From registering your small business through to carrying out a sufficient amount of promotion to ensure your launch isn’t a flop, you’ll soon find your list of things to do is several pages long.

In many ways, this has always been the case, regardless of whether you setup in business two weeks ago or two decades ago.  It’s always been a manic time.

However, small business owners today have one more additional point to contend with – and not just at the initial stage of their development – which is the vast quantity of new technologies that are constantly being developed.

There’s no doubt that in some respects, the number of technologies, tools and resources that are made available is fantastic.  Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have revolutionised how we can engage with our audience, something that’s a huge plus for small business owners.

The problem arises when it’s realised just how many new technologies are available – trying to understand them all is difficult enough alone, but looking at how you can utilise them all is a mammoth task and one that for most, actually isn’t possible.

The truth is there are so many new technologies developed regularly that it isn’t feasible to even look at them all, never mind consider how you should use them – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even look at them.

All businesses need to constantly be seeing how they can grow and develop.  They need to understand how they can offer a better service to their customers and what needs to be done to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction is continually maintained.

And generally speaking, utilising new technologies will tick all of the boxes here – but not all new pieces of technology will need to be used to offer the best service you can.

Some technologies will work fantastically, whilst others may not be necessary, as the same goals can be met by another and there’ll be plenty of technologies that will have nothing more than a minor positive effect.

As a small business owner, you undoubtedly need to be keeping an eye out for the latest technologies, as they could prove to have a fantastically positive impact on your business.  However, it needs to be understood that this is all you need to do – keep an eye on them – as anything more and you’ll find it takes up too much time, but anything less and there’s every possibility you’ll miss a gem that could prove to be the catalyst behind your small business’s success.

The post How Much Notice Should You Take Of Emerging Technologies? appeared first on BizAmmo.

And for many, it’s highly likely you’ve at least considered business cards.

But how beneficial are they today?  Once considered a staple part of business, we’re living in a world where interaction and engagement is quick, easy and possible on various platforms, so are business cards still necessary?

The truth is they can still be extremely beneficial for small business owners in particular – you generally just have to utilise them in a way that incorporates the resources you now have available today.

For instance, traditionally, a business card features your name, position, telephone number and e-mail address.  Now if you’re meeting someone for the very first time – such as at a networking event – this information alone will be useful.

If you’re meeting someone who you’ve spoke to already, however, there’s a very good chance the person has already ‘Googled’ you, come across your Linked In profile and knows these details.

And even if you are meeting someone for the first time, just providing your name, position, phone number and e-mail address doesn’t really do a lot, except tar you together with the majority of other people who use a business card without thinking about it.

Therefore, why not try and make your card stand out a little?

Perhaps include your Twitter and Facebook profile URLs.  Sure, they may not be clickable and someone will have to physically type them into their address bar, but if they’re interested in you, they’ll do it – and apart from anything, it shows people you and your small business aren’t just the same as everyone else.

Another great way you could utilise your business cards would be to do the one thing so many people still don’t do – use the reverse.

You could invest a huge amount of money getting your business cards to look and read great, but if you’ve left the back blank, it can be slightly annoying and make the person receiving it feel as though the business card hasn’t completely fulfilled their requirements or expectations.

What you put on the back is up to you, but something useful – such as your website’s URL – is a good idea.  However, a favourite saying of yours could be a great option, too.

Although business cards might seem like an old resource, the reality is they can still be extremely beneficial for small business owners today and you simply have to take the time to work out how they can be utilised to ensure the best results possible are seen.

The post Are Business Cards Still Useful For Small Business Owners Today? appeared first on BizAmmo.

The bottom line anymore is that it is bad for the merchant to handle credit card information directly.  Therefore there are several alternatives that merchants can offer as options, a couple of which are very popular.

PayPal

PayPal is an intermediary for payments.  It can store credit cards and bank account information for a customer and when a customer pays, PayPal is the one that charges the card.  The customer’s credit card information isn’t transmitted to the merchant at all.  This means PayPal is taking on the liability for that card and providing the merchant with a special ID instead that has limited use.

Your customers can also pay directly from the balance of their own Paypal account rather than taking money out of a traditional bank account. The downside of PayPal is that its fees can add  up when compared to a regular credit card processor.

Google Wallet

This was formerly known as Google Checkout.  This is similar to PayPal, in that Google Wallet stores your credit and debit cards and issues virtual information to the merchant for payment, so the customer’s actual credit card numbers never leave Google Wallet.  This has a benefit for customers of also being able to utilize near field communication (NFC) technology on their phones to use Google Wallet to pay at physical locations in addition to making online payments.  The current main difference between Google Wallet and PayPal is that PayPal can store bank account information instead of a credit card whereas Google Checkout only stores credit and debit cards from the four major credit card companies.

