Game On…

This year our company resolution is to take the pressure out of getting set up online and to really champion those start-up businesses. So we recently announced an overhaul of our Merchant Services package for new e-tailers.

From speaking to hundreds of new businesses every month, we’re all too aware of the high set-up costs and lengthy approval processes which can make acquiring a merchant account, one of the most painful parts of setting up an online business.

David and Ben, co-founders of Pucket

We found in our 2011 e-business benchmark report, that the average time for a merchant account set up through external providers is seven weeks with one-in-ten internet business owners saying they pay over £500 in initial set-up costs.  And we think that’s too much!

The new and improved offering from Sage Pay and leading merchant account supplier Elavon, aims to provide merchant accounts in an average of four weeks, with no set-up costs, no monthly fees and no long-term contracts.  We now have thousands of business using our Merchant Services package and Pucket Enterprises is just one of them.

Pucket Enterprises is a company created by David Harvey and Ben Lewis.  After seeing two old men playing the traditional game Passe Trappe in a southern French town, David and Ben headed straight to a local DIY shop to buy the materials to make their own updated version of the game.  Pucket was born.  Several years and many, many games of Pucket later, the two-man-team decided that it was just too good to keep to themselves- they had to bring the game to the UK- and were inspired to start up their own online business.

Sage Pay modelling the Pucket Board

The Pucket game involves catapulting wooden ‘pucks’ across a handcrafted wooden board and on to your competitor’s side through a small hole. Any ‘pucks’ that arrive on your side must be sent back before you win.  Right, got it?

No longer making the games by hand, Pucket’s founders sourced skilled woodworking craftsmen based in India to handcraft the games out of Sheesham or Haldu wood and as part of their working ethos, they are proud to support Indian Handicrafts and ensure their workers receive a fair wage.

Originally using just PayPal to accept payments on their site, David and Ben struggled with the amount of queries that it raised.  “When we used PayPal to handle payments, my personal phone number was on the website, and I would receive countless calls from people who had forgotten their PayPal password, or couldn’t change the delivery address, etc.” says David.

Deciding to move their gateway to Sage Pay, The Pucket team chose to take advantage of Sage Pay’s Merchant Services package too.  Although taking them awhile to build and test the checkout functionality on their website, Pucket Enterprises are really happy with the solution.  David told us “The business has grown more than we dared hope. Most of our business is direct-to-consumer, through our website. Sage Pay was recommended to us by our web developers as being good to work with, and they worked out significantly cheaper than PayPal. They were very helpful at getting things transferred smoothly, and now we can take payments by phone too.’

Pucket Enterprises have stuck to selling just their core product-the game of Pucket- but it’s now sold in Selfridges and the Conran Shop, as well as two dozen independent shops.

We’re all huge fans here at Sage Pay HQ and can often be found holding Pucket competitions during our lunch hours!

We’re proud to announce Pucket as our February Business of the Month for their entrepreneurial spirit by having a vision and taking a chance, which is well and truly paying off!

For further information on Sage Pay’s Merchant Service package, please visit: http://www.sagepay.com/merchant-services

UK Cyber Monday is here…!

Cyber Monday is the busiest online shopping day of the year.  Here at Sage Pay HQ, we consistently see year on year records broken.  But every year we also see a range of reports released that are focused on the wrong day!  So, as the biggest date in the e-commerce calendar, why is there so much confusion?

It’s commonly reported that the UK Cyber Monday falls at the same time as the US Cyber Monday. But key UK retailers, payment providers like ourselves and the British Retail Consortium all know from experience, that there’s a much bigger hike in sales a week later.  So, here’s what we see:

The US Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving (This year it was the 28^th November). The UK Cyber Monday falls later, on the first Monday of December (5^th December).

There’s been a lot of buzz around Cyber Monday this year as sales are set to reach record highs. This morning Experian Hitwise UK reported that British shoppers would spend 350m hours shopping online during December for gifts for friends and family.  Now that’s a lot of web surfing!  Last year we found that lunchtime was the busiest time of the day with shoppers rushing online during their lunch break to grab Christmas bargains.

It’s also been estimated by the Centre for Retail Research, that British shoppers will spend a huge £13.4bn online this Christmas, with mobile shopping accounting for at least 12% of online spending.

