PayPal is the undisputed leader in online payment service providers. Google has tried to build market share for its Google Checkout over the last two years but feedback from my customers and business partners is that Google Checkout is still not their preferred online payment mechanism.

Most other online payment service providers are limited in their appeal, and are used by specific niches of customers. For example, there are some payment providers for online pharmacy transactions and online betting transactions. These are large industries however as the legalities are not the same or favorable in all countries, therefore such payment providers are able to offer a solution that is needed by the companies in these industries.

Escrow.com deserves a mention. It is a very useful site for business transactions, and their fee is very nominal for the value of the service that enables totally unknown parties to conduct business transactions.

Overall, there is no serious competition to PayPal today. PayPal has built a large market share due to its easy payment sending and receiving options. On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of EBay. Over the last 7 years, EBay has acted as the perfect growth platform for PayPal creating about 10 million of PayPal users worldwide.

PayPal’s total payment volume, the total value of transactions, was US$ 60 billion in 2008, an increase of 27 percent over the previous year. This $60 billion of 2008 represented nearly 9 percent of global e-commerce and 15 percent of US e-commerce. In fact, at an analyst day on March 11, 2009, eBay CEO, John Donahoe announced that PayPal could be a larger driver of revenue than EBay marketplaces business. So clearly, there is a huge demand for safe and easy online payment systems like PayPal, which has become the market leader with a big lead over the competition.

The economics of owning a popular online payment system are very attractive.

Online payment sites don’t pay interest on money held in the user accounts. A majority of active user maintain some working capital for day to day transactions. While the numbers are not available in public domain, we can do some rough math. PayPal has about 10 million users, and assuming an average money balance of 100 USD per user, that’s a billion dollars of interest free capital or float that PayPal maybe enjoying at any given time. Good acquisition by Ebay!

It is surprising that over the years, Amazon has not taken any major step in this direction to grow or acquire a payment system like PayPal. So where can competition come from? From social networking sites.

One of the major changes in the Internet landscape since 2002 is the rise of giant social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Each of these sites has millions of regular users. And a site like Facebook can develop its own payment system and virtual currency, which makes it possible for a marketplace to grow. We already see hundreds of third party applications on Facebook, and many of them sell low cost items. A virtual currency can be a powerful solution. I believe Facebook is already working along these lines.

There is also value is trying to solve one specific problem of international trade – the problem of varying currency conversion rates. If a large payment site can create some form of protection against currency rate changes, by using its own virtual currency in the marketplace that could be a powerful innovation that can nurture and grow a wide variety of international trade. On this front, PayPal and EBay are best placed to make something possible. A virtual currency in a global marketplace is the next big milestone for online payments. It will take extensive collaboration with banks and financial institutions, and we will have to wait and see who will take up this big challenge.

About the Author:  Shankar AVSB is the Director of MyOrbit Online, a London based Internet business with over 100 websites in different industries. He closely follows Internet business and online payment systems for conducting international trade and has advised numerous companies in improving their online business. Shankar is also the CEO of 7Avenues Private Equity, which runs ventures in Retail, Supply Chain, Services and E-Business. He can be contacted from here.

Create a massive fall in the market large enough to trigger stop-losses typically set up at 5% drop, and then buy blue chip stocks at 30% less price before they recover, sell Put Options at 1000% gain, blame it all on computers and trading algorithms. Some person or some company somewhere has walked away with billions in profits after this event. It looks very well planned. This event was most probably an example of higest form of market manipulation, a bold master stroke, though illegal and unethical.

To find answers, we need to check the money-trail.
Who all bought millions of DOW 10500 Puts for pennies a few days back? Those Put options would have got sold at 10 dollars each, making billions of dollars. It is very unlikely that the organizer is within the US, otherwise the SEC/FBI can find ways to take back the money. The organizers are most probably hedge funds, outside the US, in offshore locations. The sponsors had enough capital, and NYSE/NASDAQ trading algorithm expertise, to make the initial 250 point dent, and then the market forces took over, pushing everything down in free fall.

