Merchant account chargebacks are a dreaded event for any business that accepts credit or debit cards. They are expensive, time consuming, subject to fraud and just downright annoying.

Chargebacks are not the same as refunds which are initiated on your end when, for example, a customer returns a product. Rather, chargebacks are initiated through the credit card issuer because the customer has challenged the charge or filed some kind of complaint. It amounts to a reversal of the original transaction, and the merchant gets stuck paying a chargeback fee to boot.  Read the full entry

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After a year of delays, the Federal Trade Commission’s new FACTA Red Flags rules that have caused great fear and confusion among small and medium businesses, are in effect as of November 1, 2009.  The FACTA Red Flags rules will require millions of businesses (large and small) that grant credit to establish and implement identity theft safeguards for customers.  This could include auto dealers, jewelers, furniture companies, health care companies, mortgage brokers, doctors, dentists, equipment leasing dealers and suppliers of various types — many of which are still unaware of the looming compliance issues. Read the full entry

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If your business pays wages, you must file quarterly IRS Form 941 reports to process tax payments and reconcile tax withholding. The next deadline is November 2, 2009.  But don’t sweat it — file your IRS 941 forms the easy way with a low-cost online service like FileTaxes.com.  Read the full entry

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The time has finally arrived. After multiple delays stretching a year, the much-feared FACTA Red Flags Rules — new anti-fraud legislation that requires millions of credit-granting businesses (both large and small) to implement identify-theft safeguards — take effect just after midnight on Halloween (technically, on Nov. 1, 2009).  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the rules enforcer, had previously delayed the effective date of FACTA requirements three times.

The problem is this: Despite an FTC effort to educate small businesses and other entities about FACTA red flags requirements, confusion still reigns over what businesses are covered. Even FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz himself has suggested that Congress may simply have written the law too broadly. Leibowitz ordered his staff to beef up its efforts to educate businesses about compliance and provide more clarity on which businesses are covered, and what they must do to comply.  BUT NOTE THIS INSIDE INFO: FTC insiders say the Commission is highly unlikely to take enforcement action against businesses that know their customers or clients individually, or if they perform services in or around their customers’ homes, or if they operate in sectors where identity theft is rare and they have not themselves been the target of identity theft. Read the full entry

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If you have a website – even a modest one – or use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, using the right keywords or keyword phrases is vital to success. Well-chosen keywords give you a better chance of showing up near the top of search results. But not just any results. What you want are the most relevant searches conducted by your best prospects.

Keywords tell the search engine robots what your business is all about. Selecting good ones is harder than you think. The bots aren’t really that smart, so you have to be clever in what you feed them. Experts at Network Solutions, a top domain registrar and web hosting firm, compare it to placing “bait” on your site. The bait attracts the search engine “spiders” that crawl billions of website pages and index what they find.  Most entrepreneurs use common sense to create keywords. That’s fine, since they must appeal to real people as well as search spiders.  But many keywords are not common sense, and anything you come up with still must be properly implemented to be effective.

Here are 7 steps to improving your keyword power, drawn from experience here at Business.com as well as Network Solutions: Read the full entry

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The new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system will be out shortly and many small and home-based businesses are already planning to switch from older systems as a way to breathe new life into their systems without having to buy new hardware. 

But most business owners find the prospect of migrating to a new operating system daunting. If you are considering an upgrade to Windows 7, but want to avoid turning a migration into a migraine, the PC techies at Support.com have a new hand-holding service that might help.

Read the full entry

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Recession-damaged small and mid-sized businesses would like to extend credit to customers with little if any credit history if they could do it without great risk. Now there’s a way. FICO — the company behind the ubiquitous FICO credit score we all know and love — has created a new FICO Expansion Score to help businesses evaluate the estimated 50-70 million U.S. consumers who have either no traditional credit history or thin credit bureau files at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

This group of potential customers is heavy on students, senior citizens and recent immigrants, so the scoring model is based on non-traditional credit data such as subscription memberships, bank deposit account activity and utility histories. The resulting scores use the same 300-850 scoring range as the traditional FICO and can also be used in combination with the traditional score when making credit decisions.  The new scoring system can help identify responsible, credit-worthy customers who can meet their obligations but simply haven’t had an opportunity to establish a traditional credit history. Read the full entry

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One of the best things to happen to small business the last several years is the arrival of computing services that you access online. They are cheap (often free) and eliminate the need for you to have expensive hardware and software in your own location.

Among the most prolific of these services are online billing and bookkeeping websites. They range from free and simple services that let you create and send invoices, to full-blown financial management solutions that can help manage all aspects of your business.

Here are my top five online invoicing and bookkeeping services for small business: Read the full entry

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Today, most businesses are scrambling to hold onto customers and market share.  Some are succeeding; some aren’t. What makes the biggest difference?

According to marketing guru Maribeth Kuzmeski, the single most important thing setting successful business owners apart is their ability to connect. “If you can build strong relationships and connect with your customers, you will get your piece of the proverbial pie,” says Kuzmeski. “If you can’t, you’ll be scrambling for crumbs.”

So how do you avoid having to grub for the leftovers? Gather your strategies and tactics and start changing the way you work. Even if you’re a “lone wolf” type, the idea is to forge better business relationships and a network of colleagues and contacts who will stick with you. “And best of all they will voluntarily recommend your services to others,” says Kuzmeski.  If you’re ready to ramp it up, here are some tactics that can start getting you immediate results: Read the full entry

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Want to see the future of picturing products online? Visit the website of one of the companies specializing in 360-degree product photos, virtual reality (VR) images, user-controlled product zoom, hotspots and multi-media VR that also combines sound.  Forget flat, boring 2-D images. This stuff will bring a new “cool factor” to your website, and can literally put you into a different dimension from your competition. Businesses using 360-degree product shots are producing huge benefits such as:

• Longer time on site
• More clicks and more sales
• Fewer returns
• Fewer calls and emails asking product questions Read the full entry

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