Tomorrow we’ll be posting up our findings so stay tuned and happy selling!

How to avoid card fraud as an online retailer

We recently put out call to online retailers to get blogging about the e-commerce industry and share their advice and opinions.  We were inundated with responses….so here’s the first one!

 Tim Richards runs a medium sized on-line office supplies company, Office Allsorts. As well as the usual stationery items, Office Allsorts sells digital cameras, memory cards, plasma TVs, digital camcorders etc.  The goods they sell could attract on-line fraudsters, so Tim has sent us his top tips on how to avoid becoming a victim of online fraud.   Office Allsorts uses Sage Pay to process its card payments and make use of the 3D Secure functionality on their account.

Over the last 18 months a substantial number of our orders (many thousands) and revenue has come from debit or credit card payments. Unsurprisingly, we have had many attempts to obtain goods fraudulently, some of them laughably amateurish but I give them 10/10 for effort. Yet, despite this, we haven’t been a victim of on-line card fraud.

Here’s some advice on decisions we have taken and processes we follow which have been instrumental in us mitigating the risk of on-line fraud:

3D or not 3D? That is the question.

Some people argue that applying 3D secure results in a reduction in order conversion rates as customers either can’t remember their 3D secure password or can’t be bothered to go through the additional stages to complete their order payment process.

I can appreciate this viewpoint and we have certainly watched customers build their basket of goods, enter the payment process then bail out at the 3D secure pages, some without even attempting the 3D process. Yes, this is infuriating and has undoubtedly lost us revenue and orders.

However, any fraud is a 100% loss to the business and if you’re talking about a £400 digital camcorder that’s a loss many small businesses couldn’t afford.

I guess it’s down to the products or services sold. If the product is relatively low value and has little resale value then implementing 3D secure may be overkill but, if like us, your product is relatively valuable, sought after and easily resold then in my opinion the potential for a reduced order conversion rate is far outweighed by the cost lost to fraud.

Google maps – Street View

We use this, a lot. If the delivery address states a business name but Google Maps show a block of flats in a run-down area, be very wary of shipping the goods. Go on Google, find out the telephone number of the company and call them to verify the name of the person placing the order and the delivery address. We had one order recently, supposedly from a well known University which stated “Please deliver to Goods–In entrance at 123 This Street, London and call 0**** 123456 for gates to be opened”. When checking the address on Google Maps the University Goods-In entrance was in fact a doorway in a block of flats. Needless to say we didn’t ship the goods and informed the University.

Failed Transactions

Check them. If you have any doubt about the authenticity of a transaction check the failed transactions against the customer name. This week we had one customer who attempted payment 11 times with only a minute in between each attempt, all attempts failed. The record though is a customer who attempted payment 34 times, before succeeding. On closer investigation, each attempt was made using a different credit/debit card. The 34 preceding failed attempts were sufficient, coupled with a poor 3^rd Man score, for us to decide to cancel the order.

Fraud Scores

Get to understand your fraud checking tools scores. We don’t have the time to check all scores in detail but we do check ALL results which don’t get the ‘all clear’.

Gut Instinct

Not very scientific but it has never let us down yet. If a transaction looks ok but something about it just doesn’t seem right to you then dig deeper as it’s more than likely it’s dodgy. At the end of the day, humans have been relying on ‘gut instinct’ for millennia.

There are some pretty clever fraudsters out there and despite the processes we have in place, I know we’re going to get caught out sooner or later but if I can delay that day and minimise the loss through our processes then that’s all we can realistically expect.

If you have any other processes to keep an eye on fraud, I’d be keen to hear from you below

Tim Richards - Office Allsorts

Wise words, thanks Tim.  If anyone would like to guest blog tackling similar subjects, get in touch.  We’d love to hear from you!

Getting your ducks in a row…

One of my pet peeves is a badly designed checkout process.

It’s a terrible thing to spend hours searching for the products you want, get them all in your shopping basket in the right size and colour and then have to re-search for the product when it incomprehensively disappears from the basket or puts in 10 of the same product.  Then when you try to find your basket again, it’s completely vanished!  After searching the site for your basket, you find it.  Oh, you mean this miniscule icon in the bottom left hand corner that doesn’t even resemble a basket?!

