At teclan we frequently receive requests asking whether certain emails, phone calls and orders that many clients receive are real or potentially fraudulent.
With this in mind we want to take this opportunity to remind our clients that fraudulent activity within the ecommerce world is common and that you should always be vigilant and on your guard to ensure you do not get caught out.
Human instinct is generally very good and most often if something looks fishy, seems too good to be true or just doesn’t ring true then there is a justifiable reason.

On the internet, as far as ecommerce is concerned, there are several common scams you should look out for. We also recommend some techniques for double checking your intuition and confirming if such events are fraudulent or not.

Common Scams and fraudulent techniques:

1. Email Phishing – Emails purporting to be from your bank or service provider attempting to fool you into revealing sensitive information.
2. Large order values and/or quantities – most often from foreign shores, however always check unusual orders as fraudulent cards may be in use.
3. Suspicious overseas details – Many common scams and frauds are attempted using overseas addresses e.g. from African sub-continent.
4. Anyone requesting ALL your bank details – they do not need ALL these details to transfer money. If they are legitimate then alternate payment methods can be discussed.
5. Suspicious phone calls requesting bulk deals – again, as with overseas online orders.
6. Purchases using credit cards with different delivery address – a  common fraud attempt to use stolen card details to obtain goods by deliver.

Techniques we recommend  you use to check and combat the fraudsters:

1. Google any generic seeming email subjects, email content, address info. If this is a scam it will most likely not be the first time it has been perpetrated therefore there is a high probability that someone has already reported this online. A quick Google search could yield a quick result to confirm your suspicions.
2. Use 3rd man and  all other available fraud screening technologies available to you.
3. Check any phone numbers used against  http://whocallsme.com to see if this number has been previously reported e.g. 971-55-6874623
4. Use common sense. Does the order/query raised sound suspicious or too good to be true. Don’t let pound signs blind your judgement.
5. Google again for any relevant information to find any online record of similar activity online.
6. Once a scam or fraudster has been confirmed report it online e.g. at “whocallsme.com” to further aid others in their own searches.

Above all be aware. Vigilance and common sense can prevent you falling foul of these scams and fraudulent activities.
If in doubt then research, check and then get in touch with the team at teclan to help where required.

Do you use Google adwords and promote your phone number in the ad text, then read on, some interesting changes are coming in place in coming weeks.…

Google Adwords Team are calling this “Click to Call Enhancements”. Basically if you promote your phone number in your Google adwords ad, it will become a clickable call number. So someone clicks on your phone number from their mobile device, you will get a call. If you get a lot of leads through adwords, then this gives you ability to track and get some data on how many call leads do you actually get through your Paid Search Campaign.
Then read on…. This is a official announcement from Google adwords team…

If you currently have a phone number in your ad text or have plans to start adding your phone number in an ad, in coming weeks, Google Adwords  will be launching a new enhancement to AdWords ads that will impact charges on clicks to these numbers.

To help our mobile users connect more easily with advertisers, all non-clickable phone numbers displayed in AdWords ad text will be automatically converted into a Click-to-call number.  Currently when advertisers enter a phone number directly into their ad text instead of using Call Extensions, the phone number is not clickable and will not generate a call. This can be a frustrating experience for mobile users who attempt to initiate a call to this phone number.

The new Click-to-call enhancement  makes sure that all the phone numbers that are displayed in Google ad text will be clickable.. This is particularly useful for users to make calls with their mobile devices.  If your ad text includes a phone number, you will begin to receive clicks and calls on this number once the enhancement is enabled in your account. As with phone calls placed via a Call Extension, you will be charged for clicks on your phone number that result in a call.

The adwords policy, does not allow the phone numbers to be inserted into ad headlines. As with all Click-to-call ads, advertisers will be charged when a user either clicks on the headline or the phone number listed in the ad. Please see below for additional information regarding this change.

Which phone number shows?

