What is Check 21?

Check 21 is a federal law that is designed to enable banks to handle more checks electronically. Using Check 21, merchants send scanned images of paper checks electronically to the bank.

Banks can then handle these checks electronically, which makes check processing easier, faster and more efficient.

Why use Check 21?

Before Check 21, merchants had to physically take paper checks to the bank for deposit. Banks then were required to manually process the paper checks with the banks and credit unions that the checks were drawn upon. This process is clearly inefficient and costly. By using Check 21, banks can process the payment faster and more efficiently, enabling the merchant to get paid faster. Merchants also save trips to the bank to deposit paper checks.

How does it work?

The merchant uses a check scanner, which scans and captures the entire image of the check. Intellivative submits these images electronically with the transaction information to the bank. The merchant’s bank can transmit this information electronically to the customer’s bank. If a receiving bank or its customer requires a paper check, the bank can use the electronic picture and payment information to create a paper “substitute check.” Using ‘Check 21’ electronic check conversion, the transaction is processed within 24 business hours.

Which check scanner(s) are supported?

The RDM 7000i is the check scanner that is compatible and is currently being used with the Intellivative Merchant Portal to capture the check images. Other check scanners may be integrated in the future. The RDM 7000i is available for resale from Intellivative.

If you sign up for a merchant account with Intellivative that includes ACH check services, we will provide a check scanner at no cost.

Is it difficult for merchants to set up the check scanner?

It is not difficult to set up the check scanner to work with the Intellivative Merchant Portal, but for those occasions where a problem is experienced, we prepared the Installation and Setup Guide, complete with step-by-step instructions, pictures and screenshots, to help the merchant install the software drivers and get the check scanner device working properly with the Intellivative Merchant Portal.

Contact us for further information or to get set up for the check 21 service.

Tips for Business Success

• 5 Ways to Get Paid Faster from Business Brickyard: Getting paid for the work you do is sometimes half the battle–it can mean the difference between a successful business and a struggling one. Here are some simple tips for helping make sure those payments keep rolling in.
• Transform Negative Reactions into Opportunities from Entrepeneur: Transforming negativity into opportunities is difficult. When you see someone saying something bad about your company, whether it’s on a customer service call, a blog post, or a tweet on Twitter, do you get defensive? Instead, try to take a step back and look for the nugget of truth that’s embedded–view that as an opportunity for your company, a free idea, a challenge to do better. This article has some very good advice for entrepeneurs to turn lemons into lemonade.
• 25 Common Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs: another goodie from Entrepeneur. While it’s clearly speaking to the small business owner, I think this list is relevant to all business owners, both big and small. Love what you do, Take it seriously, Plan, Manage Money, Ask for the Sale–some (maybe all?) of these you probably know already, but nice reminders to help you stay focused through tough ecomonic times.
• 78 Ways for Your Small Business to Save Money in this Economy from InsideCRM: We’re all looking for ways to cut corners in these erratic financial times.

To all of you who have experienced slow load times on our web site, we apologize. We are working to move to a faster hosting company as quickly as possible. Also, although we currently hire a hosting company for our web sites, we do our own hosting for our transaction processing and carefully monitor performance to ensure a high service level. We are considering doing the same for the company web site, but for a little while anyway, we’ll still be using a shared hosting company.

A side by side comparison of web site hosting companies

So how do you go about comparing web hosting companies? It’s hard to distinguish between them by looking at their web sites–they all promise so much. How do you know if one host will be faster or slower than this other one? Reading reviews is helpful, but for us it wasn’t enough. We’d already read a lot of reviews and selected our current host based on someone’s recommendations, and look where THAT got us.

The need for speed

For us, web page load time across the entire site was really important. Also, we use Wordpress for intellivative.com, so of course the site had to support Wordpress, MySQL, and PHP. We’re also concerned about uptime and support, but really, speed is so critical. On the web if your site doesn’t respond within a few seconds, your visitors very likely have lost patience and moved onto somewhere else. Our test focused on page load time. How do you know how quickly your pages will load on any host? The only way we know of was to test it by hosting the same design and content on several different hosts and measuring page load time.

