Telecom Xtra Blocks Out Competitors

March 25th, 2008

It seems as though Telecom Xtra has made another, more significant than normal anti-competitive action by requiring all its customers to record into the Yahoo! Xtra e-mail system any e-mail addresses they use for their business.

So, if you have a professional e-mail address for your business, which is a service not provided by Xtra, you must now log all these e-mail addresses into Xtra’s system.

Under the guise of “Online Identity Theft Protection” or some such thing, Xtra has made it a requirement that in order to send e-mails from your business e-mail account, if your internet connection has been provided by Xtra you must log any e-mail addresses you intend to use, with the Xtra service.

At the same time, Xtra has announced plans for a stronger push into the business market, offering customers the ability to do all their business e-mail hosting and web hosting through Xtra.

Now, as Xtra will now know all e-mail addresses for all their customers, they can easily promote to them the “benefits” of changing their web hosting and e-mail services to Xtra.

Xtra now blocks, as standard, 50% of our services as a web and e-mail hosting services provider. Our customers must send all e-mails through the Xtra service, rather than our service. When a problem occurs with sending e-mail, our customers should be able to call us to resolve this. Rather, we have to send them on to the Xtra “Help”-desk, in order to get the issue resolved. Their enquiries are frequently sent overseas to people who have not been trained correctly, therefore the issue is sent back to us to resolve – which we can’t resolve as it’s not our service.

Needless to say, Xtra is limiting what its customers can do and restricting their ability to easily use a provider other than Xtra for their e-mail services.

In the interests of our customers, our interests, and the interests of other providers in the marketplace, we have lodged a formal complaint with the Commerce Commission in regards to what we see as being anti-competitive behaviour by Telecom in this matter. Watch this space for some action over this monopolistic behaviour in the future.

Posted in E-mail & the internet | No Comments »

Invoicing

February 25th, 2008

We have recently transferred across from an internally developed invoicing system, to a third party web based application called Freshbooks. While transferring all our customers over to a brand new invoicing system is a daunting and particularly time consuming task, the time savings for us have virtually wiped out the time spent on data entry to date.

If you want a simple yet powerful application for your business invoicing, the money you spend on Freshbooks will be quickly gained back in the time you would have spent on invoicing manually in the first place. We can now automate a large part of our invoicing system that was just not possible before.

What a time savings to see invoices going out automatically every month.

If you are a client of OPMC who has recently received an invoice from us through Freshbooks, we would love to get your feedback.

Posted in OPMC | No Comments »

Business Trip – Wellington to Sydney

December 12th, 2007

For Wellingtonians intending to do business in Sydney, I offer the following tips for a day or two in Sydney.

-Keep a budget umbrella on hand at all times. You can pick one up from the CBD on the day for $6, anything more than $10 is midnight robbery for these things. If it rains, it usually is torrential rain. In Wellington you can get a good judgement on whether it’s going to rain, or at least have some warning. In Sydney you might find yourself in the middle of thunder and lightening and drenched. Sydney CBD also does not have the sort of street awnings to hide under in the rain that Wellington does. Your only option might be to wait it out for up to an hour until it settles down – they are usually over quite quickly.

-Look up all your destinations on Google Maps before you go – http://maps.google.com – and compare this to where you’re going to be meeting people. If it says it is a 7 minute journey you want to be very wary of this because the traffic conditions can change in a heartbeat in Sydney, particularly before 9:30AM, 11-1:30 and 4PM onwards. The train system is efficient, but again if the walking part of the journey looks short it probably isn’t.

-Make sure you allow plenty of time to get to your meetings. Arriving early is better than arriving late.

-If you have a chance, I would recommend visiting a BNI chapter (http://www.bni.com.au) while you’re there, where you can meet 20-30+ business professionals for a structured but friendly business meeting and gain some new contacts or even pick up some work unexpectedly. I am at these meetings once every week and can invite you along as a visitor. Just contact me through the website @ http://www.opmc.com.au

-Wireless internet is not as readily available as is in Wellington with services such as Citylink’s CafeNet. If you are a regular visitor I would recommend buying a data card from Dick Smith from a company called “Unwired” – http://www.unwired.com.au. This is an excellent solution, there’s no contract and there is ubiquitous coverage in the CBD. Otherwise try a Vodafone store where you may be able to pick up a one month data plan for $20-$30 – no promises though.