To those who say that since the prices came back to pre-fall levels, and no real damage was done — they clearly are not traders or have market positions or investors who have put stop losses.  Many traders and brokerages got blown out of their positions because their stops were taken out after 5% drop in the Index.  Many futures and options traders squared loss making positions, and opened hedging positions, only to be caught in the pull-back few minutes later.  It was violent – a financial hurricane. Such extreme movement of stock prices has cascading effects on margin positions which impact other non-related trades, commodity positions and forex, because all these market are inter connected.

Global Sugar Prices Look Weak And Likely To Fall Further

“Once we accept our limits, we can go beyond them” – Albert Einstein

The above was one of his favorite messages, and we can trust Einstein to have thought through the various aspects behind his thought. There is great value in these words in every possible project and venture.

As we have pointed out in many previous posts, many businesses are not able to make sales and profits they deserve because there are gaps or holes in their business process; someone is letting ready prospects go away, while someone else is trying to sell to cold prospects; someone is not trying enough for repeat business, while someone is relying totally on that; someone is afraid of upcoming changes in their industry; while someone has not even thought about it!

This year, we will share numerous insights and learnings from businesses and professionals worldwide as they take on bigger projects, and make them successful. We plan to have at least 10 posts every month, so you will have a lot of new stuff every time you visit.

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The above ad is from the AIDS prevention campaign being run in Uganda. It was shared by Perry Marshall over the weekend. It stands out from the usual ads, and has an immediate on the reader because of its ability to directly address the target audience — middle aged men with the income and propensity for procuring teenage sex.

What makes this ad stand out? Some reasons I can think of are:

1. It is dealing with morals/values, where its possible to act differently in private from what we  accept in public.

2. It uses just a few words and that too as questions, which you will tend to answer within yourself.

3. The few words are supported by a carefully chosen image, which really delivers the full impact of the ad.

4. It puts you on the defensive; very few ads can achieve that. It makes you respond internally. So you are likely to remember it for some time.

These days we see hundreds of ads every day on the Internet and in print media. Our mind has been slowly getting trained to separate the signal (content) from the noise (ads). In the early days of the web, 1997 to 2000, there were not that many ads, and the technology behind them had no capability to geo-target the audience.

The above ad is a great example of a powerful ad.
See how you can use its structure for your own business.
- Shankar

The research has come out with some interesting facts:
(a) For low income earners over 45 years age and medium income earners under 45 years, the research found that home ownership actually fell by 15 percent over the two decades to 2006.

(b) Unrealistic property price increases have taken away a large chunk of the national income gain from the resources boom.

The research has also revealed concerns that many lower income earners in the 25-44 age group might never be able to own a home because the property prices continue to remain inflated. Overall, the research stops short of saying that Australian property prices are over-inflated and are deserve a correction.

Now, such a research, even if true, would naturally not go well with current property owners, who would see this research as a threat to their property prices, and some of the initial reaction from people has been along these lines. Nobody wants to upset the cart.

However, one fact of real estate industry remains the same across the world: property prices will be in line with liquidity in the economy, and rising interest rates would be an indication of tightening liquidity, which will put pressure of property prices. And like we saw in the US, once a few people in an area are willing to take a lower price for their financial reasons, a price correction can set in quite rapidly.

Whether Australian property prices actually correct or not is anyone’s guess, but given the bullish trend in global economy, it is unlikely that any property price correction will be deep or prolonged, unless the global economy stalls on its way to recovery.

Reference: www.news.com.au

Google Voice is an interesting service, very much in the territory of Telecom domain, so we will have to see how it impacts/ complements/ competes with the Telecoms of today.

Just FYI, Telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, Orange, etc are among the largest online advertisers, because they have a lot of money at stake in the face of VOIP, etc, and they are taking anything lightly today, though in the long-run, solutions with better economics will prevail, like we have seen with other technologies in the previous decades.

How does Google Voice work? You get a new Google assigned phone number. Then, you route all of your other phone numbers through that number. So, your office phone, your work phone, your home phone – whatever. Google voice will allow your calls to selectively ring to any of the destination phones you choose. It is a practical and useful concept, which is will be liked by many.

