By Stella
Many people have been talking and asking about Square, the new gadget coming from Tom Dorsey, the prolific founder of Twitter. The basic idea is to make the acceptance of credit cards universally available for everyone individuals, businesses, etc.–provided they have an iPhone and Square’s little swiper piece (you plug it in the iPhone to facilitate the swiping of credit cards). Cool idea, huh? Here are some questions to ponder: Read more
By Sean
Visa and Mastercard both have special, lower interchange rates for small transaction sizes. Visa and Mastercard tend to create new interchange categories when they want to attract a new kind of merchant that has not previously accepted cards. Small ticket merchants (think convenience stores, parking meters, etc.) have historically been turned off by the per-transaction part of the interchange rates. Paying $0.10 in interchange, plus another few cents to the credit card processor really hurts when you are only charging the customer $5. Read more
By Stella
Interchange is the fee that businesses pay directly to credit card issuers for the service of processing their credit cards. Visa and Mastercard publish their rates for public knowledge, while American Express does not. After doing some digging, we found that the American Express 2007 Annual Report reveals that, on average, Amex’s discount rate was 2.56% (2007), 2.57% (2006) and 2.58% (2005). Read more
By Stella
FeeFighters uses Interchange Plus pricing in our credit card processor marketplace. This type of pricing has historically only been available to larger merchants, but we’ve made all of the processors on our marketplace abide by interchange plus rules. Read more
By Stella
New rules for credit cards will be kicking in less than a month from now, as legislation for fairer industry practices finally begins. These new rules may change the terms on your existing credit cards, so the most important thing to do to prevent being surprised by unnecessary fees or changes in rates is to seek out information on how the new legislation will affect you. Don’t stop reading if you have a great credit history and amazing FICO score, you may be affected as well. Five smart things to do before the the law sets in can be found here, here are a couple of the more salient points. Read more
By Stella
USA Today reported on the growing trend of consumers quitting their credit card habit: cold turkey. Read more
By Stella
The government has adopted a new philosophy (and one we’ve long rooted for): Transparency. In response to President Obama’s mission to make government more transparent, the Open Government Directive was established in December 2009. Here are some of the sweeping goals, direct from a White House memo: Read more
By Stella
In an effort to do some targeted advertising, I decided to try Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads. My assumption before the experiment was that LinkedIn would be much more effective and have higher CTRs because it is a professional sphere whereas Facebook is more informal. I started with Facebook Ads, designing 3 different ads in one “campaign.” One great feature in making a campaign is that Facebook really holds your hand throughout the process. Not only is their help section extremely useful, and offers a range of tools and explanations, but help is provided on the side with each step. After designing the ad, Facebook lets you narrow in on your target market much more detailed than LinkedIn. Whereas on LinkedIn, your choices are much more limited due to the way they define their users. For example, “business owner” on Facebook can just be listed as an interest, whereas on LinkedIn you have to guess at which title/position a person has: manager, vice president, CXO, etc. Here’s what their Targeting page looks like. 
The pricing on Facebook is also superior to LinkedIn. On both sites, you can choose between CPM vs. CPC, but Facebook suggests a value for both. Another huge difference is that LinkedIn is much more expensive. Facebook’s minimum daily advertising budget is $5.00 while LinkedIn’s is double (not sure why?). On Facebook, the ability to see the ad’s performances side by side was really helpful in playing with messaging and seeing what was effective. The ability to manipulate data was also superior on Facebook. They offer different kinds of reports, graphs, CSV uploading…it’s fun to manipulate and play around with all of the tools they offer. LinkedIn: don’t even think about it. Extremely underdeveloped. As far as performance, neither one was fabulous or game changing, but Facebook is proving to be worth the little money put in, whereas as LinkedIn was a failure. By running multiple ads, we are able to see which messaging works, and experiment with our targeting (for example: we started out targeting “college graduate business owners who speak English” and decided to drop to “business owners who speak English”). Our highest CTR on Facebook is 3.3% while it’s less than 1% on LinkedIn. Conclusion: Though Facebook ads aren’t as effective as we’d like, they are a great way to get your brand out there while on a tight budget. Though LinkedIn may seem intuitively like a better fit for some business advertising, skip it. Facebook’s advertising is immensely superior in quality. For more information, check out this great article about another business owner’s experience.
By Stella
A FeeFighters user recently asked:
When there is a return, do I get money back from the processor? Read more
