Now that the holiday rush has passed, your business needs to focus on how to approach the New Year with an eye toward growth and profitability. Are you missing out on some easy strategies for more frequent customer transaction completion? We often believe that the biggest challenge simply lies in getting customers in the door or to our websites. However, savvy customers now have a world of possibilities in their smartphones. They easily compare prices, research competitive products or services, and make many shopping decisions based on digital offers or information. Take the time now to re-evaluate your goals for 2016, as well as how you can make your retail merchant account better work for your business.
Category: business merchant services
International Blog Post Edition: Singles Day & MasterCard’s Global Liability
There’s a “quickening” at year’s end, with all the preparations, travels, gatherings, and, of course, sales and transactions that mark the season, and much of the particular corner of it that we cover here. So we have lots of “strands” to weave into an early holiday narrative for you, about immediate trends for the holiday season, and what may lay beyond it for the new year.
AVPS Offers Smart Merchant Account Solutions to Help E-Commerce Businesses
With the internet flooded with e-commerce businesses, you need to focus on marketing and growing your brand in order to stand out. But are you still stuck with those necessary operations, like how to accept credit cards, establishing an e-commerce merchant account, and creating a business plan for long-term financial stability? At AVP Solutions, we want to help set your small business up for success, and we can help you establish a merchant account that will work for you.
Credit Offices Going through Changes, Difficulties
Your FICO score: As an individual, it determines your “creditworthiness.” Your personal score can even sometimes affect getting business credit, in the early days of a start-up. And of course, it affects the degree to which your customers can open new accounts, or the degree to which they’re charged to keep using current ones.
This is the week — EMV is here!
And so, after weeks, months — years? — of writing about the coming “EMV standard” in this space — that switch to the chipped “Europay Mastercard Visa” card already standard in Europe and other parts of the world — that day is here at last.
Expand Your Ecommerce Business
Your small business is growing, and the best way to reach new customers is through a well-designed website. A website can take a brick-and-mortar business and expand it to an international audience, or allow budding entrepreneurs to create a new business with very little capital.
Consumers Using Credit More — But Don’t Have EMV Cards Yet
Some interesting studies and surveys have popped up in the “payments press” over the last week or so, highlighting the ongoing use of credit and charge cards among consumers, yet also highlighting slow adaptation to changes that would seem otherwise rapid.
Labor Day and Birthdays: Drivers Head Out, Gas Heads Down, and Visa Checkout Serves Cake
Though the thermometer readings around the American West insist otherwise, the end of summer has come with Labor’s Day arrival, and the flipping of the calendar page from August to September.
Schools are in full bloom, and Walmart is already selling Christmas toys — starting its layaway program two weeks earlier than last year (“Walmart’s layaway program coincides with its Toy Week, which allows customers to get a glimpse of the top toys of the holidays chosen by children.”
Payment Times Keep A-Changin’ – New Technologies, Shifting Consumer Trends
The payments news cycle is once again filled with predictable data breaches (both of the IRS and even less discreet varieties), and we hope being a regular reader of these updates has somewhat indemnified you against the worst of these hazards (since you use separate passwords for different accounts and devices and update all your security patches, right?)
Small Business is Optimistic — But Is It Ready For EMVs?
Shopkeep is a cloud-based technology company used by more than 18,000 different small businesses, to keep track of things like payroll, inventory, etc. They are also prone to surveying their customers and compiling the info in what they called their “ShopKeep Small Business Index,” or SSBI They just announced the release for their survey for the second quarter of 2015, and the good news is that “survey respondents reported their highest revenue and optimism to date.”
