Up and Coming Products

AlternativePayments are happy to announce that in the very near future some brand new service offerings will be released.
With on going expansion taking place within AlternativePayments the company is continuously growing and along with growth comes increase in support staff, promotions and some of the most competitive rates on the market in Alternative Payment Solutions.

As these new service offerings are released they will be announced as it is believed that most will highly benefit from these new options and services which in turn provides increase in sales and revenue and at the end of the day the numbers are what count!

For more info on what services we can provide TODAY please visit AlternativePayments.com OR drop an email over to sales@alternativepayments.com

In the meantime, stay tuned to our blog updates as we will be announcing each new product as they become available.

Capitalizing on Micro Processing and Subscription Billing

Over the last decade, the proliferation of technology through all fields has changed the face of news and publishing in drastic ways. The two most concrete examples of this are the increasing popularity of self-publishing and major news outlets moving to online subscriptions over print.

With these major changes in production and consumption in the literary world, the need for alternative payments has become more and more important. This is especially true in the areas of recurring billing and micro-processing. With experience in both of these types of payments for almost 15 years, AlternativePayments is able to help you maximize your profit by offering alternative payment solutions.

Recurring Billing for Subscription Services

With more and more news outlets moving to an online subscription model, the need for a processor familiar with this area is more important than ever. Whether your company is a large scale news organization trying to crossover from print to online, or you are a smaller local paper or blog, AlternativePayments can get you started quickly and easily with subscription billing. Since 1999 they have been providing fully scalable, and customizable, recurring billing services. With an extensive background in alternative payment methods popular around the world, AlternativePayments is uniquely setup to help, especially for companies with large readerships from outside the US.

Micro Processing for Self Publishers

With the explosion of self publishing as an effect of products like the Kindle and iPad, micro processing has experienced similar growth. With cheap eBooks running from 99 cents to a couple dollars, and pay as you read becoming a more popular method of online consumption, the need for micro processing is ever growing. With AlternativePayments, you can easily setup customizable micro payments for single products, setting access rules individually. AlternativePayments also has the ability to setup prepaid, pay as you go reading, where readers prepay as little as $5 and their credits are deducted as they read. They also provide an easy way for customers to convert to a subscription based service and allow publishers to set custom article pricing.

There is no sign that the trends in micro processing and online subscriptions will end anytime soon for the publishing industry. Talk to AlternativePayments today to see how easily you can get setup with alternative payment solutions to maximize your company’s profit.
Email us at sales@alternativepayments.com

Keeping Up With the Times

The trend of how things are done online constantly changes and over the course of 15 years of working online, viewing how advertising is distributed and witnessing the amazing progression of how funds are transferred has substantially expanded leaving many that don’t stay current with new technologies in the dust.

First and foremost, you don’t want to be one of those statistics that eventually fade out or have your creation purchased by a whale for pennies on the dollar after all the hard work and effort you put into it.

In order to stay in the game you need to actively educate yourself which in this day and age is at your fingertips every time you sit in front of your computer. While many don’t openly acknowledge this, everything you could need for education no matter what the topic is can be found on Google or your preferred search engine.

It is advised to make a list of relevant search terms also known as keyword phrases so that you can do your own research and educate yourself with all the new trends that appeal to your market share.

By doing such searches you will find forums, blogs and other educational sites and resources that you will likely bookmark and frequent regularly while having that first cup of coffee before plugging away at your websites development.

If you are impatient you can always hire someone who is capable of keeping you informed but the reality of this is if your time is only worth a certain amount per hour it is likely that hired help can cost more than what you make. In which case you then need to "suck it up" and take the responsibility upon yourself to keep your mind fresh on all things new and innovative.

Another aspect is keeping a close watch on your competitors. While they often don’t display their secrets on their front pages, you can research their terms or service and legal pages and other features that are offered to ensure that your legal section is current. And for those who are sneaky, view their source code if available and take notes as to what software they are using, what keywords they have in their meta tags and other such minor details which while often is inconclusive can have an equal amount of impact on your websites rankings and stability if you don’t stay in suit.

The reality of it all is that there are many tools out there available for you to stay informed; all you have to do is search for it!

