What I want to talk about today are a couple of changes in merchant processing. Just to refresh your memory, this is related to debiting and the debit cards coming through everyone’s business; regulated and unregulated cards. How to deal with it and how to look at it and decide if you need to talk to your provider or if you need to talk to me and have me tell you how to deal with it; if they’re not divulging the best price you can get with it.(That rate is an unbundled rate at .05% plus 22cents.) A lot of merchants are getting 75% to 85% debit cards; this is a big chunk of money. Bundling it without telling you they’re charging you a .80/.90/1.25% You can all be down to cost which is the aforementioned rate. Be aware of that and ask your fellow merchant, “Why do you still have a pin pad? You should take a look at what’s going on. What your merchant provider is not telling you that you need to know? “All the way up to Northern California and Nevada because no one is talking to these merchants; it’s a big deal. Another thing, a fun thing, I wanted to talk about today, with what we’re doing at First Data in the social realm (and we’re a big social networking company,) to Sean. Who has a business page on Facebook right now? If you don’t have one, get one.
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The new way of social networking, and of gifting and leads is Facebook. When I thought of this, I thought of our group in a big way. We call it the First Data E-Gift program on our platform. Now, you see all the big ads on the side of Facebook from all of the big companies trying to sell gifts. Well, we can be as big as that. This is the new way of doing it and I think it can expound and help our group by bringing people in and help to promote each other’s business by bringing people in. The E-gift Social Solution—We have friends, high school friends, local people, etc. I mean, I can benefit people all the way up in Tahoe with this. For example you can e-gift someone some flowers. You can send a certain value amount through Facebook. They now know about your business, your brand name, etc. This is something you can use to promote a new business as well. Also a “Thank You For Shopping” reward is a good idea. If it’s a new business we can just shower them with our services and link our sites and put links in there as well. Basically, they can go into the Facebook marketplace home page.
Let’s look at an example. This is a person who just found us and wants flowers. They can go directly to our Facebook Marketplace online storefront or Merchant Fan page. The customer can access it on a smart phone or computer. They can send an e-gift through the E-Gift Application. They can send it to multiple friends at the same time (the same gift.) The recipient receives a notification that they’ve received a gift either by email or Facebook with your brand logo. The gifts are chosen and include a personal message from you. They then head to the secure check-out process where they use the credit card number they wish to use. An alert goes out and redemption instruction is included. I’m thinking about this in a way that we can share it. We can get more tips into the group this way with new ideas and awareness of what we have to offer to all our people in a very classy way. We can also bring in new business, thank or business-to-business people who service our accounts and make them aware of who we are and what we have to offer. It’s just a great idea and I’d love to get some feedback. Any comments?
So, If I understand it correctly, it’s going to be a stand-alone Facebook page that we “like” in order to be in sync with it and we can use it as a service that we use to gift people.
–I forgot to mention you can get a gift card program through First Data (it’s all virtual.) We set you up with an account at a low cost. If you have accounts we can link you all up so you can share what we all have to offer with Friends, Groups, etc.
So you have to sign up with the program and then you become a part of a pool of business where you can gift them from any of our business..?
–Yes, you can do that or just from you ,personally, as well. So I think it’s smart to have each business on each site as a link.
Well it sounds very interesting. I’d be interested to see how it rolls out. Especially since First Data seems to be ahead of the curve on stuff.
–Well, we won the Number One Company for Innovation in the merchant field for another year in a row. This is very exciting. I can send you all a link for this and I believe that this is a way for us to all be outstanding as a group and as individuals. Thank you.
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This post was written by
Sean Sloan – who has written 290 posts on Business Networking Orange County, California - LeTip West Orange County.
Sean has a background in music, graphic design and movie production. All of these interests coalesce in his web development skills. Sean grew up around marketing and advertising in the Office Supply business his father started. Sean's areas of expertise are Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing and Video Production.