Websites and SEO: Expanding Your Business Locally

I discussed that without a website it will be difficult for your business to really thrive. There are exceptions to that rule of course but to the majority of businesses websites are an integral part of their company . This applies even if even if they only sell retail. There are many way you can expand your business locally and we discussed some local seo tips. Let's go into some further discussion about local seo. Keywords are an essential part of local seo. You want to make sure you have the right keywords that people are actually searching for and not what keywords you think they may be using. There is no need to try to figure it out since Google has done the work for you. Use the google keyword tool to find the most popular keywords for what you sell. Next step is to integrate those keywords and add the area you sell in such a "Italian Restaurant Bergen County" and so on. The other seo tip you want to try is link building. Link building means you want to try to get your website linked to from other sites and preferably sites that aelate to your business as you. The more relevant the site is to what you sell or service you provide the more "weight" it will carry with the search engines. Many people add a link page to their sites and  simply link to other sites they would like to be linked to and see if they will reciprocate while other simply email and request a link swap.Happy linking!

Accepting Credit Card VS Cash Only

Many merchant who have always been a "cash" business worry about switching over to credit card processing.One of their main concerns and rightfully so is the cost. There are of course ways to keep those costs down but there is a cost nonetheless. I read an interesting article by Jim Prevor where he discusses Cash or Credit? Which is more expensive? He points out:: The whole issue of complaining about the cost of credit card fees is really an example of how hard it is to change our perspectives in business.Because the use of cash came first, we tend to view the cost of handling credit as an additional cost. But credit and, more broadly, electronic payment devices such as debit cards and key fobs are clearly destined to be the payment devices of the future. For a consumer, they facilitate easy record-keeping, avoid the risks of carrying cash, etc. He goes on to explain that handling cash has a cost for merchant's too.

Debit Card Processing and Technology: BIN $mart

There are many ways you can process a debit card. The most common are pin based and signed debit card (i.e. you swipe the debit as "credit " and then sign the receipt). Depending on the scenario one may be less expensive then the other.BIN$mart works by evaluating each card transaction by using a complex algorithm to estimate the least expensive processing method. After the card is swiped, BIN$mart will prompt the cashier to either collect more data, prompt for PIN entry, or simply have the customer sign the receipt. Your staff simply needs to follow the prompts on the terminal – BIN$mart does all the thinking for you.

You have probably seen similar technologies at work in the big box retail stores. When you swipe your debit card, the terminal will automatically prompt you to enter your PIN number. Large retailers have known for years that getting the customer to enter their PIN saves them money on larger transactions. In fact, small merchants may save up to $1.00 on a $100 sale by having the customer enter their PIN. The problem with many of these solutions is that they are only looking to see if a card is debit and not calculating to see if PIN-debit is actually less expensive or if there are other cost saving opportunities.

Compare that to BIN$mart’s technology, which looks at all of the following:

• Your specific rates and merchant
• account structure
• The exact sale amount
• The card type (debit, credit, corporate)
• Your SIC code
• The likely Interchange category for this transaction
• Probable debit network costs
• Your zip code

Each one of these can influence the decision to favor one transaction method over another. BIN$mart uses them all in real time to maximize your potential savings.Our company is currently proud to offer this technology to small and medium sized businesses.Feel free to visit Prestige Merchant Services for a demo on BIN$mart technology at work.

Hotels and Credit Card Processing: Saving Money

Hotel News had an interesting article about saving money on your merchant account. Hotels certainly process a lot of credit cards and in different ways that can effect the rates their charged.The author, Joel Ross wants to point out that more important than the actual rate itself is being aware of downgrades and reclassification of cards which is very prevalent in the hotel industry. As he explains:

It is not what you think you are being charged it is what you are really being charged that matters. The real costs often are intentionally difficult to decipher when the monthly statement arrives. Transactions get downgraded or reclassified for a wide variety of reasons, and unless you are a real expert at analyzing the statements, you will not see it.

These are just some of the reasons to stay away from contract as companies can pull all sorts of dirty tricks and by the time you figure out what way is up you are stuck paying heavy fines. Hotels unfortunately are  sometimes limited to the processors they can use especially if they are using propitiatory software.

The problem with PayPal : Reasons for a Merchant Account.

Although PayPal has certainly made it easy for online merchants to accept credit cards, it is not without it's share of problems. If you are going to accept credit using PayPal it would be a good idea to sign up through a separate bank account. Pay Pal has a history of siding with the customer much more than a bank would with a traditional merchant account. Reading through PayPal's agreement may surprise you ( and not in a good way) and few ever do. This way if they Pay Pal decides to debit your account they won't get much until the issue is resolved. I have heard many horror stories about PayPal freezing funds for a merchant for several months. Although this could certainly happen with a traditional merchant account (i.e. if you did something that would raise a red flag for fraud) it seems to happen a lot more often with PayPal. Another problem many client's tell me is that it's very difficult to get anything resolved with PayPal when things go wrong. Many credit card processors have 24/7 customer service so should an issue arise you can always get a live person on the phone.

What is a Downgrade? How can I avoid them and save money?

People who accept credit card now or plan to in the future, should be aware of the various surcharges and markups that can occur. Some can be easily avoided ( i.e. Interchange plus pricing VS Tier Rate Pricing ) while others can not (i.e. higher risk cards are always more expensive to process). The question is: what is a downgrade? Can I avoid downgrades on my merchant account? Downgrades refer to a card that has a higher cost associated with it (i.e. reward or corporate cards). There are other things that can cause downgrades which are easily avoidable such as batching out within 24 hrs. If you fail to batch out within a 24 hr period, in most instances your rate will jump automatically to "non-qualified" status and you will pay the highest rate category for that card processed. An easy way to avoid this problem is to set your merchant account to "auto-batch". This will allow the merchant account to check and see if anything needs to be "batched out" and you can set up the time for the batch beforehand.

PCI- Compliance: What We Learn From Heartland Payment Systems

Here is a great article that discusses PCI-Compliance and how the various security breaches at Heartland Payment Systems show that PCI may not be enough. Heartland, the 5th largest processor in the Nation goes down in history as having one of  the largest breaches of security of any credit card processor. The hacker of the breach, Albert Gonzalez has plead guilty to computer fraud and identity theft. Meanwhile Heartland Payment Systems agreed to pay Amex 3.6 Million in a settlement over a criminal breach of Heartland's data network.