Do you have questions about accepting credit cards? If you do , feel free to join Payment Transaction Systems Podcast on blogtalkradio on 4/8/2010 3:00 PM. Call In # is (347) 215-6574. Feel free to join us and share your experiences as well as questions.

Over at MerchantPOS.net, http://merchantpos.net the Nurit 8020 GPRS Wireless credit card machine at $520.00, no coupon code required.

Hypercom Optimum T4210

The Hypercom Optimum T4210 Credit card terminal is a part of Hypercom’s  new optimum credit card terminal line.  It is a small (3.6 in (w) x 8.1 in (l) x 2.3 in (h)) good looking credit card terminal with a black case, big sliver keys, colorful key overlay and color coded port plugs for easy setup. This terminal also comes with a small, bright LCD screen. The Hypercom T4210 is a sturdy terminal that was built to handle harsh retail environments. It’s small frame packs a lot of punch with a v.32 modem which makes it one of the fastest dial up credit card terminals when processing in a dial up environment. With the T4210 the LCD Screen is graphics capable so you are able to print logo’s and coupons at the point of sale on your credit card receipts.

I am quite impressed with the Hypercom T4210. As a credit card processing service provider, we deal with different brands of terminals everyday. We build the files for them, download, deploy and offer the support for them. Hypercom is a brand that we trust because we rarely have problems with them. The previous T7 series from Hypercom has about a 7 year life cycle, so I will assume the T4210 has a similar life cycle as it feels as solid if not more so than their T7 series terminals.

The Hypercom T4210 downloads fast and processes fast. Transactions were authorized at the point of sale via dialup within 4-5 seconds. Those speeds are approaching Ethernet enabled credit card terminals, for less money.

The Hypercom T4210 also has a lot of memory so you can add different applications as you see fit such as gift cards or check processing in the future. These terminals are also PCI-PED approved. Therefore, you can use the internal pin pad for pin based transactions for years to  come. Merchants today who are using a non PCI-PED enabled internal pin pad terminal will either have to switch to an external pin pad or buy another terminal.

I have not tried this terminal on digital lines (like cable ) but when I do I will report back.

Verdict:

If you are looking for a credit card terminal for your business that is small, sturdy, attractive, powerful and fast, the Hypercom T4210 is the way to go. It is one of the easiest terminal to download and operate. Plus for the price, you can’t go wrong as this is a brand new terminal that will function well for many years to come.

Innerfence Iphone App

I’ve noticed a few bolg posts and even in the latest apple iphone commercial, a credit card terminal app is featured on the iphone. For $49.99 it’s a whole lot cheaper than a wireless credit card terminal out there which run in the price range of $600.00 to about $1500.00.

The Innerfence iphone Credit Card Terminal App promises to process credit cards natively on the iphone tying into the authorize.net payment gateway to run transactions. The demo is very fast even on the edge network and it has intuitive fields such as emailing the customer their receipt as well as asking the customer to opt into a newsletter.

For $49.99 that sounds really good, But who is going to use this app? What are the true benefits? By processing your transactions this way, how much is your processing costs going to be?

Who this App is For?

I think this app is for very small, hobbyist business owners who have the occasional trade show or who occasionally sell there wares via a market. This app is not for the business owner who has many trade shows and processes transactions on a regular basis in the field. Here’s why:

1. Keeping Your Customer At Ease:

With credit card fraud as high as it is now, not many people will be comfortable giving their credit card to someone to enter in that information into their cell phone. It screams of fraud. It may not be, and you may be totally legitimate, but the perception of someone entering their credit card number into your CELL PHONE is scary. The customer will be thinking, is that safe?

2. Cashier Error

I have an iphone. I am on it everyday either texting, twittering, etc. I have gotten much better in typing out what I want. However, how many tries will it take to enter in the right credit card number. What if you make a mistake but don’t know it and it comes back declined. You will have to tell your customer their card declined, when in essence it didn’t. How many times will a customer allow you to enter in their credit card number into your CELL PHONE before they cancel the sale? Cashier error when entering credit card numbers into an iphone will be rampant and will have consequences for the business owner.

