T Minus 4 Days to Launch

Yesterday was an incredibly busy day for us.  Our last email was sent at 1:10 AM, which I guess is technically today.  Oh well, life in the fast lane.



We are now officially schooled in Merchant Accounts.  What a pain in the ass.  There are literally hundreds of choices, and each one seems more convoluted than the next.  Fortunately, our e-commerce host, Network Solutions, integrates only with a half dozen or so providers.  In fact, they offer their own Merchant Services.  More on that in a second.



Now, if my company offered merchant services, I'd want to make my website as user friendly, intuitive, and informational as possible.  We were able to eliminate basically all but two providers without even doing a lot of work.  Terrible websites combined with  difficult contact options means we will exclude you 100% of the time.  Sorry.  On our own site, we give like 127 ways to contact us.  Really.  Check it out.



So we narrowed our choice down to two providers: Network Solutions & PayPal.  Both offer the same services, priced competitively.  PayPal offers an all in one fee (we estimate it to be around 2.5%), slightly higher than that of Network Solutions base fee (2.05%).  However, with Network Solutions, you pay extra for things like Amex charges & corporate card charges.  While we don't love this, we do feel that the majority of our customer purchases will be consumer, not corporate, and, although we love Amex ourselves, we're not in the majority.  Most purchases will most likely be Visa or Mastercard.  So we'll take the lower base fee offered by Network Solutions and see where it gets us.  We had one other hangup with Network Solutions.  They make you sign a 3 year deal, with a $99 cancellation fee.  No big deal, but not ideal.



In the end, our decision came down to customer service.  With Network Solutions, we got a Live Chat session going, and within 30 seconds we were getting answers to our questions.  In fact, we even setup a call with them later in the day.  They called us, we hammered out some details, and signed the deal.  PayPal, on the other hand, was a 17 minute wait to Live Chat with someone, and frankly, their Live Chat was lame.  They sent us a link back to their website for information.  Uh, thanks.  They did, however, respond to us via Twitter, but we hardly want that to be our main mode of communication wtih our provider.



We also got Quickbooks up and running last night.  Went with the online version for a trial before committing to buy the new snazzy Mac version.  This is probably worthy of it's own post once we get up and running, so stay tuned for that.  Riviting stuff!