Test #1: Bluehost vs. SimpleHelix and FatCow

The test:

• We loaded our Intellivative Wordpress theme and imported the site content on all three hosts.
• Using the Full Page Test at http://tools.pingdom.com/, we tested the page load time for 7 different pages with three trials on each page.
• We did two runs of the same test: one on Monday, July 13 from 10:30 – 11:30 and then again the same day from 11:30 – 12:00

The results:

• Of these three hosting companies, SimpleHelix was hands down the fastest, but Bluehost performed well, too.
• The graph shows the percentage of pages that loaded in less than X seconds, so the higher the bar at the earlier times (2 sec, 3 sec), the faster the host is serving pages.
  • SimpleHelix was the only hosting company that loaded any pages in less than 2 seconds, and it loaded over 50% of the pages in less than 3 seconds. Almost 80% of the pages were loaded in less than 5 seconds.
  • Bluehost loaded only a small number of pages in less than 3 seconds, but it did load over 50% of the pages in less than 4 seconds, and almost 80% of the pages in less than 5 seconds.
  • FatCow is very slow serving this particular web site–loading only 30% of the pages in less than 9 seconds. Nine seconds is a long time to wait for a page to load on the web–and FatCow’s average page load time was almost 10 seconds.

Test #2: GoDaddy, JustHost, WestHost, and FatCow

My boss wanted us to look at some other hosts that he’d heard are good, so we did a second test with three other hosting companies. Unfortunately, we couldn’t include Bluehost and Simplehelix in this test because we’d already taken down the sites, so this test compared GoDaddy, JustHost, WestHost, and FatCow. The test:

• First, we had to sign up for a hosting account with each of these hosts.
• Again, we loaded our Intellivative Wordpress theme and imported the site content on all three hosts.
• Using the Full Page Test at http://tools.pingdom.com/, we tested the page load time for 10 different pages with three trials on each page.
• We did two runs of the same test: one on Monday, July 20 from 10:00 – 11:00 and then again the same day from 11:45 – 12:45 central standard time.

The results:

• GoDaddy and JustHost were both pretty fast, but JustHost performed a little better.
• Note that JustHost loaded over 70% of the pages in less than 3 seconds, and over 90% in less than 6 seconds.
• GoDaddy loaded 30% of the pages in less than 3 seconds, and almost 90% in less than 6 seconds.
• WestHost didn’t do so well on this test–only 30% of the pages were loaded in less than 6 seconds, but they did load over 70% of the pages in less than 9 seconds.
• FatCow did not fare well in this test either, which is consistent with the results we saw in the earlier test. They only managed to serve 40% of the pages in less than 9 seconds–the rest were loaded slower than that.

Your results may vary

If we ran these tests again on another day, we would get different numbers. The numbers here aren’t absolute—a lot of factors come into play when you’re talking about the speed of web pages. The same hosting companies might fare differently with a different site—or on a different day. Hosting companies generally have several servers and some servers may perform better than others for specific technologies.  The time of day and the day of the week that the tests are done also makes a difference because there’s more traffic on the servers at certain times of the day/week.
We did these tests to compare Wordpress hosting companies for our web site—we’re using it to give us a general idea of how quickly OUR web site might run on each of these hosts. We purposely chose a variety of pages on our site and included the main blog page (which shows several posts) as well as a category, a blog post, and several other pages on the site.
If your web site uses different technology or content management—or even if you’re running a Wordpress site, your site will probably experience different results. FatCow and WestHost might perform very well on some other web sites–we don’t know. But we discovered (a little belatedly) that those two hosting companies probably aren’t the best choices for our Intellivative web site.
If you’re looking for a hosting company, you may want to run your own test rather than using our results. If you do a comparison test, why don’t you drop us a line and let us know how your testing turned out? We’d love to hear it.