3. Your processing fees are going to be sky high.

Firstly you are entering the card number that will downgrade your transaction to a minimum Mid Qual with rates in the range of 2.25% – 3.00% depending on your processor if you are set up as retail (most businesses are). Your transactions will downgrade even more to Non-Qual if you don’t enter information like the customers address, name etc.You may pay $49.99 for this app but would pay apx 3.00% – 4.5% in processing costs for every transaction you accept. Maybe the business owner who makes an occasional sale here and there would be satisfied with this but a person who is running multiple transactions per day, this app would not work.

4. Higher Chargeback Risk.

Let’s say you run the card via the iphone. What protection do you have that you actually sold something to your customer. There is no receipt with a signature line, there is no shipping tracking number to verify that a product was purchased and you as the business owner delivered the product. How would you prove in case of a chargeback dispute that you actually sold and the customer received your product?

5. Professionalism

It’s just plain tacky. It may be cool, but your main concern is to sell your product. “Cool” helps only if it helps you sell more. Customers want to feel as though they are doing business with a company that knows what its doing, entering their credit card number into your CELL PHONE says amateaur. The customers may have concerns about you losing your phone, will their credit card data be stored? Like I said their concerns may be unwarranted may but do you want to explain that as a disclaimer every time you take a payment.

Now there is hope for this app. I do believe there is potential for accepting credit cards via the iphone however more needs to be done. For instance, connecting a card swiper to the iphone. This may need to be manufactured, but it will reduce cashier error and you won’t look like you are entering the transaction into your cell phone. It will also lower your procesing fee. Swiped transactions cost an average of 1.80% verses the 3 and 4% keying it in would cost.

This app also needs a receipt printer. The receipt printer wil allow you some protection from chargeback and will help put the customer at ease because that is normal way they process credit cards. You can still get their email address and send them a copy of the receipt.

A great idea would be a bluetooth enabled cardswiper/receipt printer that would pair with the iphone to accomplish this. If Innerfence can do this and get that working, this would be a great alternative to a wireless credit card terminal.

Depending on the cost of the additional equipment needed, you may be better off sticking with a wireless credit card terminal.

As a small business owner, don’t neglect the marketing aspect of your business. You may think you can open your doors and people will start walking in or visiting your site and start spending money. Well it’s not that easy. In order to compete with other small businesses in your industry as well as larger, better funded entities you have to develop effective marketing strategies to get the word out on your business. You need a way to get people in to your store or business, cash in hand and ready to buy. Here’s where to start.

Every marketing plan is different. Region, business type, products sold all contribute to how you should market your business. Before you decide on a marketing strategy write down the end result you want. Start from the end and work towards the beginning. For example, At the end of this marketing program I want to get 100 people to visit my store and I expect 40 of them to buy something.

Once you know the end result you want you can then figure out what you need to do to get there. Have concrete goals, with concrete numbers. Have a concrete time period and stick to it and finally, Write it down. I find the best way for a goal to come true is to write it down in a journal, planner, blog whatever, just somewhere that you will see it regularly

Once you have your end result you want you need to figure out who your audience is. When I say know your audience, you should try to find out as much as possible about your target audience. For example, if you sell tires, you should know who will be buying those tires. Will you target mainly men or try to focus on women. What is the average age of people who come into your store, do they own houses, do they have kids, what type of car do they drive, how often do they buy tires.

For that tire shop, knowing those intimate details about their customers will help you better target marketing programs for their audience. If you find out that the majority of your customers are men who are married between the ages of 37 and 60 you know that you may not advertise on myspace or friendster because chances are that’s not where your customers are coming from.