E-Checks

An e-check is basically an electronic transfer from a bank account.  Customers would provide their bank account information and the merchant debit funds from it as if a check had been written by the customer. These can be accepted through some third party payment processors (including Paypal).

These are a few of the ways payments can be processed as either alternatives to credit cards or as intermediaries of credit card payments, so the merchant’s liability is limited.  As stricter security measures are imposed on credit card use, more options may pop up as merchants try to find ways to not have to deal with the liability of working directly with customer credit card data.

What forms of payment do you accept besides credit cards?  How do you limit your liability and keep costs down with the recent upswing in credit card security measures?

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As an employee, this generally won’t be too much of an issue.  OK, it’s not ideal, but if you’re working in an office and suddenly have to rush out, chances are there’ll be other people there to take over your duties temporarily, even if it’s for a few days.

But when you’re a small business owner, you don’t often have the same level of ‘flexibility’.  Therefore, when you have to deal with a personal emergency as a small business owner, how do you do so without your business suffering?

The good news is, it’s relatively easy and it’s all in the planning.

Most large organisations have contingency plans, which are put in place when ‘Plan A’ isn’t possible.  Sometimes they will be for seemingly minor aspects, whilst other times they’ll be for obviously important tasks (such as in relation to evacuating a building).

These plans often look at the most vital parts of a certain process and provide a solution if the ideal scenario can’t be carried out – and when you’re planning for a personal emergency as a small business owner, this is exactly what you need to do.

In an ideal world, we’d know when an emergency was going to happen and we’d be able to ask a friend or relative to answer the phone temporarily, have time to put an ‘Out Of Office’ automated message on our e-mails and ensure all customers know we’re going to be taking a couple of days out.

But obviously emergencies aren’t planned and so you therefore need to essentially produce a guide that can be followed by a certain person in the event of an emergency.

What this guide will feature will vary from business to business, but it needs to either offer a step-by-step process as to what someone needs to do (such as ‘How To Setup An Automated E-mail Responder’), so the guide can essentially be handed to any family member or alternatively, it needs to instruct someone who’s familiar with your business as to what to do (‘Send a message to all new customers who’ve placed an online order to say there’ll be a delay in shipping due to a personal emergency and offer a refund’).

Whatever the guide says, it’s important you feel confident that whoever reads it knows exactly what needs to be done, leaving nothing to chance.

Dealing with personal emergencies is something we all have to contend with, but as a small business owner, you have to be certain that when you do need to respond to one, your business will be able to be left instantly and won’t suffer in any way as a result, allowing you to focus solely on the emergency.

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However, the more time passes, the more you’ll realise some businesses seem to do things that fall into an area that’s a little ‘grey’.

I’m not saying they’re committing anything illegal, but we’ve all seen the signs where it appears a certain product is being advertised for a certain price, only to get closer and realize the advertised figure is actually the amount of money that’s being discounted off the product’s price.

In many ways, these signs are a little deceiving, but they’ve been proven to work as a sales and marketing tactic and so to some, it can mean it’s OK to be a little ‘clever’ every now and again.  It’s what they believe makes the business world go round.

Generally speaking, however, I’d be tempted to disagree.

Today’s consumers have changed tremendously.  No longer receptive to the hard sell approach, they tend to want a few things above all else – and one of them is clarity.

They don’t want an organisation to try and trick them into buying something or make something look much better than it actually is.  They’d rather know the truth from the start and although it might mean the item isn’t as good as the organisation may want the customer to believe, more often than not today they’ll be satisfied because they know the truth.

It’s for this reason why it’s strongly advised honesty is always taken as the path for your growing small business.  Everyone can take shortcuts and you’ll no doubt see some success if you do, but the only way you can guarantee your business’s on-going success is to be truthful and honest at all times.

Consumers want to feel as though the companies they’re spending their hard earned money with are respecting them and likewise, they want to respect the company themselves.  Base your small business’s growth and development on not necessarily lies, but not the truth either and you’ll not only likely trip up at some point in time, but as soon as you do, you’ll find it almost impossible to be considered a respectable company within your industry.

By all means, use the sales and marketing techniques that have been proven to work, but always keep in mind that customer expectations and requirements are continually changing and today more than ever, honesty is going to be one of the qualities a customer respects most about a business.

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Control of Costs

The first benefit is a finer control of costs.  Buying a lot of products at once can open the door for better pricing from their vendors.  The merchant also can negotiate their own terms with shippers to reduce shipping costs (which is usually dependent on shipping a certain volume of products through the chosen shipper).  On the downside there is also the cost of storing the products, but that can lead to other benefits.