Well, we’re wondering what people might do with the Intellivative Payments API. The goal of our payments API is to simplify adding payment functions (e.g., credit card, debit card, echeck transactions; recurring payments; card on file) to business applications–making it easier to integrate payments into whatever it is you might want to build.

So what WOULD you get if you crossed a payments API with a:

• billing API, an e-mail service, and an SMS messaging service?
• travel service and a map?
• claims processing system?
• movie?
• retail store, SMS messaging service and shipping API(s)?
• Twitter?

Perhaps none of these are groundbreaking ideas–some of them I’m sure have already been done. But maybe you have a business idea that hasn’t been done, or maybe a way to do something that has been done, only better. Or perhaps you have a new twist on an old business idea? Whatever it is, we’d like to hear it.

Are you a developer? Would you like us to feature your work on our blog? Tell us–What would you build with the Intellivative Payments API?  We’d love to tell your story.

(Add a comment below by clicking on the little thought bubble thingy.)

She points to some examples from Amazon–ever noticed how the site remembers what you searched on last if you didn’t purchase, and when you go back to visit again, it presents you with items that are related to your last search? If you hadn’t found that item yet–or got interrupted and never finished buying that birthday gift for your niece, for example, it makes your shopping experience so much easier and can even serve as a reminder for undone tasks. As a retailer, think upsell–not only are you more likely to get the sale  to satisfy the intent of their current visit, you’re also likely to sell them on whatever they had intended to buy on the last visit.

As humans, we like it when people remember us, and a web site seems much more friendly and human if it remembers what we wanted and presents us with options that we like. It’s even better if the site can identify our personality type (or buying modalities) and speak to us in language that we identify with.

In eCommerce, if you can take online shopping and make it into a delightful experience (rather than the frustration that people regularly experience on so many eCommerce web stores), you’re going to encourage your shoppers to come back over and over again–and tell all their friends. Repeat sales go up, customers are happy, life is good. 

So take a careful look at your eCommerce traffic and ask yourself what your visitors’ behavior can tell you–how can you turn that knowledge into a more personalized shopping excursion for all your customers?

Read the article from Get Elastic for some great ideas.

Well, in order to accept credit cards and debit cards, you need a payment gateway like Intellivative (others include Authorize.net, LinkPoint, Verisign, Paypal, …). But there are a lot of other factors involved …

Where are you going to host your eCommerce web site?

You might already have part this figured out, but if you haven’t, you’ll need to choose and purchase a domain name for your web site (check its availability first!) and find a place to host it. Large businesses might host the site on their own web server, but smaller businesses probably want to hire an Internet Service Provider to do that part.

How big of an online store do you want?

Are you selling 2 different products, 100, or 1,000? The scale of your online store is going to make a big difference in your web store’s strategy.

If you have just a handful of products to sell, you’re not going to need a whole lot. A “Buy Now” button from PayPal or Google might be enough–or you may be able to sell your products on an auction site like eBay or Amazon.

But when you’re ready to move beyond selling a few products online, you’ll need an online shopping solution with more functionality. That’s where shopping carts come in. If you have more than 5 – 10 products, you’re going to need a shopping cart. 

Should you build your eCommerce store yourself, hire someone to build it, or buy a pre-made solution?

Nowadays, it’s not necessary to solve it all yourself (unless you just enjoy doing that kind of thing). A pre-built shopping cart can give you so many features it would be difficult to build yourself. You still might want to hire someone to help you, but most likely you can find a cart that will meet your needs. 

You can find shopping carts that will provide all kinds of bells and whistles–the question becomes which bells and whistles are important for your store’s success?

Here are some of the features you might find offered:

 The lists of features alone can be overwhelming, but really, it’s best not to have too many, at least to start with. Think about making your store simple for the user to find what they want, add it to the cart, and purchase it. Some of the “features” can sometimes get in the way of that one primary goal. Keep yourself focused on the goal, and don’t let yourself get too bogged down in features.