And when you get to that point of needing Alternative Payment Solutions, you know where to turn!
AlternativePayments.com 

The Difference Between Credit Cards and Charge Cards

To many a “charge card” and “credit card” are the same thing and the terms are used interchangeably, however there are distinct differences in these types of cards that clearly set them apart. These unique features can determine customer availability as well as impact credit scores. What is a charge card? A charge card is a payment card that requires the balance of purchases to be paid off in full each and every month. There is generally not a preset limit on charge cards, instead spending habits, payment history, credit record and financial resources determine for how much a purchaser will be approved. These factors are continually monitored to adjust spending limit. This means that charge card customers will not incur over-limit fees and do not need to apply for larger limits as with credit cards. Since all balances are to be paid off in full each month, there are no interest rates or minimums associated with charge cards. Payments are also usually required within 40 to 50 days from the close of billing cycles as opposed to 25 to 30 days with most credit cards. If full payment is not made on a charge card, there are penalties and late fees that are incurred. Just as with credit cards, there is an annual fee that is determined by the type of card you have. For example the annual fees for AMEX vary widely depending on spending habits and your spending limits. Annual fees include membership in rewards programs and additional perks. How do I know if I qualify? Since charge cards do not have preset spending limits and require to be paid off in full, the qualification requirements are generally higher than credit cards. If you have less than stellar credit, you may still qualify for a low limit credit card, or can even get a secured card where you deposit money to cover your limit. To qualify for a charge card, one must usually have a strong credit background. Affecting credit score Credit cards and charge cards can also widely vary in the way they impact your credit score. Since charge cards do not allow the user to carry over a balance, they are a way to build credit history without the risk of racking up expensive debt. The other area that charge cards vary greatly from credit cards in terms of credit is in credit utilization. Credit utilization is a highly weighted factor in credit scores that is based off a user’s credit balance versus available credit. Since charge cards do not carry a set limit and cannot carry a revolving balance, they are excluded from credit utilization in credit score factoring. What does this mean for merchants? While credit cards are king in the US, charge cards are a growing alternative that are becoming more widely accepted every year. Opting not to allow charge cards as a payment method, among other alternative payment methods, could cause you to lose business to other merchants based on your customers’ preferred payment methods. To add charge cards and other alternative payment methods to your checkout with ease, check out AlternativePayments list of options for the US and foreign markets.Or drop us an email at sales@alternativepayments.com  

How Can Alternative Payment Solutions Help You?

The online market growth is no secret and continues to surpass previous years in sales for every industry that primarily sells a service or item on the internet. While the day to day operations continuously function and bring in revenue from your already established and trusted traffic source provider (online advertising, SEO, forum and blog postings or through social marketing) what alternative options have you explored to further increase and surpass your goals?

While the majority of online services have opted to primarily use credit card processing such as Visa and Mastercard, there is still a market that does not own a credit card as they are simply not economical in a lot of countries and are not forced upon the consumer market. Most European countries & citizens have sworn off the use of credit cards there for making your online service offering obsolete to them because there is no “Alternative” solution in which for them to make a purchase.

By implementing an alternative option for payment such as the processing provided by Alternative Payments, you are potentially opening a whole new world to your product.

While exact statistics vary between companies that provide alternative payment solutions, data has been collected and has displayed an average increase of 10-15% in sales. So sources have reported increase percentages higher than that but as stated, as a whole the average has come to be 10-15%.

So when asking one’s self “How Can Alternative PaymentSolutions Help Me?” stop and look at your monthly or annual sales from the year before and add an additional 10% to that figure and then think about what that 10% could do for you? You may want to use the additional revenue to take a much needed vacation or maybe hire additional staff to further expand your existing business? Regardless what you’d spend the additional revenue on; there is nothing but positive attributes that can be derived from implementing such a tool.

To implement Alternative Payments “1 Click” button that offers all solutions that are pulled via the consumer’s geographical location it’s as easy as dropping an email to sales@alternativepayments.com and further inquiring.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to act upon this feature nor do you need money for start up costs, it really is as simple as emailing sales and they will walk you through the rest.

DirectPay EU - How Does It Work?

DirectPay EU allows your customers to pay via their bank's web site directly from their checking or savings account.

When a customer selects DirectPay EU during checkout, they will receive an email with an electronic bill that they can pay at their own bank’s website from their checking or savings account. Each transaction is initiated and carried out by the customer, so there is NO RISK of costly chargebacks and the funds are guaranteed.