-Plan your trips to meetings carefully, and take plenty of water especially in summer. Once you are in the middle of nowhere in some Sydney suburb with no shelter, no water and no idea where you are, things will go downhill quickly from there.

-Take a map with you of the area you’re going to, CBD or otherwise. Ask what approximate location your meeting is at on any street – some streets stretch from one end of the CBD to the other, so if you start at the wrong end it may be like walking from St John’s Bar to the Ferry terminal under the motorway bridge in Wellington, to get to your meeting.

Posted in Expansion to Australia, Exporting | No Comments »

Online Sales and the environment

October 6th, 2007

While much of the interest around online shopping centres around convenience, we should take a moment to spare a thought for the environmental impact.

As shoppers and businesses are becoming more environmentally considerate, there is another reason to offer online shopping as an option, or even an alternative to the traditional retail store – its level of environmental friendliness.

Construction
The construction, and fit out of a store require a huge amount of energy and sometimes significant pollution. Each building block of the store needs to be sourced from somewhere. Transportation of materials to the store also contributes negatively to the environment.

Ongoing Use
The ongoing use of a physical store requires a significant amount of energy to run – much, much more than your run of the mill online store. Lighting also needs to be left on at night in many cases, to deter theft of product.

Customer Use
Customers visiting your store, unless they walk or ride a bike, are going to contribute to environmental pollution by having to drive to your store. The amount of natural resources required to get a customer from their home to your store must be rather significant.

With this in mind, when you’re thinking about your business options, or whether to open a store in the physical world or online, you should now spare a thought for the environmental impact.

Posted in Online Sales | No Comments »

Problems, concerns and risks about selling online

September 28th, 2007

We have many customers coming to us with concerns about selling online. Here I address some of these and provide some answers. Most of these centre around online credit card payments.

I’ve been told credit card payment online isn’t secure.

Firstly it’s important to note that nothing can be guaranteed 100% secure these days. All we can do is take precautions to protect ourselves and our customers.

Online credit card payments for goods can be secure, even more secure than your internet banking. However, problems with security can come from several sources:

-Lack of suitable methods for protecting customers’ information by online store owners.
-Lack of knowledge by store owners on what is needed to protect their customers credit card details.
-The unsecure storage of customer credit card information within the online store – easily accessed by malicious individuals.
-Viruses and other nasties hiding on the customer’s computer – when they enter their credit card details anywhere on the internet, this information is sent to a criminal who can then use the card to make purchases without the knowledge or consent of the card owner.

The problems are therefore divided into two areas of responsibility – customers and the store owner.

The store owner must make all reasonable efforts to provide a secure environment online through which the customer can make credit card payment.

But the customer must also take responsibility for keeping their credit card details secure – the responsibility of the store owner cannot extend to, for example, ensuring there are no viruses on the customer’s computer because this is impractical.

At OPMC we use a third party to process all credit card payments through our clients’ online stores. No credit card information is stored within the store itself – this helps keeps costs down and means the responsibility for safekeeping of credit card details is neither with us nor the client. Rather, we leave it to the experts, who are constantly investing in the latest technology to protect secure information from prying eyes.

While we do take this precaution with online stores, there is another option to stop you worrying about credit card security – simply don’t allow credit card transactions on your website!

I don’t want to sell online because credit card transactions are too risky!

Credit card transactions online aren’t any more risky than anywhere else, apart from when the conditions above are met and your online store, or customers’ card information is ripe for the picking by hackers. If you have a key logging virus installed on your computer and haven’t taken appropriate measures to protect your computer against these threats then of course it is going to be risky.

That aside, the other measure you can take is to not accept credit card payment through your website.

It is not necessary to accept credit card payment through your online store, although it may make things handy for your customers. If you are concerned about accepting credit card payments online there are many other forms of payment available to you.

For example, you can provide instructions through the order process that payment can be made by direct bank payment or cheque. Then, so long as you are satisfied with the conditions you have set for customer orders – eg, that payment must be received before the order is shipped – then you have yourself a “secure” online store. If you do want to accept credit card payments, but not over the internet, you can always offer the customer the option of calling to provide their credit card details. Do not let them e-mail you their credit card details, this could be much less secure.

