Business Services

How to Build a Great B2B Platform

For years, consumers have enjoyed online shopping and today, most people say they love making purchases online. This is due in part to how hard B2C commerce has struggled to perfect the whole customer shopping and buying experience. They’ve been successful because the latest reports show that 89 percent of Americans now shop online—and they love it! Online sales are a great place to create abundance in your business.

What we don’t hear much about is the B2B shopping experience. B2B commerce is an important segment of industry where billions of dollars change hands all over the world. But how well have B2B sites done when it comes to the customer buying experience? After all, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling to Microsoft, on the other end of the transaction there’s a real live human being making the final decision about the purchase.

With that in mind, can we take some of the valuable things we’ve learned about B2C commerce and apply them in the B2B venue? Or is there just too much difference in the two platforms? Many experts believe we can extrapolate much of what we’ve learned in B2C commerce and apply that to B2B sites without too much adaptation.

While each one has its pros and cons, selecting the right platform for your business may come down to specifics like:

What size business?

What industry?

Is there an inventory?

Will you be shipping internationally?

Your budget

How important is Self-Service?

The book, Create Abundance by Zhang Xinyue offers wisdom for business owners who want to create abundance in their personal and business lives. There are helpful suggestions about learning to meditate and let go of stress.

Local Search Marketing Tips

Article by : Pierre Zarokian

Your California Internet marketing needs to be local in order to eventually expand into the global market. Here are some of the local search marketing tips that you can use today to get your online marketing life in order.

-Make Sure that Your NAP is in Order.

NAP stands for “name, address and phone number.” NAP is synecdoche for similarity across all of your listing items. The general idea is to make sure that the way you list yourself across all platforms is exactly the same. If you have an abbreviation in your listing on Google, then that abbreviation should also be there on your Yahoo listing.

Scale Appropriately

The best California Internet marketing company strategies build up to a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. They start in smaller, local directories that are also niche oriented. Once the audience is created in that space, the marketer can send that audience to like and repost things on the bigger social media platforms en masse.

Focus on Your Local Audience.

Search engine marketing in California relies on the foot traffic that you get to your storefront. Even if that storefront is an online storefront, you must still have a local presence. This is the easiest audience for you to get, and it is necessary in order to get bigger audiences from other places.

About the Author: Pierre Zarokian is a internet marketer that runs and Search engine optimization company and social media marketing company. He regularly writes for Search Engine Journal and Visibility Magazine.

 

Top Factors to Consider When Selecting a Custom Control Center Designer

Summary: If you want your IT team to be more efficient, you’ll want to ensure that you command center is designed appropriately.

With so many organizations and businesses looking to remodel, upgrade, or build new command centers, standards are thrown out the window and even the laziest design seems feasible to many. If you’re one of the many businesses looking to establish a command center with a gorgeous showpiece video wall, this article will help you understand the gravity of this type of project.

The Budget

Your investment boils down to what custom designer you’re planning to use. For instance, say you go with a remodel project and you’re starting with a blank slate. You’ll obviously ask questions regarding what the designers are envisioning. Then, you’ll jump into the fray and give them input on what you’re picturing in your head. There cannot be any disconnect between the two of you. If you have a firm budget laid out in your head, don’t keep extending it to the point where it becomes ludicrous. See what these designers can do with a number laid out in front of them. This is where you start separating one from the other.

The Decision

One it’s time to make a decision, how do you make sure that you’re selecting the right consoles or other accessories? The key factor behind this is quality. Now, be honest with yourself, you already know that every manufacturer out there is going to consider themselves “the best in the business”. It only takes the right salesperson to draw you into their business. Be mindful that not every custom control designer has the same mentality when it comes to your project. Lay out a sufficient amount of ideas and goals that you have and provide it to some of the designers that you are interested in. After all, it’s their job to provide you with a customized center that can handle every aspect of your business. Not only do they need to understand your wants and needs but they’ll also need to make it happen.

Why IT Support is So Crucial in Today’s SMBs

Summary: Hiring the right IT specialist can make a significant difference when it comes to efficiency.

Deadlines can be life-or-death when it comes to a small business. If your client bails, you’re not only losing their trust, but you’re also losing money as well. If this sounds somewhat familiar, you might want to consider hiring a full-time on-side information technology support specialist. However, finding the right individual might be somewhat difficult of a task.

