Axiar Payments: a cost-effective and prompt payment solution?

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I have been invited to write a review of Axiar Payments Solutions. Axiar offers e-commerce websites, particularly in the U.K., a way to handle both credit and debit card transactions as a credit card processor. This isn’t the first time that I have reviewed online payment systems, take a look at the review for Group ISO. This service is initially distinguished by the fact that it has a British focus, as it deals in British Pounds.

Axiar Webpage Introduction to Payment Processing
I had no idea until I saw the neat diagram (below) how complex online payments could be. I have only a small online business so far: so I was spared the complexity by using Paypal. I guess when systems are simple to operate, we assume that they are simple to setup and operate. If you still don’t believe me, take a look at the process that Axiar employs to verify credit card transactions.

APS Chart

Once you have grasped the complexity of the transaction, you will begin to understand why a payment service provider like Axiar Payments Solutions can really make a name for themselves and the advantages they would provide over other 3rd party credit card processors.

 

Now, you’re thinking: “My bank offers me payment services with my merchant account. Why should I switch?” It may be easy to use your bank, but have you consider the alternatives fully?

Advantages of Axiar

  • Lower transaction fees will mean that you are able to offer your customer better deals on your products and services. In a price competitive environment, this would be quite an advantage to cut prices in the face of stiff competition. Given that they charged a flat fee, for items of higher value or websites that have low volumes of turnover, this may represent a good opportunity to save $$$ or pass the savings on to your customers.
  • A higher conversion ratio. Your customers won’t need to leave site: there is always the danger when a customer leaves your site that they may not return for a variety of reasons. One particular reason would simply be a browser crash. When the user loads up the browser again, the URL is gone.
  • Increased trust will help to spur more sales. Perhaps customers may not even complete the transaction because they get taken to a page on another website that they don’t know. Naturally, given the phishing problems, customers are quite leery of website they don’t know or don’t choose to visit.
  • Better anti-fraud screening is essential for small retailers, as credit card fraud is a real problem, but it needn’t be. Axiar explains about how they tackle fraud.
  • Speeds up your cashflow. For all businesses, but especially for small business without large accounts or reserves of cash, speeding up cash flow helps to reduce periods when cash isn’t coming in but expenses are still a drain. Axiar claims that money will be deposited into your account faster. Worldpay, for example, hangs on to the money for quite a while.

Suggestions

There are a couple of issues that I think they need to look at, though. First of all, given that Europe (as in the E.U. member countries) is converging and the Internet is accelerating that process, why do they not accept Euros or bill in Euros? Now, they claim that they are the UK’s premier payment solution… it would surely just enhance that claim if they allowed their customers to do business in Euros (and in Europe) as well. Many online businesses are not as fussy about national boundaries as bankers seem to be!

 

The other tweak needed is making sure that their websites support not just Internet Explorer, but also the other major browsers as well as non-Windows platform browsers. Vista may be a success, but Firefox browser on Windows is becoming a major IE competitor. If Vista stumbles, so will IE 7.0.

A good example of how their website omits this can be seen on their front page if you are a Firefox user. Let’s hope it’s just limited to the graphic’s untidiness. The version of Firefox (2.0.3 in English on WinXP) that I used displayed a problem in the

Image Problem

bottom left corner with one of the images. It made the page look untidy. Look here and see for yourself. It’s not a major glitch, other websites display incorrectly, too.

I’ve asked for clarification on the status of non-Windows or non-IE browsers and whether they can operate the services such as their “virtual terminal” or not.

Updated on March 26th and 29th, 2007…
The FF image problem has been fixed very promptly. So regular FF users should see a perfect front page! That was very fast. Also, Axiar have confirmed that the virtual terminal will work fine in IE and FF. So that’s great news there!

What is your experience of credit card payment services? Which one did you use? Was it a positive or negative experience?

Sponsored Post.

Do you have investments that make you poorer?