As an industry leader in global alternative Internet payments, AlternativePayments has developed DirectPay EU, an innovative billing product providing merchants with payment access to 36 countries with over 700 million European consumers which in plain English translates to a vast number of Europeans that your product would more likely appeal too as you’d be offering a trusted payment source that they are familiar with. And if that fact isn’t enough to persuade you then maybe the fact that you WILL see an increase in sales if implementing this solution is more of a deciding factor that will appeal to you?

DirectPay EU is the smart payment solution to offer your European traffic and implementing it on your website is a piece of cake!

For more info, contact sales@AlternativePayments.com and question them about DirectPay EU and their many other solutions that you could implement to broaden your target audience reach.

Language Barriers & How to Bridge the Gap

Once upon a time and yet not that long ago, individual countries communication with one another throughout the world was restricted too package and letter delivery, telegrams, phone calls and fax machines.

Times have certainly changed in the past 20 years and now anyone with an appropriate electronic device such as a computer, laptop, tv, tablet or cell phone can now communicate with those alike.

Now while the gap has been bridged via the invention of the internet (thanks Al Gore lol) the hurdle to conquer is translation between languages. In the online world this is actually an easy task to tackle through simple translation of landing and check out pages.

It’s a fact that websites that provide sufficient translation on the vital pages of navigation can increase and generate their revenue in sales substantially.  Look at it this way, a huge corporate company like McDonalds or Coke is internationally known due to branding and marketing in different continents and in different languages and by doing so they have dominated their markets for many years. Well this same concept when approached in the correct manner can achieve similar results but on a smaller scale than what those big wigs have but that is purely due to the length of time that they have invested in their marketing as well as the billions that they have thrown at advertising over the years.

So how can you bridge the gap? Here are a few simple tips to guide you in the right direction:

• Evaluate how much text is located on your landing and check out page. Do this based upon per word.

• Look at your geographical statistics and assess the top 4 or 5 non English speaking countries that visit your site.

• Review the current bounce rate from those international locations and make note of this so that after translation has been implemented you can go back and do comparison report to see the difference that translation has made. For those that are not aware as to what “bounce rate” means, it’s a online marketing term that represents the percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave rather than continuing to surf on your site. Such information can be acquired by having the likes of Google analytics implemented on your site.

• Once all of the above have been reviewed then seek out a handful of translation companies who can provide their service based upon a word count that excludes words such as “is, the, and” and ask for a quote to be provided. Once all quotes are in, read over their exclusion terms and assess which 2 companies to compare against one another and make them battle for your business.

• Have your administrator or tech implement the translations accordingly to the geographic location that is relevant and if you have the ability of having someone in those locations test the sites load times and ensure that it displays correctly then that is a massive advantage to you.

• While many companies will demand payment up front, don’t trust them! Insist on a 50% down concept and remaining amount to be paid upon completion. Those who argue this fact are NOT who you want to work with as you are taking the risk so they either comply or lose your business because there are many companies out there highly capable of providing what it is that you need.

• Don’t think you’re smart and translate things yourself using Google translation as grammar varies substantially and 1 wrong term can cost you thousands in lost sales because if a consumer witnesses such errors they tend to feel mislead and will not trust your website and in any relationship (yes even with online internet sales) trust is important.

• Translation can have an impact on your international search engine traffic through international extensions there for further increasing your international viewing reach.

Notes:

And with that all said, once you have mastered and completed the implementation of translation you need to ensure that your website has the capability of processing the sales in that specific countries trusted form of online payment which excludes credit cards.

This is where AlternativePayments becomes a vital part with their several payment solutions that cater to literally hundreds of millions of users that you could not reach and convert prior.

Don’t believe us? The only way to sincerely dispute this fact is to implement translation and an alternative payment solution provider such as AlternativePayments and see for one’s self.  

Are You Looking For Ways To Increase Revenue?

In an increasingly competitive market it is difficult to come up with new business solutions to increase sales and generate more revenue online and when you realize that you’ve hit that wall where growth is no longer growing, what do you do?

While this may be the case in some instances, generally it’s found that you simply aren’t looking in the right places.

