Network Business

Posts Tagged ‘Real Time’

If your business still does not have a merchant account that allows you to offer full credit card services, you are turning your back on profits. Just take a look at all of your competitors. All of those that pose serious competition accept credit card payments. Those that do not have credit card services do not have great sales figures to show, either. Even statistics point to the fact that companies that have credit card services earn much more than companies that do not have credit card services. The average credit card sale is $40 while the average cash sale is only $9. That means you are losing potentially $31 per sale.

You may also be spending more by accepting only cash and check payments in your business. The processing of cash and checks has been found to be more costly, requiring more manpower in handling. Studies have shown that the average processing cost of credit card payments is only 2.7% of a transaction while the average processing cost of checks is 4% of a transaction and the average processing cost of cash is 4.8% of a transaction. Once again, you are leaking profits by refusing to accept credit card payments.

So how do you accept credit card payments in your business? This is where credit card services come in. The old route is to apply for a merchant account in a bank. You will then have to lease the software and equipment necessary to actually process payments and send the data to your account. If you want to accept credit card payments online, you need to apply to a payment gateway that allows real time credit card authorization for online transactions. You should ensure that your payment gateway is compatible with the bank or financial institution where you have your merchant account, and with the software and equipment you have leased.

In choosing the bank or financial institution for your merchant account, consider their expertise in combating fraud and reducing chargebacks. Also make sure that they are experienced in handling merchant accounts with online transactions.

If you are a small business owner, stick to a bank or financial institution that caters to small businesses rather than large companies. You may be able to get better rates and packages designed for your specific niche.

There are options for credit card services that offer everything you need in one easy package. You will not have to deal with various entities or go through various procedures. Often, these options also have added benefits, among them, quick reporting on your credit card sales figures. They may also offer interest on your credit card sales income, even up to money market rates.

One very important feature of your credit card services that you may not know of is that it can automatically qualify you to avail of small business loans. Once you have established a record of sales through credit, most credit card services will allow you to make cash advances that are practically like getting previously approved small business loans without having to put up any required collateral. The credit card services consider your future income through credit card sales as your collateral. This can go a long way in further growing your business.

Payment will not be a problem, either. For as long as you have sales through credit payments, you automatically get to pay your small business loans. It does not matter how much your sales are. Your payments are automatically deducted as a percentage of your sales. You are always covered.

Now do you still need further convincing on the benefits of credit card services for your business?

In order to keep up with your customers’ demands you need a real-time 360 degree view of your business. Your systems need to operate 24 hours a day and your stock levels must be up to date at all times.

When your company is small and based in a single location, things are simple. But they may start to get complicated when you expand or start to outsource into other territories, either at home or abroad. For example, if you’re a retail business with multiple shops around the country, as well as a national distribution hub and a factory located abroad, then ideally you want everyone in the business to send you data in real-time. This way you can know at any time how many coats have sold in your Newcastle shop and how much stock remains at the distribution point.

You want every part of your business to be connected. This way a sales till in your shop in Newcastle can both ring up sales and keep track of how much money has been taken. It can also connect to the internet and access your company website, as well as interrogate the distribution hub to see if there’s any stock left or to put in an order if more stock is needed. You also want it to be easy for the shop assistant on the till to be able to contact anyone in the organisation, no matter where they are, in order to get an idea of stock levels in different shops or to find information about forthcoming products.

Without fast connectivity, you have to disconnect each part of the business from the headquarters and collect data on a daily or weekly basis. But this means accounts are always a few days or a week out of synch, so nobody can say with any certainty whether or not an item is in stock. Such businesses are also unable to respond effectively to changes in the market both locally and nationally.