What’s really important on an eCommerce site is:

• a straightforward user shopping experience–this is your number one goal. Make sure you shop some of the stores that use the cart you’re considering. Notice how easy or hard it is to select an item and make a purchase.
• pleasant, uncluttered design–does the cart allow you to create a design layout that makes sense, without overwhelming the user, yet still allow them to easily find what they’re looking for?
• sufficient information–people need enough info about your products/services to make a decision. What types of tools do you need to give shoppers enough information about your products? Does the cart allow drill-down to product details? Multiple product images? Product comparisons? Test out each tool you’re thinking about using to see how straightforward and helpful they are.
• secure online transactions–even experienced shoppers have reservations about handing over their credit card numbers. Make sure all the software you employ on your site is PCI compliant.
• search engine optimization–your store has to be found first, and search engines are critical to making that happen. What does the cart do to support that?
• support after the sale–shipping integration, email notification and order tracking are customer touchpoints that can make a big difference in customer retention. Does the cart offer sufficient tools to allow you to do that?

Make sure the cart supports these essentials, but also think to the future. What are your long-term goals for this site? Will the shopping cart you’ve selected be able to grow as your business grows or will you have to switch solutions? Switching solutions later can be expensive and timeconsuming. 

What comes after the cart?

Once you’ve figured out the shopping cart problem, you still need a payment gateway to integrate with your cart and a merchant account where proceeds from your sales will be deposited.

A payment gateway connects your online store to the payment processing networks and banks. The payment transactions are handled electronically, via a secured Internet connection. Some carts will partner with a payment provider; others will allow you more flexibility. It’s always better to choose a cart that allows you the flexibility to choose your gateway, so if you want to switch down the line, you don’t have to change your entire store around.

Similarly, it’s beneficial to choose a gateway that allows you to change your merchant account. Gateways that connect to more than one merchant account provider help because it allows you to shop around and get the best deal as your business changes. A merchant account provider that suits your business today may get expensive in terms of merchant account fees when you grow past a certain size.

Speaking of that, Intellivative is currently integrating with three new bank networks, which will greatly increase your choices for merchant accounts, without having to change your eCommerce store setup.

Give us a chance to show you how much you can gain (and save!) with Intellivative. Contact us for a free, no-obligation quote today.

Well, in order to accept credit cards and debit cards, you need a payment gateway like Intellivative (others include Authorize.net, LinkPoint, Verisign, Paypal, …). But there are a lot of other factors involved …

Where are you going to host your eCommerce web site?

You might already have part this figured out, but if you haven’t, you’ll need to choose and purchase a domain name for your web site (check its availability first!) and find a place to host it. Large businesses might host the site on their own web server, but smaller businesses probably want to hire an Internet Service Provider to do that part.

How big of an online store do you want?

Are you selling 2 different products, 100, or 1,000? The scale of your online store is going to make a big difference in your web store’s strategy.

If you have just a handful of products to sell, you’re not going to need a whole lot. A “Buy Now” button from PayPal or Google might be enough–or you may be able to sell your products on an auction site like eBay or Amazon.

But when you’re ready to move beyond selling a few products online, you’ll need an online shopping solution with more functionality. That’s where shopping carts come in. If you have more than 5 – 10 products, you’re going to need a shopping cart. 

Should you build your eCommerce store yourself, hire someone to build it, or buy a pre-made solution?

Nowadays, it’s not necessary to solve it all yourself (unless you just enjoy doing that kind of thing). A pre-built shopping cart can give you so many features it would be difficult to build yourself. You still might want to hire someone to help you, but most likely you can find a cart that will meet your needs. 

You can find shopping carts that will provide all kinds of bells and whistles–the question becomes which bells and whistles are important for your store’s success?