In addition, Google Voice offers bonus features like:
- You can selectively ring calls to multiple destinations.
- You can selectively block and screen calls
- You can send, receive forward and store SMS text messages
- Check your voicemail online, read it via email or text (you can even forward it)
- You can create personalized voicemail messages per contact
- You can group your contacts and manage their preferences on a group level
- Conference calling, call recording, call switching, 411 info

What we have seen in our experience of advising over 100 businesses is that almost 95% of them do not use their website an effective Sales & Marketing tool, and that’s why they are unknowingly leaving a lot of money on the table.

For example, today, many prospects come to our websites when they hear about our services or products, and our website has to be ready to engage any visitor, and also provide answers to all the common questions that any visitor/prospect would be expecting, to increase the interest in the products and services that you are offering.  Now this may look very logical, but the fact is that 95% of the websites that we have come across are not able to do this, and so chances are high that your own business website may be lagging in this aspect.

Some of the things that you should really consider to check if your website is really interesting and effective in Sales & Marketing are the following:

First and most important input for your website is the navigation – keep it simple and intuitive.  Navigation is one of the places where most websites falter.  The navigation seems to become very complex in most B2C and B2B services and visitors don’t have a clue how to trace back a particular URL or how to save a given URL because when you have complex navigation, people do not follow the path or are unable to retrace a given page.

So please make navigation very simple and my advice is that any business site should not have more than three levels of navigation.  So if you have the ‘Home’ page or ‘About us’ or ‘Contact us’ page as level 1, just think of one more level and another level, so maximum three levels.  Anything more than that means an ineffective website.

My personal preference is two levels only where you have an ‘About us’ page, a ‘Contact us’, an ‘FAQ’ page and ‘Services’ page as Level-1. If you are looking for investors, then that deserves a separate page of its own at Level-1.

‘Services’ or ‘About us’ page can go one level deeper, into Level-2, to share the specific products and services on their specific pages.  But that’s where it stops and not too many levels of pages.

The second input is that the top-level pages should not be too many in number; keep it between 5 and 10 – that’s something which most users can understand and navigate easily.  So keep the top-level pages, which could be like ‘Home’, ‘About us’, ‘Product/Services’, ‘FAQs’, ‘Blog’, ‘Contact’ etc.

Third input is that if you are offering any product or service, there must be an FAQ page – a separate page dedicated to answering various questions and answers that you have faced from partners, customers, prospects. So an FAQ page is a very important.

Fourth input is applicable if you are selling a product or service that can be bought or ordered online or by phone, then there must be a very visible ‘Order’ page at the top level.  We have found that the ‘Order’ page is often hidden at some second or third level and the website is losing sales. We have observed that by moving the Order page at the level-1 and making it prominently visible across the site, it has improved sales by anywhere from 25 to 100%.  So there’s a big benefit from a small improvement.

Fifth input is about Testimonials. if you are a business that has been live for some time, then you must surely have customer testimonials and that is another top-level page because it can really help in talking to your prospects about the benefits of your services and no other page does it better than a ‘Testimonials’ page.  So it’s a highly recommended top-level page that you must have.

That’s how some of the best performing websites are structured and what we have shared here is essentially the summary of website improvement and online business improvements that we do for our sites (we have 50+ of them), and for our business partners and clients, who are seeing results in terms of improved sales.

Now, there are many Internet consultants out there who will charge a fair amount for such inputs. So we thought we will save you some money by sharing these inputs, which are based on real-life successful websites under us.

Please remember that you can constantly reduce your cost of customer acquisition by having an effective website that converts your prospects by engaging them well and showing them the key benefits.  Please also remember that a detailed one page website, if done properly, can beat a 25 page website that plays hide-and-seek with the visitors.

If you have already followed the above suggestions, and still your website is not proving to be effective in your sales & marketing work, something else is creating a problem. If you want our help in diagnosis, please leave a comment in this post (it will not be published) and we will get back to you.

Thanks for visiting,
Shankar on behalf of MyOrbit Team

Its a real problem once your email id goes this way, because the hackers get access to your email id and change the password, and use your address book to send lots of spam mail from your id, and you will be forced to spend lot of time in damage control.

So to protect your email ids, please change your password ASAP if you have not changed it in the last 2-3 weeks, and keep it cryptic. This is the best protection.

And to protect against any key-logging script that may have come on your computer from somewhere, please regularly delete all cookies and Internet temp files, and run anti-virus once every week. Let us know if you want any help.