If you are currently using both Call Extensions and a phone number in your ad creative, only the newly clickable phone number in your ad creative will show. This is done to save the user from seeing two different phone numbers in the same ad.   If you would like your Call Extension number to display, simply delete all phone numbers from your existing ad text by following these steps. You’ll also receive an additional line of ad text displaying your phone number if the Call Extension is used.

Measuring results

You’ll be able to review how many calls you receive on the clickable phone number listed in your ad text for each campaign, ad group, keyword and ad on the ‘Campaigns’ tab in your AdWords account. Just select the ‘Click-type’ option under the ‘Segment’ drop down and view your report.  Please note that since these are not calls generated from a Call Extension, they will not be reported in the Extensions tab reports.

Recommendations for featuring a phone number

You can simply leave your phone number in your ad text and benefit from this change which will automatically make your phone numbers clickable and enable users to call you. To get most value out of this enhancement, its better to have “Call extensions”.  This has several benefits. With a manually created Call Extension your number will appear as an additional line of ad text which frees up space in your ad creative for other promotion. In addition, when you create a Call Extension, your phone number appears on a separate line in the ad, and you’re able to take advantage of other powerful enhancements such as Vanity Numbers, Call-only and Call Metrics reporting.

More information on Call extension can be found here:

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173346

This post also gives more information on Vanity numbers, Allow only clicks-to-call numbers.

teclan’s take on this:
We think that this will help a lot of small businesses as so far it was very difficult to measure ROI if they were getting call because of the paid clicks. Now because of the available metrics and easy to follow anlaytics data this will become simpler and easier.

Do you want to implement Google adwords campaign for your business, get in touch. Call us on for a chat.

Getting Started with Secure Payments

One of the most important aspects of your online business is a reliable, secure link between the customer and the bank in the form of a secure payment gateway.  A Payment Service Provider (PSP) will deal with the authorisation and security checks on your behalf to help prevent fraud.  This will give your potential customer security and reassurance and may be the difference between a sale or a ditched shopping cart.

Getting started

Before you can set up Actinic or Sage Pay secure payments you need a Internet Merchant ID number.  In the case of PayPal, this is not required.

An Internet Merchant ID is an electronic merchant number generated by your bank specifically for your business to be able to process online transactions.

If you do not have an Internet Merchant ID you need to contact your bank and advise what you need it for and what company will be collecting the card details.

Please see the following for examples of the different payment plans and the card collecting companies

Pay Pal takes a percentage of every transaction. Actinic and Sage Pay only charge for transactions after a certain amount of transactions.

At this point you will find out about any additional charges from Streamline and your bank, i.e. a one off administrative charge and a monthly charge, depending on how many card transactions are processed. If your company is outside the EU there may be additional charges.This process can take up to 2 weeks to set up.

Once you have your Internet Merchant  number, you are now ready to go ahead with purchase of your Payment Service Provider.  Please call a member of the teclan team on or click here.

Update Google Base Feed for Actinic

If you are not already listing your products on Google Base then you are missing out on sales, however please note the rules for submissions to Google Base have recently been updated.

Google base allows you to freely list your products in Google’s shopping search results.

The Google base feed creator in Actinic V10 and V11 is currently missing some vital, required fields which will result in your submissions being rejected,

teclan have developed and tested a solution to both Actinic V10 and V11 for this problem and we are making this exclusively available only to teclan’s Actinic customers.

Note: if you are not on V10 or V11 and wish to upgrade then please contact the team to help you upgrade.

Please read on for more information on the main missing fields (availability & google product category) and how teclan can help.

The V11 update has received lots of positive feedback from our customers.

Here’s what the press think

Actinic Business v11 (Extract from The Telegraph)

This ecommerce software is an improvement on earlier versions and sophisticated enough to suit most online retailing needs

So you’ve set up a decent website, but you want to sell things online rather than just directing customers to your stores or call centre?