Here are some of the features you might find offered:

 The lists of features alone can be overwhelming, but really, it’s best not to have too many, at least to start with. Think about making your store simple for the user to find what they want, add it to the cart, and purchase it. Some of the “features” can sometimes get in the way of that one primary goal. Keep yourself focused on the goal, and don’t let yourself get too bogged down in features.

What’s really important on an eCommerce site is:

• a straightforward user shopping experience–this is your number one goal. Make sure you shop some of the stores that use the cart you’re considering. Notice how easy or hard it is to select an item and make a purchase.
• pleasant, uncluttered design–does the cart allow you to create a design layout that makes sense, without overwhelming the user, yet still allow them to easily find what they’re looking for?
• sufficient information–people need enough info about your products/services to make a decision. What types of tools do you need to give shoppers enough information about your products? Does the cart allow drill-down to product details? Multiple product images? Product comparisons? Test out each tool you’re thinking about using to see how straightforward and helpful they are.
• secure online transactions–even experienced shoppers have reservations about handing over their credit card numbers. Make sure all the software you employ on your site is PCI compliant.
• search engine optimization–your store has to be found first, and search engines are critical to making that happen. What does the cart do to support that?
• support after the sale–shipping integration, email notification and order tracking are customer touchpoints that can make a big difference in customer retention. Does the cart offer sufficient tools to allow you to do that?

Make sure the cart supports these essentials, but also think to the future. What are your long-term goals for this site? Will the shopping cart you’ve selected be able to grow as your business grows or will you have to switch solutions? Switching solutions later can be expensive and timeconsuming. 

What comes after the cart?

Once you’ve figured out the shopping cart problem, you still need a payment gateway to integrate with your cart and a merchant account where proceeds from your sales will be deposited.

A payment gateway connects your online store to the payment processing networks and banks. The payment transactions are handled electronically, via a secured Internet connection. Some carts will partner with a payment provider; others will allow you more flexibility. It’s always better to choose a cart that allows you the flexibility to choose your gateway, so if you want to switch down the line, you don’t have to change your entire store around.

Similarly, it’s beneficial to choose a gateway that allows you to change your merchant account. Gateways that connect to more than one merchant account provider help because it allows you to shop around and get the best deal as your business changes. A merchant account provider that suits your business today may get expensive in terms of merchant account fees when you grow past a certain size.

Speaking of that, Intellivative is currently integrating with three new bank networks, which will greatly increase your choices for merchant accounts, without having to change your eCommerce store setup.

Give us a chance to show you how much you can gain (and save!) with Intellivative. Contact us for a free, no-obligation quote today.

Imagine you have a retail store and three different visitors come into your store:

• The first is a businessman in an expensive suit, carrying some luggage. He clearly just got off a plane or is about to get on one.
• The second is a mother with a 2-year-old on her hip
• The third visitor is a young woman (around 20 – 22) who heads straight for the bargain racks

How would you approach each visitor? What would you say to each one? Your approach would be very different, would it not?

Now imagine those three same visitors go to your online store. Would you want to approach them with the very same messaging and products? Probably not. That’s where web site personalization comes in. There are companies (like Sitebrand or Kefta) that specialize in helping you segment your site visitors and speak to their needs with messaging, sales, offers, and products that are targeted specifically to them.

So you can help the businessman find what he needs for his trip, the mom find what she is looking for before her two-year-old needs his nap and the best deal for the young bargain-hunter.  

Does Personalization really work?

I did a quick search and lo and behold I found a (very dated) 2003 report from Jupiter Research that says that web site personalization does not always provide positive results. To quote Jupiter:

“To drive key business metrics, most sites are better off focusing on the basics, like usability, information architecture and making key tasks easy for users to accomplish,” said David Schatsky, Senior Vice President at Jupiter Research.

What this says to me is NOT ”personalization doesn’t work”, but that if you haven’t first done your due diligence and optimized the usability of your web site, you’d get more bang for your buck by tackling usability first.

