. Often, unsatisfied people will not contact a company to express their dissatisfaction. Instead, they communicate this to their peers and this communication is happening more and more on the Internet. These are the folks I try to assist. My only priority in this is to make sure that the customers and vendors are provided with a satisfactory resolution or a clear explanation as to why their desired resolution could not be provided. Rather than waiting for someone to make contact, I am actively looking for people to assist.

What’s coming in the next year? I will continue looking for and assisting vendors resolve issues, noting trends in vendor’s needs and advocating that we meet those needs. I also will continue to provide content for our blog as well as seeking knowledgeable guest bloggers to help provide you with the information you need to run your business.

More importantly, I will be a more active participant on various online forums. This will allow me to clarify some common misconceptions about 2CO, and e-commerce. I am a voice for our vendor-base, and will use my position to bring up issues and recommendations that come from you, our vendors.

-Bion is 2CO’s Customer Advocate.

With over 85% of small businesses failing in the first three years of operation, one has to wonder why this number is so high.  So I did a little research and this is what I found.  It turns out that banks, business schools and different organizations that support small business were asking themselves the same thing.  With a passion (not unlike mine) to see small businesses succeed, they decided to find an answer.  They decided to survey small businesses and find out what the heck was going on.  Funny thing, all of them found the same revealing yet simple answer to the question.  Why are so many small businesses failing – simply put, “it is a lack of marketing”.

Even after discovering this, I was still perplexed as to why someone would put so much “blood, sweat, and tears” into creating something that they love just to see it disappear before their eyes.  But then I realized that we all start businesses (and I’m no exception) because we want to work for ourselves doing something that we love.  So we start our own (marketing, retail, literacy, training) business with all the right intentions to make it successful.  But then we get so involved in working in the business that we forget or don’t know how to work on the business.

So how do you break the cycle of working in your business instead of on it?  Simple, you have a plan:

1. Schedule time with yourself each day or each week to work on your marketing (do not break these appointments; they are as important as any appointment you would make with a client)
2. Decide in advance what you want to accomplish this year with your marketing (this will eliminate the “promotional panic” where you spend money on last minute ideas and get no results)
3. Commit to a budget to support your efforts (decide on a number that you can spend monthly; you can’t grow on zero dollars)
4. Identify your ideal client (it’s easier, cheaper and more effective to market to a specific group of people that wants your service than to market to the masses)
5. Define your differentiation and communicate it (you have to stand out from the crowd/competition if you don’t want to be shopped solely on price)
6. Create a communication system that allows you frequent and regular contact with your prospects and clients (it takes 7 – 10 touches for someone to know, like and trust you and then buy from you)
7. Stop talking about you in your marketing materials and start talking to your ideal client (people want to know what’s in it for them; tell them about the benefits; not the features)

John Jantsch said it best in his Duct Tape Marketing book, “If you’re in business, you’re in the business of marketing”. Continue reading…