Control Workflow

A benefit of a merchant storing their own products is control over the workflow of the warehouse.  It is very important to configure the layout of the warehouse and the process by which employees gather products for orders in the most efficient manner possible to waste as little time as possible walking back and forth.  This requires a good knowledge of the products the merchant is selling and what their customers tend to order the most.

Control of Products

Another benefit of a merchant stocking their own products is being able to inspect the quality of the products before shipping them to customers.  No customer likes to deal with returns or receiving less than quality products.  Quality problems can cost merchants those customers as they will look elsewhere in the future.  Third parties may not care as much about the state of the product the customer is delivered as the merchant would, so this allows a merchant to have their employees do some sort of quality check on the products (what kind of check depends on the product) to reduce the likelihood of a return.

These are some of the benefits of stocking inventory as opposed to using a third party to store and ship products.  Merchants will have to weigh a variety of factors to decide if the time is right for them to start this.  What other benefits have you seen of stocking your own products?

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For several months, it’s almost guaranteed you try to get by just doing what you’re doing, working by yourself every hour sent.

There’ll come a point, however, when something needs to change.  You’ll either reach a point where you physically can’t do what’s required of you anymore because of time constraints or you’ll be at a plateau that you can’t get past – your business is ticking over, but you’re in a situation where you need to invest more time to ensure its growth, yet you don’t have the time available.

It’s here where you’ll start to consider hiring an employee – and for many, taking on a relative will so often be their first train of thought.

Completely understandable if it is, hiring a relative can be fantastic.  You’ll know the person inside out, understand their qualities and already have a good relationship in place with them.

They’ll make the perfect employee, right?

Well, potentially, yes – but hiring a relative could also prove to be particularly detrimental to both your small business’s growth and your relationship with them in general.

The reason behind this is there’s a huge difference between time spent going to the football with your brother at the weekend or shopping with your niece on an evening and working with them.  To all intents and purposes, if you decide to hire a relative, you need to think of them as a ‘normal’ person rather than someone who you’re related to – and this is where most people go wrong.

They don’t realise the difference between a personal relationship and a professional relationship.  They think that if they get on fantastically in the former, this will be the exact same case in the latter.

And in some instances, it will be.  But the reason it so often isn’t is because in your personal relationships, no one’s telling someone what to do or nothing’s really expected of one party.  It’s a really laid back, easy-going relationship, as it should be.

When you transfer this to a professional scenario, no matter how relaxed you think you may be as a small business owner and potential employer, hiring a relative – or in fact, anyone – is going to mean you expect something from them or need to ask them to do something – and if the relative doesn’t want to do it or feels uncomfortable in the situation, this is where problems are going to arise.

In many ways, hiring a relative for your small business can be a great idea, but without the right understanding of how it will work, it can also prove to have a negative effect on your business’s growth.  Only touching on the topic in this post, it would always be recommended to at least look at hiring a relative, but simply understand that you might have to take off your rose-tinted glasses when doing so.

The post Hiring Family: Should You Hire Relatives For Your Small Business? appeared first on BizAmmo.

This option involves using something called a fulfillment center.

What are fulfillment centers?

Fulfillment centers are companies with warehouses.  If a merchant does not want, or can’t afford the space, to store products he buys to sell, he can use a fulfillment center to store his products.  Fulfillment centers typically have multiple warehouses positioned around the country or world.

A couple of examples of fulfillment companies are Fulfillment By Amazon, which utilizes the network of warehouses Amazon already has in place, and ShipWire.  There are a lot of similarities between fulfillment centers and drop-ship vendors, but the main difference is that with a drop-shipper, the merchant doesn’t own the products, whereas he does own everything he stores in a fulfillment center.

Storage and Logistics

One of the main benefits of fulfillment centers is the ability to purchase stock and not have to store it yourself.  This is generally good for merchants who either want to stock items from suppliers that won’t drop-ship, or if they are able to get better prices from being able to purchase in large quantities themselves as opposed to passing on orders to the drop-shipper for fulfillment.

Running a warehouse efficiently is actually a science and is difficult to master.  There are all sorts of warehousing theories, such as wave-picking that can be utilized to more efficiently gather products from shelves to ship on an order.  Fulfillment centers make it their business to know the latest methods in efficiency when storing and moving products so merchants don’t have to worry about learning this right away.

Shipping

The other big benefit of fulfillment centers relates to shipping.  This is similar to the benefit of drop-shippers because the merchant doesn’t have to worry about the actual shipping, and can have the option of letting the fulfillment center work out better rates with the major shippers because they have so much quantity going out.  They would normally use this negotiating power to keep costs down for the merchants, who are their clients.

Another benefit of fulfillment centers is that they can save on shipping costs by allowing merchants to send products to appropriately located warehouses to cut down on shipping time.  Most fulfillment centers allow merchants to provide branded packing slips to send to the customer with the orders as well.  The ways in which an order can be transmitted to a fulfillment center varies as much as it does with drop-shippers.  It could be email, a direct integration between the two companies’ software, or it could be a fax or phone call.  It just depends on the fulfillment center.

