MegaPath’s Black Friday Strategy

Black Friday will soon be upon us. This is the day after Thanksgiving that marks the traditional start to the Christmas shopping season. It’s a day that retailers brace for and depend on. For as Black Friday goes, so goes the profitability of the year.

The name Black Friday is generally attributed to the accounting practice of using red ink to show losses and black ink to show profits. Many retailers struggle all year long just to pay the bills and keep the lights on. Black Friday represents, at least symbolically, the change of the company’s fortunes from red ink to black ink. That’s how important the holiday shopping season is every year. It can be the difference between profit and loss, survival of the business or bankruptcy.

Since Black Friday and its online equivalent called Cyber Monday (The Monday after Black Friday) kickoff the most stressful and highest sales volume month of the year, it behooves retail businesses to have robust processes in place ahead of time. That includes the ability to process credit card transactions rapidly and securely. Lose your connection to the credit card processing companies, even for an hour, and you risk a stampede of irate customers out your front door and directly to your competitor. It’s even worse online. If your site is down or slow or you can’t accept credit card payments, your competitors are just a click away.

With this in mind, MegaPath is asking retailers, “Are You Prepared For Black Friday?” Even with predictions that consumers will be spending slightly less this year than last, there will still be a torrent of sales activity this shopping season. In fact, it might be argued that with less spending each customer becomes more valuable. Anything you can do to give that customer a pleasant shopping experience will work to your advantage.

MegaPath is a major competitive telecommunications carrier and leader in managed IP services. They serve the retail sector with high speed network connections specifically designed to support secure payment transactions. They call their service a “Payment Processor Extranet.” As the name implies, this is a specialized form of connectivity unlike simple Internet broadband. MegaPath’s Payment Processor Extranet connects to your retail site-to-site MPLS VPN service to securely carry credit card and other payment information from your point of sale locations to credit, debit gift and private label card payment and check payment processors. You choose which processors you work with and can and or change them at any time. MegaPath provides a fully redundant proactively monitored communications network to the processors to ensure that your transactions will get through.

For gas stations, convenience stores and other retailers not connected in a MPLS network, MegaPath offers “StoreConnect,” an IPSec encrypted service that works over a wide variety of broadband connections including DSL, cable, wireless and T1 lines. Like the Payment Processor Extranet, this service gives smaller retailers access to the leading payment processors for fast, secure and reliable transactions.

One of the most important processes involved in payment transactions is PCI or Payment Card Industry security. This standard involves a firewalled secure network protected by encryption and strong access control. MegaPath’s retail solutions are designed from the ground up to be PCI compliant.

So, what’s it going to be this year? Will you depend on slow dial-up access from your POS terminals that will likely keep your customers waiting and irritated as they stand in line? Or will you make the transaction process as transparent to your customers as possible with fast and reliable broadband connectivity? If you choose to make your transactions fast, efficient, reliable and secure, there’s no time to waste. Get more information about MegaPath and other retail connectivity solutions and be ready to make the most from the Black Friday weekend and the entire holiday shopping season.

Wireless Business Broadband Available In A Day

You’re opening a new store this week and everything is all set to go. Construction is done, the fixtures are in place and the shelves are stocked. The announcements have been sent to the media and all that’s left is the ribbon cutting. After that, let the profit making begin. Oh... NO... There won’t be any profit making because there won’t be any sales. The broadband service you were promised won’t be installed for another couple of weeks. Well, that’s what they said anyway. But they said that two months ago. What are you going to do without any connectivity? Is there anything that can jump in and save the day?

Yes there is and you’ll be glad you found out about it. Instead of grinding your teeth or just leaving the doors closed until your DSL or other provider can get around to bringing up your business broadband, get a wireless solution from Accel Networks. It’s highly secure and PCI/Visa compliant, so you can make cashless transactions with confidence. Data rates are typically 768 Kbps to 1.4 Mbps download and 384 Kbps to 512 Kbps upload with solid signals covering 90% of the United States. Best of all, it can be deployed in 1 to 3 business days.