With the amazing tools available to track all your website’s traffic the first thing you should do is review exactly who, geographically, are looking at your site. This is likely to be where you discover that your international traffic is higher than assumed and by determining what countries are viewing your site you can then review your sales statistics to see the average of sales that are being processed from those locations.

Being that English speaking countries (North America specifically) use credit cards, it is often forgotten that the rest of the world are not so active with such a payment solution. And this is where AlternativePayments can step in and cover those bases that have previously been neglected. Countries such as Japan tend to have their own preferred method for online purchases such as JCB and if this option isn’t available to make a purchase they are forced to go elsewhere to buy what they are looking for. Unfortunately this is the case for most international consumers who don’t have a credit card and if there isn’t an alternative solution for the consumer to pay with they will go elsewhere to make the purchase.

So in short, if you are looking for new ways to increase your websites revenue then consider implementing Alternative Payments. With multiple payment solutions covering both Europe and Asia, no set up cost and an easy 1 click button process to complete a purchase from your check out page, you can only gain from offering this payment option to your end users.

To learn more check out AlternativePayments.com or drop an email over to our sales department at sales@alternativepayments.com

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Let's meet up at the 2013 ETA Meeting & Expo!

Alternative Payments® (alternativepayments.com) specializes in bringing the latest alternative payment solutions to merchants worldwide.  We  provide secure and easy to use payment methods that minimize risk and increase sales. 

For more than a decade Alternative Payments® has provided clients with payment solutions that have successfully proven the increase of overall sales and revenues, whilst minimizing risk of chargebacks. 

Visit us at the The Electronic Transactions Association’s (ETA) 2013 Annual Meeting and Expo, being held April 30 through May 2 at the New Orleans Convention Center, at our booth #1020, and we are happy to demonstrate why our "One Button" approach has been so successful.

To arrange a meeting with one of our sales team associates, we can be reached

via email at sales@alternativepayments.com or call us at (626) 773-7194.

Cash-in on the Mexican market with TelePay

Cash-in on the Mexican market with TelePay

Plagued by experiencing credit card declines, Mexican shoppers can now shop online and use TelePay as a convenient and easy to use payment method. A simple voucher with a 9-digit code that is generated online at the time of the sale is all that needs to be brought to a store. Payment can then be made in cash and the online merchant where the purchase was made is then notified immediately. 

Cash payments are common in Mexico and it eliminates the risk for merchants not getting paid. In addition, there is no need for a merchant having to deal with any type of credit card chargeback or reserve issues.

A network of more than 50,000 local convenience stores and super markets support the TelePay voucher payment, offering millions of unbanked and card-less shoppers a method to join the world of online eCommmerce.

Alternative Payments merchants can simply add TelePay as a payment method to their current payment page or contact the sales department at sales@alternativepayments.com to get started today.

Spec Sheet:

- For Mexico

- 115 million population

- 42 million online consumers

- low credit card penetration

- Cash payments are common place

- No risk for merchants

- no CB’s or reserves

- widespread and accepted locally

- throughout Mexico

- supported by all convenience stores

- solves:

- credit card declines

- unbanked population

- access to Mexican market

Announcement!

Now available! Wolf & Wolf Software Engineering Services. Dear clients and business partners, 2013 promises to be an exciting and rewarding year for all of us. We recently completed our data center upgrades with all new hardware and security products, and we are now providing our clients with state-of-the-art programming services. We are delighted to announce, that we have established our own Software Engineering company ”Wolf & Wolf Software Engineering Inc." in Pasadena, California (www.wolf-wolf.eu).  Our customers will greatly benefit from the experience our team has to offer in programming and software management.  We understand the challenges of running your online business, and have the flexibility to provide you with the best of class products you are seeking. With the resources at our California office, and our Project Management team in Germany, we are able to service clients from all continents using our own in-house programming staff located at our development center in Serbia, Europe. We started our engineering company, because we ourselves experienced the difficulties in getting quality work done in time, at reasonable prices. Having global management located in the US in the same time-zone as our clients is a huge advantage, and avoids the pitfalls of language and time barriers. We support all types of technologies, and can manage projects from the planning stages right through the design, programming and implementation. Call us for a free consultation and find out how we can make your programming projects a reality.  Phone: +1 (626) 773-7187  Email: sales@wolf-wolf.eu ---------