Once you’ve gone through all this trauma, just wanting to pay, you’re hit with pages and pages of garbled checkout.  Enter your address.  A seemingly simple command but nowadays customers want goods delivered to their work address where they’ll be able to sign for their package, or to a friend or family members house as a gift.  You continue through the payment process only for your payment to fail because your delivery and billing address do not match.  Arrrggghh! Just let me pay!

The checkout process is such a fundamental part of running an online business.  Mess this up and your dropout rates will be sky-high.  Theres some pretty obvious things you can do to avoid high dropout rates at the checkout.

1. Keep things simple, don’t overload your pages.

2. Have a clear link to the shoppers basket on every page of your site.

3. Provide your shopper with an order summary before asking them to pay- Nothing makes customers cancel the process like confusion over how much they will be paying.

4. Keep your payment pages down to a minimum -The less pages, the less obstacles the shopper has to overcome in order to pay you.

5. Inform your customers of how far they are in the checkout process and whats coming next with a bread crumb trail If you have 3D Secure set up, it’s a good idea to let them know what it is and when they will encounter it.

So on my quest to find the Sage Pay Business of the Month for June, I’ve decided to focus on the checkout process and one e-commerce site that’s got it all wrapped up is Bombay Duck.

Their payment process is simple, uncluttered and comprehensive.  You don’t have to be a genius to manoeuvre through the site and their customised pages incorporate all of their branding so you don’t realise you have been redirected to Sage Pay to collect your sensitive data.  What’s even better is that if you are an existing customer, you can simply log in and find all of your address details stored so you don’t have to re-enter them every time you want to pay!

I’m sure my bank manager wishes my drop-out rates were higher but with companies like Bombay Duck making the checkout process so easy, it would be rude not to buy!

Congratulations to Bombay Duck for being Sage Pay’s June Business of the Month!

If you’d like to know more about optimising your checkout pages, download our E-Business Benchmark Report here.

From cupcakes to chicken coups

From working at Sage Pay, my eyes have been opened to the changing trends of online retail.  Innovation has always been key to us and when we come across businesses that dare to be different and strive to innovate, we love to celebrate them.

In the past years the e-tail space was very much owned by electrical companies and travel.  But times are a-changing.  We’ve recently seen a huge surge in websites selling the weird and wonderful.  The online marketplace is now a wonderland of the exotic.  Fed up with your usual mid morning nibble?  You can now order snack size boxes of fresh fruit, nuts, seeds and dried treats online to arrive directly at your desk.  Graze.com has seen the demand for this and with all their food 100% natural, our office has been busily snacking their way to 5 a day.

Speaking of snacking, who would have thought 5 years ago you could have fresh cupcakes bought online and delivered directly to your door.  At Buttercup cake shop you can order every type of cake from chocolate peanut butter to banana split.  And because you never know when a cupcake craving might hit, you can place your order through their website in the morning and (if you’re in London) they’ll be zoomed over to you, by…well…later that morning!  You can even order an extra shot of icing (which makes up for not being able to lick the spoon!)

Fancy living The Good Life?  How about joining the urban farming trend by ordering a few hens online.  Relax by watching them potter about your garden whilst you enjoy fresh eggs on toast.  Or perhaps you like more excitment?  The latest buzz is Beekeeping.  Why not purchase a swarm of bees over the internet to begin your new hobby as an urban conservationist.

Omlet allow you to do just this and we think they are a true pioneer of the online space and this is why they have been chosen as our second Business of the Month!  Their innovative products are perfect for city dwellers who fancy a taste of the rural.  Their website is a complete knowledge base of everything and anything you need to know to become an ‘eggs-pert’.  They also have a fantastic community forum where they actively encourage discussion on a number of topics.  Through the Omlet website you can pre-pay securely by card and then your bees are sourced locally and delivered to your door. Companies like Omlet prove that shoppers are demanding more from e-tailers and their sales are soaring.

Well done Omlet for ‘bee-ing’ Sage Pay’s March Business of the Month!

P.s Our friends at Graze.com are offering a free snack box and your second half price!  Simply enter the code SAGEPAY to take advantage of this yummy offer!