Actinic aims to provide all the ecommerce and shopping cart solutions you need, and works for single sites or multiple sites for bigger companies.

I’ve reviewed Actinic’s products here before, but over the years the company’s software has slipped behind competitors in terms of online functions. For instance, live stock levels weren’t included, so your customers might order something without knowing you’d just sold the last one.

That live stock information was finally introduced in last year’s version, and designed so that online and desktop application stock levels are synchronised handy if you sell via a website as well as in your shop, say.

This year, things have been made simpler still. So the software can automatically create customer accounts and makes managing these accounts online easy. Customers can also track orders and see their order history.

Checkout was an issue in earlier versions, with customers finding that they had to click through multiple pages to order and pay for items. This is now improved, and all on one page.

There are Actinic products for smaller enterprises starting at £19.99 a month, and pricier options if you need them. Actinic Business Plus, for instance, is the next level up and makes it easy to integrate data with Sage 50 Accounts software.

Actinic Business falls in the middle of the range and includes marketing options to use on the site, such as buy-one-get-one-free offers, coupons and discounts, along with lists to show what other customers bought.

Setup is through a series of user-friendly wizards and the product catalogue is managed through a drag-and-drop interface. There are pre-designed themes and styles which you can customise as you build the site.

The strength of Actinic’s program is that it’s a comprehensive one-stop shop with a lot of features, and the latest edition is the most useful yet.

4 stars

A good product page layout is absolutely essential in designing your ecommerce website, as it can make or break an ecommerce website. A good product layout will be simple in design and clearly show the buying area (buy button), as well as this the information must be laid out clearly with a very clear image of the product, many good websites are failed by poor product images.

Top 10 Great Examples of Well Designed Actinic Product Layouts

1. Mower Magic – Has a simple product layout with checkboxes for upselling products

2. Gift and Wrap – Has a simple product layout with very clear and large product images

3. Name Art – This website has a really nice product layout, very good use of images and the information is clear

4. Pour Les Enfants – This website has a great product layout with good use of social media

5. Cartridge Co – A simple layout for a lot of information, everything is separated into its own area to enable the product layout to be as clear as possible.

6. Polished Bliss – Again a very clear product layout with good use of images

7. The Cake Store – A well laid out product layout with clear product options

8. Nigel’s Eco Store – A clear product layout with a lot of features such as social media and  multiple images

9. Just 4 Baby – A stylish overall design which delivers a punchy mix of product and sales based information in a very competitive market

10. Cheeks and Cherries – A product layout that shows a good quality image really does sell the product.

We often recommend email marketing to our clients and customers. It is often touted as the most cost effective way to market to your customer base to grow your online sales.
To demonstrate this we undertook a recent survey from a sample* of our customers which yielded some powerful and  interesting statistical results.

• Over 65% of businesses see up to 10% of their sales being generated by email marketing
• Average email marketing conversion rates are between 3-5%**
• Over 75% of businesses utilising email marketing use 3rd party software to manage their email marketing
• Around 50% of businesses send newsletters on a monthly basis
• Targeted “Seasonal offers” and “Price discounts” were the most successful marketing messages communicated
• Only 30% of businesses send an email in a  “text only” format

Whilst these results reinforce many common held beliefs regarding email marketing it is still a powerful reminder of how effective email marketing can be when it is correctly targeted, effectively managed and thoughtful deployed.

The power of existing customer details:
It is much easier to convert your existing customers than the new ones because you have already sold them your services and they are more likely to trust you. This trust must be honoured and NEVER abused.

Conversion rates higher:
For an average ecommerce site the conversion rate typically starts from 1% , email marketing conversion rate is much better between 3%-5%. Email marketing is  likely to gain you core sales.

Timing is everything:
Timing of sending the email campaigns and the timing of the offer itself is very important. Aim to capitalise on seasonal offers and “offers of the moment” wherever possible, targeting those customers to whom this kind of message will be most effective e.g. customers who bought around the same time the previous year.