None of my customers would buy from me over the internet because it’s not safe.

Online sales is a growing sales medium with some huge competitors in the marketplace. New Zealand’s own Trademe, Ferrit, or larger international stores like Amazon sell vast quantities of products to people wanting to buy over the internet. People choose to buy their plane tickets online, pay bills and gamble. The Government even allows online payment for certain services by credit card.

You can ignore this as a growth industry and potential benefit to your business, or you can consider it as an option.

But it’s not for everyone. A good place to start would be to profile your customers. Would they be open to the idea of purchasing / ordering online? Then perhaps ask some of your key customers about the idea with a set of questions about your idea to offer your products online. You can even go as far as to develop a basic online store to present to key customers to trial. Feedback from that will help you in your decision making process.

Posted in Online Sales | No Comments »

Starting a business network in Sydney

September 16th, 2007

I have been over in Sydney for the last 2 weeks and this trip has been focused more on establishing our network over here.

This has been a good challenge, especially as we don’t have an established network here. One might ask how you can start operating your business in Sydney if you’re not into big budget advertising or don’t have an existing strategy in place. The first thing I would recommend is BNI (Business Network International). This is a structured networking member organisation that has weekly breakfast meetings on virtually every day of the week in multiple locations across Sydney.

You will need to call ahead, but you can find out more about times and locations on their website at http://www.bni.com.au.

It is an excellent way to meet new business professionals, and who knows? You might establish a great new business contact by taking an hour and a half of your morning to meet 15+ other business professionals.

Posted in Expansion to Australia, Exporting | No Comments »

Technical Misadventures with Yahoo!Xtra Bubble service

August 20th, 2007

I have two e-mail accounts with Xtra, and it was recently brought to my attention that they had “upgraded” their system.

I went to log in to my Xtra e-mail, a relatively painless process for the last few years. I was confronted with a login screen and was relieved as I had read they had made some major upgrades that had had major impacts on customer’s services.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. I was then told that my web browser was rare, or something to that effect and that I would not get the optimum service with the browser I was using (Safari on the Mac). I chose to ignore this message, and continued on.

I was then introduced to what seems like a 5 step process:

1) Register
2) Download
3) Personalise
4) Summary
5) Get Online

Why do I have to go through this process to check my webmail? Something that should be a simple process which has just become seemingly impossible, inconvenient and annoying.

I was asked to enter my basic details – e-mail address, name and phone number. Despite entering this information correctly, I was given the following error messages:

Yahoo rubbish

Despite reentering the information again and again I realised I was not getting anywhere. So I switched over to Firefox for the Mac.

After the connection to Yahoo timed out, giving me an error message, I tried again and was confronted with the same page “Tell us about yourself” (I am a customer of yours why do I need to tell you about myself when all I want to do is check my personal e-mail?)

As the details were pre-filled, I pressed the “Continue” button. Once this was eventually processed, this time I was presented with a page asking me to confirm my identity. Ironically, the page is titled “Help us help you”. One would have thought the best way they could help us is to not require this sort of re-registration process to check our e-mails.

Another wait while the new “improved” Yahoo!Xtra service had a think about my security question and date of birth. Note at this stage I am still on “Step 1″ as described above and have been trying to check my webmail for 30 minutes now.

Success! Yahoo has processed this information and takes me to the next page! Which is empty…

I try to refresh the page to resolve this issue, and come back to my original issue on Safari, with some more errors thrown in for good measure:
yahoo rubbish

Pressing the “Continue” button again, I get an error message…again. And again. And again. I cannot use my e-mail.

35 minutes and counting, I am reluctant to continue but want to check my personal e-mail. So time to resort to Windows.

Going into Windows and logging in, I am first asked whether I want to add “sub accounts” for my family, a significantly different message from that I had on the mac. But I am not onto “Step 2 – Download” so at least we are making progress.

I now have to download “Yahoo Bubble” to check my e-mail. Redundant, more time and heavy on reducing usability. Seems to be the only way for me to check e-mail so I am going for it. Have now been spending 45 minutes on this.

I am now asked Whether I want Typical setup (which installs software i neither want nor need), or the custom setup “Advanced users only”. Custom setup lets me install neither of these pieces of software, so I select this option.