Communication is Key

Be sure that they can work well with others. If the person is patient and clear when he communicates with your employees, the job gets done much quicker than normal. To get a feel for the candidate’s communication style, be sure to ask him to walk you through a technical mess that he has untangled for someone else. How does he communicate with the management team? Does he get the employees involve? Can you sense frustration when it comes down to it? Furthermore, the individual needs to confident in his abilities to get the job done as well. If he doesn’t know what he’s doing, why would you hire him in the first place?

Team-Oriented Players

Another important aspect that your IT must be able to handle effectively is tech support requests. Everything in a business needs to run in an orderly fashion. So, how does he demonstrate being an effective worker when it comes to helping desk structure and workflow? Does he field, log, and respond to any employees that seek help? Everyone needs to work as a team and if the IT support specialists refuses to be team-oriented, you should probably look for someone else to fill the position.

 

Major steps to setting up an online store

Written by Secure Net Shop

E-commerce is the number one trend in modern society. The drive to create an easy friction-less purchase experience is driving every retailer to create online stores. This is happening across the globe as smartphone and credit card saturation is driving consumers online. Setting up a new web site shopping cart is not hard. Here is a brief step by step guide:

Plan

Take a bit of time and plan out the entire store. What products will you sell. What should the site and checkout interface look like? Look at existing sites for some inspiration.

Domain

If you do not already have a domain them buy one. There are many registrars online that will do the job. Specialized domains will only be available in certain sites. Take your time in this step as once you choose a domain, you cannot change it.

Host

Next up is to choose a host. Avoid the cheaper hosts and their promises of unlimited resources. These are never realistic. Instead look for a host that supports PHP and MySQL, those are the most likely services used by the most popular shopping cart systems.

E-commerce package

Here you can go with a hosted solution or script you purchase. The hosted solution can be more expensive and will usually involve a monthly fee or per transaction fee. It is more secure and does not involve and technical knowledge. The licensed scripts are cheaper, one-time fees but will require some setup work.

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Add the ability to sell goods or services from your website with ecommerce shopping cart software from Secure Net Shop.

Simplify the Dentist Office by Taking Payments Online

Learn how dentals offices can embrace new technology for payment processing.

Healthcare is finally moving into the future, and online payments are an important component of that move forward. Customers will soon expect their doctor or dentist to accept payments online, and we may be heading toward a trend where healthcare pricing is easier to come by. For the average consumer, that’s a huge plus. If you’re looking to boost your client retention in the dentistry field, you might think about allowing credit transactions online.

What You Need

You’ll need to get an account at one of the many credit card processing companies that exist on the Web. If you want to save money, and have some flexibility, avoid working directly with big banks and opt for independent companies. They often offer lower rates than banks, and offer more flexibility in payment terms.

You’ll also need a website, which will complement whatever you do in the office. Your payment processor should come with a credit card machine, and you’ll most likely have some integration work to do on the site itself. Any developer can do that for you, as well as someone with a decent grasp on coding.

Why it Works

One of the biggest problems in healthcare is trying to get a price for any work to be done. Taking payments online, even if it’s for common procedures, will help address that problem. Patients will learn that a simple cleaning or a cavity fill has a standard price. They may also love your pricing model so much they recommend it to friends.

Just price what you can and experiment to see what patients respond to. Most of the time, the website is an added bonus to your existing payment processing plan.

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Charge.com Payment Solutions, Inc. is the most efficient and affordable method to accept payments online.

How to Evaluate Merchant Services for Your Business

When you’re shopping online or offline for a merchant service provider, you’ll quickly realize there are a lot of options. Choosing the right one amongst all those names can feel daunting, unless you create system for yourself to help evaluate each provider based on your needs. With this guide, you’ll be on your way to figuring out what those needs are so you can figure out a baseline to evaluate the companies you come across.

Customer Service

The first thing you need is a good support system to help you when things go wrong. Call the payment processing company you’re looking to work with and ask them a few basic questions. You might want to ask about:

• Monthly or yearly fees. If fees exist, ask to have them waived.
• Setup fees, and what hardware or software you can expect to receive in exchange.
• Rates and pricing structures.
• Amex fees.

Anything that feels relevant to your business is on the table, so be sure to prepare questions beforehand. For example, you might want to inquire about whether services will work as an internet merchant account and an in store POS.