A broadband wireless connection available in as little as a single business day? How come other providers don’t offer that. One word: Wires. No wires means no digging in the yard, stringing pole to pole, or fishing cables through the building. Those are things that take time. Avoid the wires and a good bit of the provisioning time goes away.

Accel offers a wireless solution that cleverly makes use of existing infrastructure. Most WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers are very localized and require direct line of sight to their towers. They likely will have to come out and put a dish or other external antenna on your building even if you can see the tower. Accel Networks doesn’t use proprietary towers like your local WISP. They’re using some or all of those cellular towers you see all over town. That's another reason why they need so little provisioning time.

Accel Networks has made agreements with the cellular carriers to use some of the data bandwidth that is available from every cell tower. But rather than limiting their options to one carrier, they’ve contracted with both CDMA and GSM carriers so that their service footprint covers 99% of business locations in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Their specially designed “Accelerator” customer location equipment is capable of 99.9% availability and network management from Accel headquarters. Installation takes less than an hour from the time your equipment arrives.

What can you do with a wireless network solution? The quick start option to have your business up and running in days, not weeks or months, is an obvious winner. It’s perfect for point of sale terminals in retail stores, quick service restaurants and hospitality providers like hotels and motels. It’s also a fast solution for disaster recovery in any business that can’t function without an Internet connection. Dial-up was once the answer to backing up broadband. But dial-up is just too slow for many applications anymore. Besides, the same disaster that took out your main wireline service might well have knocked out the phone lines as well.

The low capital and operating expenses per location for Accel Network’s wireless has given many businesses the incentive to upgrade from their old VSAT and frame relay connections or their current DSL and Cable broadband services. Accel is and can be the primary network service for restaurants, gas stations, banks, convenience stores and many other businesses. Some businesses have started with a panic call for quick start service and later decided to keep Accel Networks as their primary broadband connection.

Are you in dire need for fast and effective WAN network bandwidth at a reasonable price for a single or multiple business locations? Perhaps you’re just shopping around to see if you can do better than the high cost and unreliable service you have now. Either way, call the toll free number or enter an online inquiry for wireless business WAN bandwidth to get prices and availability.

Are We In A Balloon Boy Economy?

Just a few weeks ago, millions of people watched in horror as a saucer shaped silver balloon soared for 50 miles across the Colorado landscape. What made this a nail-biting spectacle was the belief that there was a six year old boy in the gondola of that homemade balloon. At one point it was reported that he may have even fallen out. Then, in a climactic moment, the balloon touched down and a quick inspection showed it was nothing at all - just a big inflated gas bag causing a lot of excitement.

This past Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 10,000 again. The same day it was announced that nationwide unemployment hit 10 percent. The market has been climbing steadily for months. We’re getting regular pronouncements that the ugly recession of the past couple of years is over. Even government officials like Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are cheerleading the return of happy days and economic growth. All that is seemingly needed now is a little mopping up action related to that pesky unemployment number and the economy will be chugging along nicely once again.

Something hasn’t seemed right about all this hoopla, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until Rick Santelli showed a chart titled “scary situation?” on his report for CNBC’s Fast Money program on Friday evening. This chart overlays line graphs for the DJIA and Unemployment as a function of time over this year. As Rick pointed out, there is an eerie correlation between the two rising numbers. A rousing discussion followed, related to government policy, corporate earnings forecasts and whether the unemployment figure is or is no longer a lagging indicator of economic activity. But I think they missed the really astounding implication of this chart. Have a look and see if you catch it:



What I’m thinking is that this chart is no anomaly. It’s an accurate representation of what’s playing out in the world of public corporations. It almost begs us to look a little deeper into the tightly coupled relationship between a rising market and rising unemployment. Let’s do that and see what we find.