Make it easy on yourself:
Use the most powerful, cost effective tools available to manage your email marketing campaign. Email marketing tools can take care of unsubscriptions, campaign management, statistical reporting on previous campaign successes and many other otherwise time intensive tasks.
We recommend Interspire Email Marketer as one of the best email marketing platforms around.
These tools will save you time and help increase your effectiveness at growing all aspects of your email marketing strategy.

Just do it – and learn as you go!:
Whilst we all want to send the “perfect” email newsletter to our customer base, sometimes in striving for perfection you can miss the simple opportunities that present themselves to you.
Use common sense and start sending emails now to your customers. Monitor their success. Make slight changes each time to strive for improvements. Discard what does not work, improve what does work.

*a sample of 1149 ecommerce merchants was selected for this survey.
** view statistics on conversion rates by industry here

Twitter can help build your business

From last couple of years, the Social Media is becoming more and more prominent in the marketing  mix. There are many social media sites and it can make one feel overwhelmed. There are some which have more power than others, Twitter being one of them.

Twitter is becoming a very effective platform for getting engaged with your target audience. Below are some of the key benefits of using Twitter for businesses:

1..Engage with your target audience

2..Provide Customer Service

3.. Promote your Products / new products/ product launches

4..Protect your brand & market your brand

5..Follow industry leaders and keep your knowledge up to date

There are several resources available which give you a lot of information about how to use Twitter, Twitter etiquettes, useful Formats & twitter tools.

The other advantage of using Twitter is your tweets may appear in Google’s Real Time search results, giving you more exposure in Universal Search Results. You can also link your Tweets to your content or the content that you like, now although these links are not passing any link advantage, it still helps with SEO in some ways.

Retweeing

One of the great features of Twitter is “retweeting”.

This is a great way to share information, pass it on to your followers.

What’s a Retweet? Well if you like someone elses Tweet and you would like to share it with your followers, then you would retweet it!

How to Retweet

Here is the format of a Retweet – RT @teclantweet “here is the tweet text, or via @teclantweet

The RT obviously stands for “retweet” and lets your followers know that the following is someone else’s content.  Next you put their username with the @ so that you link back to their profile and give proper credit. This is one of the very important etiquettes that you must follow.

The Advantages of Retweeting

Retweeting is not only a nice thing for you to do, it may also increase your follower count.  Retweeting puts your username in other peoples Twitter streams.  The more you retweet others the more likely someone will retweet your content. Once your content is retweeted by someone else, you get more exposure as they will have followers who do not follow you.

What do I do now?
You can start by simply following teclan today.
What do I get?
We post “Twitter only” offers and discounts to our followers which you will gain access to. We also use Twitter as the first port of call to broadcast important information about everything ecommerce related.
What else do I get?
By following teclan you will also get teclan following you. We will also retweet at least one of your tweets to our growing  twitter network thereby increasing the exposure of your twitter profile immediately.

Selling online potentially opens your business to a global market as well as your local, regional or country specific market. With such a massive increase in potential customers the voracious competition also expands and increases with equal ferocity.

How can you ensure your products reach the largest audience possible?
Submitting your products to Google Base is one of the things online merchants MUST be doing, however you need to be aware of some impenging changes to the format for Google Base submissions.

Fig 1

What is Google Base?
When you perform a search on Google for a product and you click on the “Shopping” link at the top of the Google menu (see Fig. 1) you are viewing results of products uploaded to Google from internet retailers via Google Base.

Google Base (originally Froogle, then Google Products) delivers a global market place for consumers to view, compare and search for the best priced products, the best reviewed business and the nearest shops to you. (fig 2)

Fig 2

It returns results in a similar fashion to Google’s standard web search results however the browser is presented with only products that can be purchased from participating online stores. It is possible to sort by price as well as relevance and you can also identify those stores who have received favourable and not so favourable reviews from previous shoppers.

