Payment Gateways

When setting up the Baba Beag website, one of the initial things I needed to do was to decide how to process transactions. If you’re only an online seller the likelihood is that you won’t have a machine to process transactions. Although Ive talked to a few seller who do. You need to ask yourself what kind of experience do you want users to your site to have. That being, do you want them to be taken out of your site environment and branding to be processed by paypal or world pay or some other payment provider or do you want to do it within the structure of your own site. For my site, I felt that paypal et al didn’t suit the business. I dont like being re-directed to externals even if they are bona fide (that maybe a personal thing) also, making your customers register with someone else before they can purchase never seemed to make sense to me.

I decided to go with Realex, which is an Irish company that handles payments. In fairness they have been good re: customer service – depending on volumes of transactions it may or may not make sense for small businesses. They charge a flat rate every quarter – and if you’re transaction numbers correlate to the amounts they allow for within this payment, then you’re getting a good rate – I think its 20 cent per txn, but if you have few transactions then your costs can be high. So you need to think about how many transactions you are likely to process and then examine the packages that each of the providers offer.

You also need to get a merchant account set up to in order to process your txns in to your business account. But that can be the subject of another post.

Advertising on third party websites

Initially when I launched bababeag.ie everyone was giving me advice (for all sorts of things) but especially on how to market and advertise the site. Everybody who I talked to was of the opinion that you had to get your site listed with all the big content providing sites that were relevant to my business. In our line of business that translated into sites such as rollercoaster.ie, magicmum, irishhealth, EUMom etc… all the parenting sites. Initially, it was probably right that I advertised on these to get the name out – but I have to say as time went on the conversion rates from these sites is very low. And as the likes of rollercoaster stick more and more listings in their product pages the throughput keeps on dropping. But the funny thing was nobody mentioned to me about SEO and real online marketing (because people, especially small business owners, just dont have a lot of understanding or experience in these areas).

I stopped advertising on these content sites around June of this year – and it has done nothing to my traffic. Instead I focused on trying to get my site optimised to get free organic listings from google et al. Im not saying i’ve done a great job but I’ve increased traffic whilst saying myself a few grand in advertising costs.

The message I would send out is that if you’re launching a site, of course look for ways to get the name out there  – and that probably means paying for it initially. But dont fear experimenting with advertising channels when you build up a client base  - and especially focus on optimising your site if you’re an online business (sounds obvious but lots of businesses don’t) which is great because for those that do, there’s a big pay off.

Courier Services in Ireland

When I started looking at selling products online one of the initial operational items that you need to sort out is how you’re going to ship the products. Obviously you need to decide how you’re going to fulfill both Irish shipments and overseas. I thought the only way to ensure on safety, security etc.. was to go with a courier company. I found that a lot of online business seem to use Fastway couriers. I got in contact with them and discussed with the area manager about volumes etc…and he came up with a price per shipment. The way they work is that you pre-buy booklets of labels which you attach on each order. I bought a lot of booklets at the start (too many to be honest). Anyway, after they ran out I found that when I went to re-negotiate the price – it wasn’t as keen as the first time around. I thought to myself why do I need to courier deliver low bulk childrens products around the country. For items such as clothing, surely I could use the An Post network. I tried it out – I came up with a matrix for postage based on number of items people bought. It is much cheaper for my customers and I have had no problems with An Post at all. The An Post network is great for small non-damagable items. In fact I have more problems with Fastways than I do with An Post.

On a number of occasions deliveries have gone missing with Fastways. And they are slow to honour any mishaps on their part. I only use Fastways for bulky items where An Post would be more expensive or when customers explicitly state that they want it courier delivered.

So my advice to people setting up online businesses is to consider An Post and not to reject them out of had – it may make sense for your business and customer love lower postage prices.