Have you been watching the earnings reports that have been coming in over the last week or two? There seems to a theme in the reports for this earnings season and last quarter’s. Many companies meet or exceed Wall Street’s estimates for their earnings. They beat expectations and their stock pops. The composite of all these good reports has been causing the DOW and S&P averages to go up. So everybody’s happy and things are great, right?

Not so fast. The same reports that gleefully announce that a company’s earnings meet or beat expectations also tend to report that sales are flat or down for the quarter. The favorable earnings results have come from what is politely referred to as “efficiency improvements.” Sometimes they come right out and say it’s actually cost cutting or even layoffs.

So we have the beaming CEO who delights Wall Street with an excellent earnings report that ensures he lives to fight for another quarter and likely garners a nice performance bonus as well. But lurking behind that rosy facade is the human tragedy of yet more lower level employees stowing their personal belongings in cardboard boxes and heading to Personnel to be processed out of the company.

Is this the mechanism that keeps the stock averages and the employment numbers rising in lock-step? Could the seemingly robust earnings that justify higher stock prices be coming from emptying the desks and factory workstations, driving more and more people into the ranks of the unemployed?

All this seems to suggest that many companies are going beyond mere hunkering down for recessionary times. They’re actually making their performance look good by hollowing out the organization, what used to be called “eating the seed corn.” An easy way to do this is to throw everything overboard that isn’t directly related to achieving the next quarter’s earnings results. Easy targets are research and development, advertising, human resources, education & training, and manufacturing beyond orders for immediate delivery.

Doesn’t this eventually catch up with you? It can, especially when new competitors enter the market. Companies with robust new product development can find market niches wide open. The entrenched dominant company that normally crushes new entrants like bugs is so weakened that upstarts can gain a foothold. Many incumbents are presently gambling that this won’t happen to them. They’re playing a big game of “chicken” with their competitors, betting that everybody will continue to cut staff and other expenses to maximize short term earnings and keep the Wall Street analysts happy.

As business owners and managers, can we gain any insights from this that will help us improve our relative positions? If we really are in a “balloon boy” economy where expectations have become inflated way beyond what is actually going on, then we need to carefully manage our operations so that we can continue to stay in business. But we can also keep an eye open for opportunities to move into areas that may be opening up. One strategy is to test the waters by offering a wider range of products and services to your existing customers, especially when you can do this without incurring additional capital expense. Those once formidable opponents may not be so formidable anymore if they’ve squandered their ability to dominate markets just to look good in the short term.

Go Daddy Gets You Online Right Now

If you have a nagging feeling that you are being overcharged to put your business online, it’s probably because you are. Prices for domains, hosting and site building vary all over the place and depend on how savvy you are at ferreting out the best deals on the Internet. That’s something of a catch-22, because the people just getting their businesses online are the ones who can benefit most from excellent service and cheap prices. Is there a way for just anybody to get the good deals in online services?

There is, and the name you want to remember is Go Daddy. Seems like a fairly easy task, especially with all the ads you see on TV. My favorite Go Daddy spokesperson is Danica Patrick, who embodies the characteristics you want in a website: high speed and easy on the eyes. But I digress. We’re talking about web resources here.

So, when you go to Go Daddy, what is there to help you get online quickly, easily and at budget prices?

The first thing you’ll want is a domain name. You have your choice of .com, .net, .org and a lot of others. For business, you best choice is something ending in .com. People just naturally associate the Internet with the .com top level domain and will tend to go there first even if you tell them your business is a .net or .biz or .name. Too much talk about the “dot com industry" or "dot com generation", I guess. Some companies go ahead and buy up at least the .com, .net and .org versions of their domain name just to keep competitors from encroaching on their territory. Domain names are so cheap at Go Daddy, you can easily afford to do this. Right now standard dot com pricing is $9.99 a year.