I agree to yet another software agreement, which prints to a record 26 pages. Who is going to read this?

Am asked some more questions, after which I wait for the next page to come up for a few minutes. At this point it seems like I almost might be at the end of this ordeal.

I am logged in, and faced with lots of information irrelevant to my e-mail – which is what the webmail was for in the first place. I see a small item on the left marked as “Mail”, and click on it.

Voila! I have been invited to try the “ALL-NEW Yahoo!Xtra Pro MAIL”. There is an image on this page, which I wait another few minutes to load.

more yahoo rubbish

Not wanting to get into more time wasting exercises (I am now up to 1 hour of this process), I decline this “to be missed” opportunity.

I have finally been able to enter webmail. Now that I’ve gone through this experience, I get to do it all over again for my other Xtra e-mail account – looking forward to it.

Regrettably, many NZ companies rely on Xtra e-mail for their business correspondence. Imagine having to go through this sort of process in the middle of a busy working day to check your e-mail via webmail? Telecom is certainly not making any friends with this sort of time wasting rubbish.

Telecom Xtra has an infamous history of making it difficult to do business using their services. Our customers cannot send e-mail through our servers if they are Xtra customers (they block our service to our customers), e-mails get lost (up to 50% of international e-mail), and service is slow. Such a big company should be setting an example rather than using their size to stifle competition and service levels.

Posted in E-mail & the internet | No Comments »

Wireless internet access in Sydney

July 29th, 2007

For those laptop-toting businesspeople expanding their business to Sydney, especially the Wellingtonians amongst you, you will quickly find that getting wireless internet access in Sydney is a chore. While cities such as Wellington have what I would consider to be an extensive wireless network in the form of CafeNet, Sydney has no such major provider.

Rather, there are a number of providers that are located sparingly across the CBD. As easily finding somewhere that provides wireless internet in the Sydney CBD is no easy task I recommend you take a look at the following:

Azure Wireless – While Azure appears to be cutting back their coverage in Sydney, they so have a number of places where you can browse the internet. I recommend you visit this page on their website, but suggest you visit the places recommended and ask them if their wifi is working before settling in.

Telstra – Telstra offers a comprehensive network of wireless hotspots, however be warned – the cost can add up quite quickly. A list of all hotspots was last sighted here.

Unwired – These guys also offer wireless internet, however it’s designed for those who have an Unwired Wireless Card. I would recommend this option if you are planning on spending a lot of browsing time on the go in Sydney.

Woolworths (opposite the town hall) – Go up the escalators in the middle of this store and you will find a small internet access area. You can prepay with some great rates here, and you simply sit down with your laptop in the allocated Wifi spot and get on with your business. It would be affordable to work here all day if you needed to, however I did have problems with sending e-mails using any SMTP server. Tech support was helpful but said I should be able to send through my own SMTP server, which I didn’t believe as I couldn’t get it working. This would certainly be the only downside of this option.

Posted in Expansion to Australia | No Comments »

Advice on setting up shop in Sydney

July 29th, 2007

For initial advice in expanding your business to Sydney, we found New Zealand Trade and Enterprise provided a significant level of support. While expanding to any new market requires careful planning and research, knowing where to start can often be difficult. Check out the NZTE website at http://www.nzte.govt.nz/ for more information about their services. They produce a number of booklets on doing business in Australia.

Posted in Expansion to Australia | No Comments »

Setting up your internet in Sydney

July 29th, 2007

Setting up our internet connection here in Sydney was not as straightforward as we would have liked. We found that while Telstra Cable was what we ideally wanted, it was not available in our building in the CBD. Optus was willing to give us limited service ADSL internet but it would take 2 weeks to be activated.

We decided to settle for the moment with Unwired wireless internet. This is a fantastic product, and more information can be found on http://www.unwired.com.au/

These wireless internet packs can be picked up at any Dick Smith in the CBD, once connected to your computer they can be activated online via credit card immediately with no phone queues. You are able to connect to the Unwired website using the wireless modem to review plans, etc, before signing up. We were online in minutes, and the software works on both Mac and PC, using either an ethernet or USB connection to your computer.

Posted in Expansion to Australia | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »