Small Business Website Names and the Exciting World of Credit Card Merchant Processing – Small Business Show 137

The Small business show episode 137 for Wednesday, September 20, 2017 Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow. Co here in Durham, New Hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. That is some kick ass intro music by the way.

I like that intro music. Nice job finding that. That's.

Hey, that's good. Yeah. So we're always trying to just take it up a notch.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, it's cool. How's things out your way there, sir?

Things are good. Yeah, it's, you know, it's fine. We're in schedule readjustment period here as I'm sure you are there. The kids are now back in school and they're now just starting to get like into a routine with, you know, the after school stuff and all those things quite kick in, you know, right when school starts. And of course one of my kids drives and one is about to have his license so we don't really need to worry about him. But we still do in terms of scheduling and drag them all over the place and all that stuff. So. Yeah, but it's getting to the point now where I can have more quality time at the office without being distracted by things that might be happening with the family. Yeah, the summer's always weird. It. Yeah, summers for me either are super productive or the like least productive time of the year. And it's really hard for me to predict which. Which it's going to be. It just, it really depends on the family schedule and all that stuff. So.

Sure, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it kind of throws everything. The routine is important, you know.

Routine. Yeah, it helps. It just makes, it does. It makes it easier is all it is. I mean discipline can, can, you know, discipline can combat a bad routine. But I don't know, the routine, the routine, it's like a system, right? It's that Scott Adams thing where. That's right, you have X amount of willpower to apply per day and if you don't have to apply it to your schedule, then you have it for other things.

Yeah, no doubt. That's for sure.

Right?

Hey, yeah, that's right. You're right. And you know, you want to. I mean, I mean, I'm a fan of routine, but I also find I need to bust out of it often, you know, because I start to think like I don't ever want to feel like you get up and it's like, okay, here's step one.

Right, right, right. That's the whole reason we don't is so that we don't have to. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I try to make sure I have at least one day a week. In fact, I plan it so that like, and Wednesdays are generally that day, the day we record the show. This is really the only thing I had on my calendar today.

That's cool.

Yeah, I mean, I. I've been busy all day. In fact, we were late starting the show because I was too busy. But, but that's sort of the thing is, it's nice to have that, that I'll call it Playtime. But, you know, just time where I can get a bunch of stuff done and not have to worry about, oh, I gotta stop for this meeting or I gotta stop for that.

Yeah, it's flex time.

Flex time. Yeah, There you go.

Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, if you recall, a few weeks ago, well, actually almost a month ago now, on episode 133, we talked about naming your small business. And then we also took some listener questions and we spent some time on there and we had a comment pop up today in the Facebook support group. That's BusinessShow Co Facebook, if you want to jump over there. And Todd M. Made a comment and he asked about this and he didn't think we covered it. He said, hey, is it still super important to get a dot com version of your company name? It's a great question. I think we covered a little bit of that stuff around halfway through about naming and SEO and stuff. But I thought we would discuss this for a couple minutes and answer Todd's question.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question too.

Yeah. And I think it gets real important now because, you know, I mean, domain names are. Can be very tough to get, you know, especially if you're. Whatever your name is, if it's common or something. So my take on it, and I certainly, I want to hear your thoughts as well, since you're into this stuff. You know, I think it is. If you can get the dot com, I think it's great. But you know, you're also talking to a couple guys that, you know, our website is businessshow code and you know, I like the way that sounds. We couldn't get businessshow.com and I, we finally, I mean, I went around and around and around trying to, you know, get this going and you know, what we would do and naming and everything. And finally, I like the content was going to be the most important part. And plus we're going to be sharing across all these different social media platforms that perhaps are more important as well. But we're a podcast, so it's a little bit different. All my other companies definitely have dot com addresses and you know, I don't. I think you need to try to fit it in and come up with something. But there's some very creative ways to do it and you know, by adding, you know, a prefix or a suffix, whether it's, you know, go or something online or, you know, that's the way I would do it. I wouldn't try to necessarily find the domain and then name your company. And I wouldn't butcher your name either. Like taking out vowels and you know, like Flickr or you know, whatever.

If you want Yahoo to buy your company, man, you know, Flickr, Tumblr, there's like, you know, that's.

That's true. Yeah. That maybe I'm wrong. But anyway, I think it is great. I think you should try to get it. But I think you got to. You need to get creative with what words you may have to combine around your name.

Yeah.

Well, what's your take on it?

No, I think having. You need a web presence. Right. Does it have to be dot com? I think it, like you said, it depends on the business. For a tech oriented business you can get away with a lot more. Like you said, we have co or IO or any of these others where it just sort of works in the name of the thing. You can make it work. And people are used to that on the Internet. But, but no, you know, brick and mortar people still think dot com. So it depends on your business and where you're branding it. Right. If the only place you're branding it is online, then, you know, then you have a little more flexibility. But, but if you're branding it, you know, in person and I think Todd said his is ebooks and a podcast. So I think you can get away with, with being flexible. You don't need. Need the dot com. But I think, I mean you need something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And you know, and it's expanding out the more you see. I mean there's all kinds of. I don't know if they're considered top level domain, you know, now with different co.IO like you say, so maybe it becomes less and less. And like you said, it depends how they're going to find you and how you're going to promote it. But if you can do it, certainly I think it's a great idea. Yeah, shirt certainly can't hurt.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. Cool. So you also, Dave you wanted to talk about? You know, I just got back from this payment processing conference.

Yeah, I want to pick your brain about. About something. Yeah, yeah, let's.

Let's hear your story about your merchant processor.

Yeah, so we, We. We have two merchant accounts here that we use for two separate businesses. One is really just straight up. We ding people's credit cards for their advertising, and we do that all in house. And we don't have an E commerce store or anything for that. It's just all happening in house. It's almost like we're swiping their cards, but we're not.

Okay.

So that's one of them, and that's for backbeat media. And then the other is exactly the opposite. We do none of the processing. It's all up to the customer to process themselves. And that's for our MacGeek Gab Premium subscribers, people that want to contribute to the show, and they get some perks out of that and that sort of thing. It's all handled recurring billing and all that stuff. We never, you know, we just see. We see it after the fact. Like once somebody has made a payment, we're like, oh, hey, cool. You know, and then we trigger the renewals and all that. But it's all hap. That all happens with a. With a. With a e commerce engine that we use called WooCommerce. It's baked into WordPress.

It's great. Of course. Of course.

Yeah, it's great. But because we started doing this credit card thing so long ago, we went down the path of having a traditional gateway provider and merchant account.

Authorized.net, something like that.

Yeah, it's authorized.net is our gateway, and then our merchant is with our bank. But we kept moving that around or whatever.

Yes.

And. And I started looking at the MacKeep stuff, which is relatively low volume. Right. You know, and. And we take that money. John and I take that money and basically split it up every quarter. And so every quarter, you know, and this started. We moved providers, I don't know, 18 months ago or something. And, you know, six, nine months ago, I look, I'm like, like the fees on this seem a little high. And it was, oh, well. And Lisa manages all that stuff here. And she said, well, I've checked, it's fine. You know, we paid some fees because we had signup fees with the new provider and this, that and the other thing, I'm like, okay, fine. But, you know, the discount rate was, Was. Was good compared to what we had. We dropped like half a Point or something. It was pretty good. Yeah. And then it was like, no, again, you know, this isn't good. Like, what's going on here? And, and I, you know, I, I mean, Lisa's, first of all, she's my wife, but secondly, in that role, she's my employee. So I try not to go out of my way to imply that somebody's not understanding something correctly. Right, sure. It's like, this is your job, you figure it out.

Right.

And I don't want to micromanage, but sometimes, you know, I have to. What's that?

Yeah, you got to get involved.

I got to get involved. Yeah. So I just kept looking and it was like, every time I do the math, it would come up that we were paying like 15% was our effective. Like, that's what it was costing me. Like, what the.

Between fees and this and that.

Yeah, that's it. It's like. And I just kept asking where it, like, break this down for me. Break this down for me. Break this down for me. And you know, I get these nebulous answers like, okay, you're not understanding the question that I need answered. Right. Which is fine. I mean, that's like, it happens all the time. Like, yeah, I'm asking one thing, you're hearing it one way. I'm trying to ask something else. So finally it like, all right, we get to sit down and I printed the reports, which sometimes is the best way to look at numbers is looking at them on a screen. I don't know, like, you can get lost in stuff really easily, but printing them out and putting them on, laying them out on a desk and having a pen where I can circle things and cross reference stuff made this really easy. So that in like five minutes I figured out that, okay, well, they're charging us, you know, 30 bucks a month for this no matter what. And then, you know, our. We have. There was some minimum charge on there, like every month. We weren't hitting whatever the minimum. Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, okay, so fine, so here's this and here's that. And it did. It worked out that, you know, our gateway provider plus our merchant provider, which each of them wanted to charge me 30 bucks a month or something, plus all these like, minimum fees and other stuff. It was, it was up to 15, sometimes even like 16% a month. And I'm like, okay, well, this is going to end like, there's just no way. And, and, and I actually did the math for, for Backbeat too. And, and it. With Mac observer, especially with Mackiecap. It really pissed me off because this is like money that people are just essentially donating to us. We do, we do give them some.

Supporting, you guys, right?

They're supporting us, but. And I'm like, man, these freaking people are stealing this money that these people are trying to just give to us. Like, this is not okay. You know, And I felt awful about it. And so, so I said, well, let's let now, while we're in it, let's, you know, now that you understand, go, go and do the same reports for Backbeat. And, and the backbeat ones, percentage wise, wasn't as high, but we were still paying a lot of these fees. And that even came out to be like it was, you know, tipping the scales of 4%. It's higher, much higher volume there, but still 4%. It's like, okay, wait a minute. This is stupid. I don't care if they tell me I'm only paying 2.2%. You're not.

You're right. No way.

Yeah.

That's such a scam. And it's a really old, in my opinion, old school way of doing business that they tell you it's one thing, but, you know, it's like, oh, the interest rate is this and then. But the APR is this. You know, when you go to your bank or whatever, it's like, well, why even tell me that it's going to be, you know, 2% when in actuality it's always going to be 3% or whatever.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So I started researching things and now for Backbeat, we're. We're ultimately flexible because we, we're not tied into an E commerce engine. We don't have recurring billing in that sense. Or, you know, it's all just managed in the house. So I'm like, okay, well, that's easy. We can move to whatever we want. And. But for Mac observer, it's got a link with our shopping cart, and I want to be able to do it and I don't want to lose our subscribers.

Sure.

Right now, you know, and this has been the reason that I haven't moved in the past, because it's like, well, hey, you know, if somebody's on a plan where they're paying us, whatever, 10 bucks a month, 50 bucks every six months or something like, you know, I know that if I tell you you have to, you know, tweak something with.

Your account, you're going to lose a significant amount.

Yeah. But when you're paying 16% out of the gate, it gets easier to Lose that.

Right, that's true.

Yeah. So we started looking and we narrowed down to PayPal, and PayPal has a couple of options. And this is why I wanted to hear from you on this and Stripe. Right, Right.

Yep.

And so Stripe was the one that said, hey, we can migrate your authorized. Net data in. So, yeah, so I'm like, okay, great. And they both were, I think they were both 2.9%, which on paper is higher, but actually on real paper it's not higher, it's way.

Yeah, because, yeah, typically what they've taken the stance is, look, you're going to pay one rate for everything instead of you're not going to pay extra when somebody has a mileage card or somebody does this or, you know, amex is a little different. Of course, you have a separate agreement, most of those with amex, but it does make it easier to know up front what you're really going to be paying.

Yeah, I don't care when I know. I just want to, like, I want it to be predictable and I want it to be what I think it's going to be. That's really what, what, what I want. Like, you know, I'll make the decision. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll take responsibility for the decision, but I want to know what I'm deciding. Not play. Like you said, play the shell game.

Yep.

And so PayPal, I think, was out of the gate. And I realized that, you know, we can probably negotiate with them maybe on their, on their discount rate, but maybe not. PayPal wanted 30 bucks a month. Stripe, Stripe wanted nothing. And it was the same discount rate after that. I think it was, I think PayPal maybe was 20 cents a transaction, whereas Stripe's 30 or something. But we don't do enough transactions where that made a difference. So I was like, okay, let's try Stripe, especially because now I could do. I don't use the same account, so I could use one for Backbeat and one for Mac Observer. It's fine. Doesn't matter.

Sure.

But I figured, well, we'll do Stripe. It doesn't cost us anything to get in the door there, and we can see how it works. And so started heading down the path with Stripe. I asked the Stripe people. Their support was great. It's, tell me what you need me to go get from authorized. Net and I'll get this. I'm sure they're going to want to encrypt this data because, you know, PCI compliance and all that.

That's right.

So I Go to the authorized. Now people armed with knowing what I need, which is actually very, very simple. And they say, oh, yeah, absolutely. Yep. We can, we understand the, the need for the occasional need for a legal export. Right. And now they have a term that they're using capital letters on. And I'm like, oh, here we go.

Okay. Yes.

Yeah. When you have a term that you use capital letters on that isn give, you know, a proper name, I know I'm about to get screwed. And. And they're like, yes. So to do a legal export, the fee is $250 per hour with a four hour minimum.

Yeah, of course, it's a roadblock.

This is 30 minutes max worth of time. And 30 minutes includes, like going to get coffee and eating a sandwich. This is a, Somebody needs to press a button process.

Yeah, Somebody just need the export.

Right, that's it. Export encryption, send. Done, done. And so, you know, I've been, I've got to run the numbers. I don't think it's worth my while to pay them the thousand bucks because.

It certainly depends on your, on your volume. Right.

Well, yeah. How many people do I really think I'm going to lose doing this? And is it, you know, is it more than 13% of them? Because if I'm going from 16% down to 3, like I can. I got some slush in there.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And I think that, you know, that the way they handled it, that in itself is reason to change totally.

Oh, I. Correct. Yes.

Yeah. Because my comment, you know, if we were talking about, hey, should I go with Stripe or should do PayPal or whatever, to me, it always comes down to the people that you get to work with. And if, if you make a good connection and things are smooth and you've got people on your side that are going to be advocates for you within.

You know, your merchant process organization. Right.

That's huge. That, that's extremely valuable. And that's something you're not going to get from an old school merchant provider that wants to mail you a letter when there's a problem with a charge.

Yes. Right. Yes.

And then you get this letter, you know, a week later and you're like, I was, what's going on? Why is this out of my account? And they don't, they don't know who you are. You know, no one from First Data or whoever your bank uses or this or that authorized.net is going to say, hey, come and we're going to have a conference. Come and we'll take you to dinner and let's meet and we'll talk about how we can grow your business. No one is going to do that, but somebody will do that. No doubt from Stripe. Not on a bit Stripe, but you know, Certainly on the PayPal side, they do it all the time. And I'm sure that, you know, Stripe has that kind of outreach program, an advocate program that would help you out. And I think that when you're really coming down, if Stripe didn't have a way to import that data, that's a big bonus. But of course you got to pay now a thousand bucks because authorize Net is effectively holding you hostage.

They're totally holding my data hostage.

Got it.

That's right.

They're doing this because they're holding on to an old school business model and they want to stop people from leaving and you just don't need that gateway anymore. You just.