Research

What registers are best for stores? Which payment processors work with iPads, Androids and other mobile devices? What about chip readers? Do some cursory research in this market to see what’s in for the foreseeable future. This will save you money later in the lifespan of your business, because you won’t need an upgrade for several years.

Final Thoughts

Once you understand more about the customer service, pricing and contract terms you know basically everything you need to know to evaluate a provider. You might want to keep some specific concerns in mind, but you should have enough knowledge to get the process started.

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Charge.com Payment Solutions, Inc. offers affordable rates on merchant accounts businesses can use online and in store. For more information, visit Charge.com.

What a Quality Shopping Cart Looks Like

By Secure Net Shop

Are you seeing results from your ecommerce website? Or did you put a lot of time and money into building one only to find a site that simply isn’t performing? Are you pouring even more time and money into it and hoping for the best? Are you becoming frustrated by the lack of results?

Here’s the thing, you may have all your bases covered except for one of the most important: your online shopping cart. Too many people in your position treat this extremely vital ingredient as something that can be an afterthought.

But it can’t be. Shopping cart systems are something you absolutely must invest in.

A good shopping cart looks the part. Let’s start there. If the graphics for your shopping cart don’t look impressive, customers will associate it with equally low quality. They might even wonder if your site has decent privacy settings.

You also have to think about how your shopping cart makes your products look. Does your cart make them look good? Are customers able to rotate the item to see if from every angle?

Finally, the cart should make the transaction smooth. That means that a customer can simply click and be done with the entire thing.

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No ecommerce website is complete until it has its own shopping cart ecommerce software. If your company currently lacks on, stop settling for lackluster results. Let Secure Net Shop help you with this essential asset.

What You Get When You Invest in an Employee Time Clock

By Allied Time

The next time you have some money in your budget to spend on improving your company, you’ll want to look into a timeclock for your organization. If you’re a bit underwhelmed by the idea, it’s not surprising. When it comes to getting more from you employees, there are countless options. People pay huge sums to have gurus come in and talk to their people. Others may actually physically alter their facilities—something that isn’t inexpensive either.

So when you hear that buying timeclocks will produce serious results, it makes sense that you’d scoff at the idea.

However, the evidence is there. When people aren’t given parameters about what’s expected from them, it becomes too easy for even the hardest working and most honest of employees to start slipping. Even worse, when these employees are keeping themselves disciplined, they’ll often find that some of their coworkers aren’t. This is how discontent grows amongst your ranks.

Introduce clocks to monitor your staff and everyone wins. You’ll soon find that people are getting more done and feel happier during their work hours. There’s just no way you’ll find a more affordable way to get these kinds of results from your people. Plus, once you’ve made the investment, these results are yours forever.

At Allied Time, the bottom line is making more of your company’s most valuable asset. With employee time clocks, you can make sure that every dime you spend on your staff is well worth it.

How FinTech can Overcome Challenges and Surge Towards the Future

The biggest opponent that fintech faces is a combination of itself and the regulatory environments that the technology finds itself in. Fintech shows a lot of promise in terms of solving some of the problems that are created by an underbanked population. Financial technology investments are also soaring, indicating that a revolution is imminent. For fintech to finally take off and become something more than digital wallets, a few changes need to be made.

Trust

One of the key aspects to fintech in the coming years will be trust, and not in the “build a warm relationship with customers” sort of way. Brand recognition will likely play a role in the future, but fintech will need to overcome challenges related to security that modern banks don’t contend with. For instance, the disappearance of bitcoins from Mt. Gox puts a major hole in the silver lining for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Renewing that trust will be crucial for fintech startups moving forward.

Big Data

Big data has become more than just a buzzword because it powers nearly everything we do. Big data can tell companies about customer behaviors and  provide insight into buying habits. It can also crowdsource certain decisions, or provide a crowdsources index similar to the volatility index. The range of applications for big data are nearly limitless.

Regulation

Perhaps the largest area ripe for disruption is regulation. Often times, well-meaning regulation can end up crippling banks and startups trying to provide a basic service. There is no quick fix, except to vote for representatives who do not engage in knee-jerk politicking. Yet even the best of intentions can have unintended consequences.

Bio: Firoz Patel is a recognized leader with a vision for the future of the payment processing market. Firoz Patel was the former CEO of AlertPay Inc., and the current Executive Vice President of the Payza platform.

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