By Stella
Yesterday, VentureBeat reported on a cool new company called WePay that offers group payment solutions for managing a single account. For example, student groups in schools or charities fundraising can take advantage of the tool to manage financial accounts smoothly with multiple points of contact. Some functionalities include creating accounts, managing transactions, collecting money, producing invoices, and monitoring payments. Read more
By Stella
Users often ask me how to tell an interchange plus quote from a tiered pricing quote. First, some background: Read more
By Stella
In the flurry of new legislation lately, one big driver for small business may have gotten overlooked: the HIRE Act. The Act was signed into law last week, and includes $17.5 billion in tax cuts for small businesses. Some other points include: Read more
By Stella
Earlier, I blogged about my “experience” trying out BuyerZone to get quotes for a merchant account. The process was so…insightful that I decided to make it visual. Here is the result, and please forward on to friends, business owners, etc. so they don’t make the mistake of wasting their time using BuyerZone. Read more
By Stella
What information goes across the network to a processor when a credit card transaction goes through? One of these pieces of information is the POS Entry Mode–data which relays to the processor exactly how the transaction went through. Here’s a short list of the different possible codes: Read more
By Stella
Note: The lack of expletives in this post is due to an attempt to retain professionalism. 
No doubt the highlight of SXSW was seeing Gary Vaynerchuk speak today. If you ever have the opportunity to see him speak, please do so! He is energetic, honest, and brilliant….but make sure you’re ok with a lot of (ahem) frank language. Gary spent the majority of his time speaking to customer service, and how it should be the focal point for any organization. Building up content can only go so far before one must build community around it. He went so far as to blatantly announce that any large corporation using an agency to Tweet or answer customer emails was disingenuous. Obviously, this must have really shocked the many agency people sitting in the audience! No matter the size of an organization, talking to customers directly is key to success. Read more
By Stella
Today was my second whirlwind SXSW Interactive day, and I have much knowledge to report. Since I don’t want to reinforce my sense of TMI, here is a brief overview of the most salient points from the panels I attended today: Read more
By Stella
My first panel here at SXSW was about analytics…social media analytics. From a business perspective, it is absolutely imperative to measure the outcomes of your social media efforts because otherwise, it’s a pointless pursuit. I got to hear two experts talk about the basics of what is necessary to measure, and industry standards. I felt the presentation was more consumer focused, so I asked the presenters how the information would change for B2B…they responded that social media is even more important for B2B since there are less communication platforms for B2B than B2C. Here are some basic ideas: Read more
By Stella
This weekend, along with hundreds of other self proclaimed tech geeks, I will be attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. Read more
By Stella