No, I don't. I don't need it. That's totally right. Yeah. So now assuming that I stick with my decision to not do the export and roll those dice and you know, I mean, it's, I'm not doing this blindly. We've already been talking with our audience at macgeekab about this, starting that conversation. Like, you know, there's ways of doing. I mean, these are our listeners, these are our customers, you know, so we've started that and when we do it, we'll send emails out instructing people how to do it and thanking them and you know, all. And I mean, I'm talking about it sort of, you know, blandly here, but like, those thanks will be sincere. Yeah, of course they are. Yeah. But assuming we don't decide to do the import that then frees us up to go with say, PayPal Pro or the new who they just acquired. Not just.

Yeah, I would suggest you use a Braintree solution means PayPal company, because it gives you really ultimate flexibility. You may not need that now, but going forward, if we want to accept Apple Pay or we want to use Android Pay or we want to use whatever, and their solution, they're coming after companies just like this authorized.net and these kind of stodgy things because their solution is ultimately portable. It is, you know, they're not one of the things.

That's the thing. And that's what Stripe has, by the way. Because I already have Apple Pay and Android Pay now and all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

It's got to be portable and that was one of my things. I did not want now, obviously Stripe is going to hold on to the token that just like Authorized Net is now. Sure. You know, and I, I have not gotten an answer from Stripe about what happens when I want to export from them in three years.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Yeah, but, you know, they're going to hold onto the token, but I didn't want something where they manage the timing of the subscription renewal. I want to do, I can do that. Like our engine will do that. I want to be able to control that. Because we're doing it with PayPal now. We've always taken PayPal, just straight PayPal, not credit cards with PayPal, although we could.

Right, right.

Yeah. But PayPal standard we were doing it with, and they control the frequency of the subscription, but they're weird about it. It doesn't happen when you think it's going to happen. And so, yeah, it's, it's. I mean, it's not the end of the world, but it's again, you know, I like predictability. And if I know that someone is due to renew on September 20th, I don't want that coming in on September 22nd and PayPal saying, oh, yeah, they're on time, it's fine. It's like, ye. That's weird.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is kind of weird. Yeah. And so, you know, the thing that I think you need to, whatever solution you go with is, you know, it's got to be kind of future proof. And I think all this, the due diligence that you're doing is will, you know, hopefully allow you to be somewhat like that. You know, the COO of PayPal that I listened to last week, one of the comments that I really thought was great, that he said was like, you know, talking about payments just for the sake of payments is kind of boring. He's like, it really, it really should be easy and in the background and, you know, we shouldn't have to worry about it, so. And not even think about it.

Yeah, well, that's how it always used to be. And the problem with what's happened with Author, because my numbers with Authorized Net used to be like three and a half percent or less every month because I was obsessive about it when we first signed up with them. And then you get used to it and it does become this boring thing that you just sort of roll with then. And you got to spot check this stuff every now and then because it, you know, it can get way out of control. That's crazy.

Oh, yeah, it is crazy.

Your price should be Going down, not up.

Well, you know, they're holding on to probably fewer and fewer customers.

Right.

Very traditional. Maybe businesses that are not paying, you know, attention. Very margin. Yeah, yeah. Margin heavy, you know, you know, industries that just don't even see it, you know, nobody's looking at it. So that's great. Well, I wish you well tell us, you know, come back and tell us how things work.

Yeah.

You decide to do.

Tell you what happened.

And I'll.

And I'll tell you the attrition percentage, too. Once.

Yeah.

Once we know that answer. Yeah. I mean, I know it's going to be greater than zero. Right. I mean, that's just a reality.

That's right.

I think it'll be less than 10% just given this particular base of customers. Right. I think they will because the only reason they're sending this money in is because they want to support us. So I think that will continue. But we're going to lose somebody. I know that, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, it's good. What's good to catch up. Hopefully we answered Todd's question, and next week we're going to jump in and talk about some statement information and how to best interpret all that data and why you need looking at it. Maybe looking at it a little differently than you have been in the past.

There you go. You'll have an Ethernet cable next week. All this Skype stuff will go away.

It just started raining and my. My temporary hero is outside, so jump out.

That's bad.

We'll talk to you next week, folks. All right, folks.

Yeah, that's right. Keep living the charmed life and don't let your ERO get electrocuted. That's.