These are some of the major benefits of fulfillment centers for e-commerce merchants.  More independent than drop-shipping, but without the full responsibility and cost of storing and shipping products yourself, fulfillment centers are a good middle ground. And they are a good solution if you want to have a storage facility in various places around the world.

What other fulfillment companies have you worked with?  What have your experiences been?

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Twitter.  Facebook. LinkedIn.  Pinterest.  Whether it’s one of these or any of the other hundreds of networks out there (and there genuinely are hundreds), there’s a range of different benefits any organization can see from using them.

But as with any resource, it’s not always a straightforward process and just as you can benefit from social networks, they can have a negative effect on your organization, too.

So, how can you ensure you only see benefits from social media?

Be Active

And the very first thing you need to do is be aware that to see benefits, you have to be active.

I’m fully aware that this sounds completely and utterly obvious, but the reason I wanted to mention it is that some believe if they don’t utilize social media, they won’t see any benefits, but they also won’t see any negative repercussions either.

This, unfortunately, isn’t the truth.

Utilising social media is expected by customers.  It’s seen as somewhat of a necessity.  Therefore, when it’s not delivered, you’re not meeting customer expectations, ultimately having a negative effect on how your brand is perceived as a whole.

Be Consistent

Linked in with this point is the need to always carry out activity.  In no way should you start and then stop – even if only temporarily – for the simple fact that online activities are always representing your brand.

Therefore, if it looks like you’re only half-heartedly attempting to engage with your customers on social media, what does this say about your organization as a whole?

What else have you tried and seemingly failed at?  Do you always only seem to give 50% effort?  Don’t you care about your customers on social media?

Now of course, these comments might be completely unjustified in one sense, but they’re very easily the impression your customers could be receiving if you’re inconsistent with your social media activity.

Be Engaging

One of the main points to always keep in mind when you’re utilising social media is that they’re social networks.  They’re not dedicated sales channels and aren’t marketing tools.

There’s no doubt they can be used for such purposes, but they must always be thought first and foremost as social resources.

You need to engage with your audience, interacting with them regularly.  A good rule of thumb is to ensure your activity follows the 80 / 20 rule – 80% of the time you should be providing activity that’s of genuine interest to your target audience and only 20% of the time it should be about your products or services.

Customers don’t want to be sold to.  They don’t want products or services forced upon them. They’re much more receptive to the occasional piece of sales-type talk if it’s interspersed with other information that they’re actually going to find generally interesting.

There’s a whole lot of information to take into account when you’re looking to utilize social media, but the simple fact is, you need to consider your customers at all times – keep them in mind and they will provide the right foundations for any activity you carry out.

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Sale at the Shopping Cart

A sale at the shopping cart means that payment is collected in full as soon as the order is placed. This guarantees that you collect the funds for the order before the order is anywhere close to being shipped out. This is good for a merchant because they can be sure they are paid before attempting to ship the order or even have the order go through internal processing (which can waste time if it’s a fraudulent order).

The downside to this timing is that it can be very frustrating for the customer if they’ve paid for their order, and then later find out that perhaps the item is backordered and can’t be shipped right away, or the item is no longer available for whatever reason. The customer then has to wait for a refund to clear if they decide they don’t want something else instead from the merchant. It depends on your business how frequently this can occur, but if you decide to go this route, plan ahead for customer service so as to not lose a customer (and all the people they will tell about their experience).

Pre-authorization and later Capture

Another option is to pre-authorize on the shopping cart first, which gets an AVS and CVV match for fraud checking. Merchants can set their credit card processor to automatically reject bad matches, or they may allow them through to review manually later, so as to not lose a potential customer who has a minor issue with their card. Authorizing a card puts the funds on hold so they can be captured at a later time of the merchant’s choosing. This way a merchant can check stock before capturing the funds.

Credit Card processors only hold authorizations for a certain amount of time though, so the merchant must capture the funds before the processor releases them back to the customer. If that happens, the merchant must run a separate transaction on the card. The other pitfall of delayed captures is staff that is not properly trained to capture them. It is very easy to run a second sale instead of capturing the authorization by accident. This leads to the customer not being able to access twice the amount charged until the authorization is released. This is a large generator of customer service calls and confusion and anger from customers, especially when they have low balances to work with.

Whichever option a merchant chooses, they should be cognizant of the pitfalls they must prepare their customer service reps for and implement proper policies and procedures to ensure that customer concerns are taken care of, while balancing their own need to be paid in a timely fashion. How do you deal with the timing of receiving payment? What other challenges have you encountered?

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