Seeking connectivity solutions via broadband

Some companies look to the internet and broadband for a solution, but here there are also drawbacks, namely a lack of security. Unfortunately, the internet is an inherently insecure network. For example, whenever you send an email, that email is split into small bits by the sender and then bounces from server to server until it’s reassembled at its destination. At any point along that route it’s possible for someone to intercept those deconstructed bits. And if you’re streaming video or audio the data can get out of sequence, as different parts of the file are sent over different paths and may not be received in the order in which they were sent. Broadband connections, while fast enough for consumer needs, are less likely to be adequate for medium to large business use. When you share one broadband line between multiple users in, say, a branch office and you need to send, upload and download large files you start to hit problems. Most available broadband connections are asynchronous, meaning they download at one rate and upload at another. Therefore, an 8Mbps connection will allow you to download a file at 8Mbps, but only upload at around 512k to 1Mbps. Speed is also dependent on your distance from the exchange and the number of other people sharing your connection.

Wide Area Network Options

The simplest solution to the problem is to create a set of dedicated connections between your sites. With these, the upload speed is as fast as the download speed, and it has pre-agreed levels of service, which are set via a service level agreement (SLA). Also, the line is used by your business and no one else, so the download speed will not reduce at peak times when the business next-door starts to send large CAD/CAM files.

Leased lines are one of the simplest connections, offering connectivity up to 155Mb, but there are other options that offer faster performance, often at a lower price. For example, if your offices are dispersed across a business park, a town, a city or a region, Ethernet Extensions are one way to link your people. Ethernet Extensions offer unlimited usage through a dedicated, fixed-price digital transmission channel. This secure, fibre-based service offers dedicated connections at Ethernet speeds of 10, 100, 1000 Mb and up to 10Gb. You can have point-to-point connections or point to multipoint, as well as supporting business critical applications and high speed file transfer to improve efficiency. All this between locations up to 25km apart allowing you to exchange large amounts of data effectively and efficiently.

In cases where your offices are spread across the country, National Ethernet may be a good solution. National Ethernet offers unlimited usage across the UK at speeds of 2Mb right up to 1Gb across our national network. If bandwidth upgrades are needed, they can typically be done remotely without the need for a site visit. Whether you need multiple circuits or a single connection, the service can be tailored to you. Annual charges are fixed regardless of usage or distance.

As the number of your sites increases, it becomes more complicated to rely on individual connections between them. In these cases, a virtual private network is often a good alternative, allowing you to share resources efficiently rather than on a site-by-site basis. An IPVPN is a cost effective, secure, flexible, scalable and fully managed service. IPVPN provides the security of a VPN with superior performance for business-critical applications, plus the cost benefits of converging voice, data and video traffic on the same network. The service is managed for you, including the set up and ongoing management of routers and IP routing. If you want to control your own routing hardware Ethernet VPNs can be a great solution, allowing you connect sites nationally, at speeds of 1MB to 1GB through our Next Generation Network.

Combining a Next Generation Network with VoIP

Because you have a connection that’s both fast and secure, you can start to use the connection to perform other tasks, such as video conferencing, or using the connection for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems.

One of the main criticisms of VoIP is that there’s no guarantee on call quality since the system uses the internet to route calls. Calls can sometimes break off or the voice quality can be so poor as to be impossible to use. However, using VoIP over a dedicated Next Generation Network will give you a clear line, as well as connections that are always reliable. This not only saves your business money, but also should encourage your employees to communicate more often.

Lastly, because you now have a constant fast and reliable connection between all your different sites, it’s now much easier and faster for your IT department to support users, no matter where they are, and to build in additional safeguards for your business, such as disaster recovery solutions. With a WAN your IT staff can use tools like Microsoft’s built-in Remote Desktop Connection to remotely control and share a PC, so there’s no need for site visits to fix simple IT problems. Additionally, the servers on your system can continuously back up their data to secondary sites. This way if a branch office is hit by fire or flood there’s a copy of all the lost data saved and available for use straight away. You can then restart the branch anywhere from within a few hours to a few days. Solutions like High Capacity Services can often be a great way of supporting the performance and bandwidth needed when servers are mirroring data of this kind over large distances.