Do you need to use Google Base?
Yes. It maximises your products exposure, it’s free and it helps generate traffic to your website. If your products are particularly competitively priced then Google Base, like other price comparison sites, can further generate traffic, business and ultimately sales.
If you are not already using Google base then sign up here.

Using Actinic Ecommerce software?
The Actinic ecommerce software comes with a Google Base export utility already built in (from V9 onwards) which allows the merchant to quickly export all the relevant product information into a CSV file for simple upload submission to Google Base.

From 3rd May 2011 Google Base submissions are subject to new requirements. This means that all Actinic Google Base feeds will begin to be rejected as they will not meet the new required format standards set by Google Base.
To address this Actinic are releasing a patch to their version 10 (10.0.4) before the end of April which will contain the new, required additional fields: Brand, ISBN, EAN and UPC. (more information can be read about these fields here)

If you have Actinic V10 already then you should be able to simply update to the latest patch when it is released.
If you have an earlier version of Actinic (V9,V8,V7,V6…..) then you will need to upgrade to V10 to take advantage and be able to upload to Google Base.

You can upgrade through our website – simply click here to upgrade your Actinic version.
And remember……
Use your Google merchant account to register and associate your Google analytics and Google PPC accounts and you can link the statistics produced by Google Base to your other statistical tracking tools within Google to monitor and check on the traffic generated by Google Base. Price changes for example can lead to a significant increase in traffic from Google Base, however close monitoring can ensure you get the maximum return on investment in your time and effort in using this free online market place.

For more help and advice on Google Base and other issues surrounding online ecommerce marketing and search engine optimisation simply get in touch with the teclan team or visit our website for more information.

On 17th December 2010, HMRC announced their intention to roll out a programme of Business Record Checks in the second half of 2011.
As of today there have already been some recorded cases where HMRC have investigated business’ accounts and records.

HMRC intend to raise £150,000,000 annually from penalties brought about by these record checks. With a maximum initial penalty of £3000 this equates to 50,000 businesses being “caught” with sub-standard records and book-keeping.
This 50,000 figure is also the number of businesses that the HMRC will be targeting each year! This is worrying as it indicates they are planning on charging every business they inspect!

Currently HMRC are training a team of inspectors who will start targeting businesses to try and identify sub-standard or dodgy record and book keeping. Many accountants and other financial industry experts have cast doubt on the skill and knowledge level of these inspectors stating that only a fully qualified accountant can fully identify issues within a companies financial record keeping.

The double whammy here for small and medium businesses is that should the inspectors find anything suspicious then they can enforce a penalty onto the business AND there is the possibility of additional penalties through subsequent PAYE/NIC or VAT audit checks for instance.

The HMRC inspectors have the power to enter your premises. Note: “premises” are defined as “any part of premises that HMRC believe are used in connection with business”, meaning they can enter your home as well is deemed necessary. The can perform announced and unannounced visits and whilst you can refuse initial entry under the terms of the Human Rights Act to privacy they can then subsequently obtain the courts permission to enter.

What records should I be thinking about keeping an eye on?

• VAT account records
• Copy sales invoices (unless retail)
• Purchase invoices
• Import & Export documentation
• Details of all payments made to contractors and sub-contractors
• PAYE records – all records
• Records sufficient to show and explain the company’s transactions
• Records sufficient to disclose with reasonable accuracy the financial situation of the company
• Records sufficient to enable the directors to ensure that any accounts comply with the requirements of the Act
• A record of all the assets and liabilities of the company
• Records to establish the statement of stock at the financial year end

Areas to watch out for:

• Unexplained receipts and payments
• Missng invoices
• Estimates
• Cash differences
• Dividend documentation

What should you do?

The import point here is that if your records are up to scratch and you can deliver all

• Examine your business records
• Get an external accountant to review your records
• Invest in investigation fees protection

Additional information:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ria/business-record-checks.pdf