When developing marketing programs, try to find out as much information as possible about your customers. Put yourself in there shoes and ask yourself, would you buy from you. How does your business look from the outside looking in. Remember, you are selling your products to other people. You have to tailor your marketing and sales pitch to your customer not yourself. You have to know your customer better than they know themselves and use that understanding of them to sell them.

Hey, No one said it would be easy.

Small Business Marketing Research Resource

Intuit Future of Small Business Series

If you sell to other small businesses, Intuit (The Quickbooks company) has published a report on the future of small business in the USA. If this is your market this is a great resource to look at to get a really good idea of your target market.

The Six Costliest Mistakes You Can Make in Marketing To Women

Women are the primary consumers in the United States. Know how to effectively market to them. Everyone should read this article.

Marketing to Men

When and were do men shop and why.

Love Those Boomers

Marketing to the Largest age group this country has to offer: The Baby Boomers

Understanding Generation X

Marketing to Generation X’ers, An Introduction

In this series, I will focus on specific open source software you can use to manage your customers. Let’s face it, we are currently in a pretty deep recession, or economic downturn (what ever you want to call it) the point is all over the country and the world, the majority of small to large businesses are experiencing less sales, higher bills and limited credit options. For the small business owner, you have to make it work. In essence we are largely on our own.

So how do we increase efficiency, cut costs and at the same time increase sales, without mortgaging ourselves to pay for it. Well one way to do all of those things is with technology, Open source technology. I was introduced to the open source industry in 2004. There I found an enormous amount of software that handles everything from Accounting, to Point of Sale to Webservers to call centers. Basically anything you want to do with technology is available in open source.

Understand not every open source software is good, worth the time or is right for your business. It will take time to evaluate the available options and they usually don’t have professional technical support. However, you will almost always find freelance individuals in your area to help you. They can usually build you a system that is unique and will fit how you do business other than fitting your business around a particular software.

To find Open source software you can either google for it. For example say you want an open source customer management software, you would google “open source customer management software”. You will find many different choices. Many of these open source software have there own sites and an online demo for you to test it. Or you can go to sites such as http://sourceforge.net or freshmeat.net which are sites that host hundreds and thousands of open source projects.

What to look for in Open Source software for your business

1. Software with a demo site you can test the functionalities to see if it is right for your business

2. An active user community. You want to make sure there are other individuals actively involved and supporting the software via forums or some other means. You don’t want to spend the time to use an open source software and if you have an issue there is no one to help you.

3. Open source components. It is best to use open source software that only has open source components that make it up or else you will find yourself having to purchase licensing from various sources to use a particular software.

4. Try to find reviews on that particular software you are considering. Google for the reviews of that software to see what others are saying.

5. If you will be using an open source web based application, it’s best to make sure the software is able to be used on various hosting enviornments (in case you will rent your server) so that you don’t invest time in setting up this open source software and find out you can’t use it.

Below are two examples on customer management.

1. SugarCrm- I particular like sugarcrm for it’s ease of use, clean interface, and ease of customization. SugarCrm is a Sales force automation/Customer Relationship Management Software (SFA/CRM). With Sugarcrm it will walk sales people through the sales process, keeping everything documented. It is straight forward to install and has a very active community. Sugarcrm comes in three versions, open source, professional and enterprise. The open source version is freely downloaded and used while the professional and enterprise versions are paid versions with professional support. Sugarcrm has many of the same features of salesforce.com

SugarCrm has a very active community that will extend the features of sugarcrm with modules. There are many modules available in the community. If you don’t find the module you are looking for, you will be able to hire someone from the community to build it for you.

2. Vtigercrm – Vtigercrm was derived from SugarCrm many years ago and now is it’s own stand alone SFA/CRM. Many people like vtigercrm and it comes with many features. Vtiger also has a strong and active community. Vtiger only comes in one version but professional support is provided at a cost. Because it is open source you will be able to extend the software to fit your business needs.

These are the main two that come to mind. These two programs will handle customer management and can be extended as much or as little as you would like.

Search souceforge.net as well as freshmeat.net for software that fits your business.