Also of note, personalization companies have taken advantage of the big strides that have been made in web analytics software in the past few years–which means they can measure and show exactly how the personalization is impacting sales. Then you can tweak your personalizing strategies until they do provide measurable positive results. Using a tool like Google Analytics (which is free), you can easily measure your return on investment for each tool you employ on your eCommerce web site.

What is usability and how does it work?

The most popular and well-known usability methodology is usability testing: a fast, inexpensive way to determine how well your site works for real online shoppers. It involves finding a few of your target web site visitors, sitting down with them, giving them a few tasks, then just watching and observing what they have trouble with. You don’t even need any specialized equipment (although I find it helps me to record the sessions with a webcam and some usability software like Morae or Silverback). It uncovers the obvious mistakes that most users would have trouble with very quickly and helps you uncover small things you can fix that would mean big improvements in your e-store’s navigation and user-friendliness.

So does personalization help?

Logically, it seems like it SHOULD help–after all, you wouldn’t speak to the businessman the same as you would the mom or the bargain-hunter, but in the end, I think it depends on a lot of things. It depends on how usable your web site is, how well you segment your traffic, whether your targeted messaging is effective, etc. If you test all these elements as you implement your personalization, I don’t see how it could NOT help increase your sales. We all like to be spoken to as individuals and we like it when companies can tell what we need when we need it and deliver it quickly. If you can do that, you’re bound to succeed.

Don’t forget to include reliable payments!

No matter what you choose to use to optimize your online sales, make sure you choose a quality payment solutions provider. Intellivative offers a quality XML-based payments API that integrates with just about any shopping cart, content management system, or personalization software.

What’s an entrepeneur to do?

Well, one option to help keep people from stealing customer information would be not to keep any cardholder information around.

One way to keep the burden off your business is to use customer lookup and card on file functions (something like the features offered in the Intellivative Payments API and Intellivative Merchant Portal).  These functions were originally designed for convenience, but when used in lieu of storing the sensitive customer information at your business, they can also act as fraud prevention tools.

By using these two features in tandem, you can save customer billing, shipping, and cardholder account information for later retrieval on a secured server. This allows you quick access to the information, but you don’t have to worry about how to protect it from fraudsters. You leave the burden of protecting your customer information to an expert in security–unless security is your business, you may be better off leaving it to the experts.

That doesn’t help if your payment solutions provider is compromised for some reason, but hopefully they are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen. I know we are continually updating security at Intellivative. We make it our mission to keep your customer information safe and secure.

You will also need access to previous payment receipts in case there’s a chargeback, so make sure your payment provider offers secure access to those as well or you’ll end up keeping copies of receipts around, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you’re worried about how to store your customers’ information safely, perhaps the best solution is just not to store it at all!

What’s an entrepeneur to do?

Well, one option to help keep people from stealing customer information would be not to keep any cardholder information around.

One way to keep the burden off your business is to use customer lookup and card on file functions (something like the features offered in the Intellivative Payments API and Intellivative Merchant Portal).  These functions were originally designed for convenience, but when used in lieu of storing the sensitive customer information at your business, they can also act as fraud prevention tools.

By using these two features in tandem, you can save customer billing, shipping, and cardholder account information for later retrieval on a secured server. This allows you quick access to the information, but you don’t have to worry about how to protect it from fraudsters. You leave the burden of protecting your customer information to an expert in security–unless security is your business, you may be better off leaving it to the experts.

That doesn’t help if your payment solutions provider is compromised for some reason, but hopefully they are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen. I know we are continually updating security at Intellivative. We make it our mission to keep your customer information safe and secure.

You will also need access to previous payment receipts in case there’s a chargeback, so make sure your payment provider offers secure access to those as well or you’ll end up keeping copies of receipts around, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you’re worried about how to store your customers’ information safely, perhaps the best solution is just not to store it at all!