Here’s a little secret you should know if you are involved in affiliate marketing, such as with a company like Commission River that provides you with a customized website. You don’t need web building tools at all. Simply use the URL forwarding feature that Go Daddy provides with your domain name and your Go Daddy domain becomes your website domain. Some people don’t bother with a website at all. They just want an easy to remember email address. You can do that by using the email forwarding feature of your Go Daddy domain name. Just set it up to forward all mail coming into your domain name to whatever email service you have now. They’ve made it so easy that you can be set up and ready to go within minutes of ordering your domain name.

Now let’s say that you do want to create an online presence for your business so that customers can shop anytime 24/7 or find you through the search engines. Go Daddy has everything you need, with pre-built designs that let you pick a template and images and then add some information about your business. There’s a blogging and podcasting service, private photo albums, and even shopping carts so you can sell your own merchandise.

Another approach is to use the Go Daddy Web design services, where professional site builders will create and update a personalized Web site design for your business starting at under $50 a month. Custom logo and web banner design services are also available, as are services to increase Internet traffic to your new site. Before you go and pay a fortune to some local design service, take a look at what Go Daddy has to offer in the way of site building, maintenance and promotion.

Of course, Go Daddy also supports experienced and savvy Internet business developers with a wide range of low cost hosting plans. This includes Grid Hosting that scales automatically to support your business needs with up to 100 GB of space, 1,000 GB of transfer and unlimited compute cycles. Dedicated IP addresses and SSL certificates are available.

No time to waste - there is money to be made online and the sooner you establish your Web presence, the sooner you can be sharing in the rewards. Learn more and order your Go Daddy domain names and other Web resources now.

Fast MEN Available Cheap

When you’ve got packets to move and lots of them, you need MEN to get them from point A to point B. If your MAN is a sluggish wimp, what you need is real MEN to get things moving. If the cost of your telecom connection has you seeing red, what you need is MEN - fast and cheap MEN.

What this testosterone laden introduction suggests is that MEN are the answer to your telecommunications problems. So they are, as long as we’re talking about Metropolitan Ethernet Networks as the MEN in question. What? You were expecting some guy in a cape?

Metro Ethernet is rapidly becoming the connectivity solution of choice in downtown and suburban areas for two reasons. Compared to traditional telecom solutions, they are fast and they are cheap.

Normally fast and cheap don’t go together, at least in the technology world. If you want more bandwidth, you pay more money. It’s a simple and longstanding relationship. Well, your relationship with MEN is going to change all that. Metropolitan Ethernet offers the connectivity you need from point to point or multipoint to multipoint at prices per Mbps that can be half that of high bandwidth SONET services and even less than T1 lines.

Metro Ethernet is a fairly new business-grade telecom service that has been standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum, an industry standards group. The move from circuit switched telecom to packet switched networks, such as Ethernet, is based on the almost universal adoption of Ethernet as the local area networking protocol of choice. If every LAN is running Ethernet, then why do a protocol conversion between the local network and the wide area network only to get the packets across town?

Why, indeed? When all inter-location connections were under the control of local telephone companies, then telephone company standards defined the services available. Now that competitive carriers have entered the marketplace with their own networks based on IP rather that telco TDM standards, there’s no good reason not to keep the networks and all their connections as Ethernet. Interfacing is trivial, network efficiency is improved, and scalable service levels are much easier to provide. It’s not unusual to be able to purchase Metro Ethernet services in 1 Mbps increments and add bandwidth when your business needs dictate.

Just how powerful are these MEN? They range in bandwidth from 1 Mbps on up, although 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Gigabit Ethernet levels are very popular as they mirror the standard LAN and network interface speeds. Lower bandwidth services, including standard 10 Mbps Ethernet, may be provisioned over copper as well as fiber to save construction costs for buildings that are not “lit” for fiber service. You need to be reasonably near a carrier’s facilities for Ethernet over Copper or EoC to work.

Would you benefit by putting real MEN to work for your organization? If so, check pricing and availability of Metropolitan Ethernet Network services for your location.