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I’m revisiting a topic I started last October with a similar title. The original post is linked here with a link to Rich Dad Poor Dad guru, Robert Kiyosaki.
Learn to Invest Like a Pro: Why the Rich Get Richer – Yahoo! Finance

The lesson my rich dad was drumming into my head, and I mean to drum into yours, is that investing should make me richer every month, not poorer. It should put money in my pocket every month, not take money out. To him, it was a miracle that so many financial services salespeople could convince financially naive people that it was smart to pay money to invest.

What a wonderful quotation this is! It has been in the back of my mind for a long time… But I tried to articulate it, however, it wasn’t convincing to other people… I’m glad that you wrote it that way, Robert.

Do you have investments that make you poorer? No? Are you sure? Let’s see.

About 2 years ago, my wife signed us both up for an invesment/insurance product from Cigna. The initial payments were small, and the whole policy was supplementary to our primary life insurance policies.

The deal with Cigna was this: Pay about US$30 each per month. 50% will be for additional life insurance, 50% for mutual funds. The money was deducted from our credit card each money for the life of the policy. Is this a smart or dumb move?

To many in the mutual fund or life insurance industry, they would say smart, because you are getting an investment and life insurance thrown in. To me, I would now say dumb. Here’s why:

1. you’ve added an extra $60 expenses to your credit card each month.
2. you are paying THROUGH THE NOSE for this service in commissions and expenses: the list starts – credit card expenses, upfront commissions, mutual fund expenses, management fees on the mutual funds, (since we’re buying in a second currency) currency exchange fees and currency exchange. I’m not sure what other expenses there are as the documents are all in Chinese.

3. Risk: there are additional risk factors posed by such an agreement.

  • currency exchange risk: it’s denominated in US$ and Euros, but both of these currencies are expensive relative to ours.
  • mutual fund risk, will it do well or not over the life of the policy.
  • risk of not fulfilling contract payments, so policy becomes void.
  • country risk (where we live now has a country risk factor that is higher than the Western world).

Overall, right now it’s looking like a dumb decision, because we are the investors who are taking the risks, but it looks like we are the ones paying for it. One of the rules of investing is that to invest well, you need to be rewarded for those risks. If you are not, then why invest. Moreover, because the policy is early in its life, the returns are well under water, compared to even just the amount of money invested in the mutual funds.

Would you purchase such a mixed vehicle for a policy? How would you look at this investment? Comment away, please.

SMF, TinyPortal and Aero Theme: Add a community to your blog!

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Over the years, I have worked with several different forum softwares: SMF, PunBB, PHPBB2, and as a user vBulletin. One of my customers wanted to upgrade his forums on his hosting plan after using PHPBB2 for a while. He needed to grow his forums a little more and add features to his groups, including attachments, sophisticated group management, increased ease of use, and so on. But the vBulletin license was too expensive.

I recommended SMF as a good alternative, and in fact, it is. But we had to migrate the forums. It was complex but possible. So, yesterday we worked for about 4 or 5 hours to get everything working. So here’s how the process went!

Backing up your installation
I first backed up everything, then I created a working install of the original website. Just in case everything went wrong, we could redirect everything to the backup or restore the backup easily enough. If you are upgrading, such a cautious route is highly recommended.

Finding the software
We decided to go with SMF, but I couldn’t get the webinstall software that they were offering to install, so I downloaded the files from the most recent version, and uploaded them to my host. It was a little slow, but reliable. Once uploaded, the install went quite smoothly, and was done quickly.
Importing Posts from PHPBB2
The next problem we faced was importing the 300-odd posts and settings from PHPBB2 to SMF. Naturally, there is an importer utility, but initially it wouldn’t work. I tried almost every variation, but it kept reporting that it couldn’t find the PHPBB files. I think that was because I hadn’t installed the backup properly. The other odd thing was the posts all have to be IN THE SAME database as the SMF install BEFORE you import. You can’t import from another DB to your SMF database. However, it did work as reported, eventually. I still don’t know why it didn’t work at first or what I got wrong.

TinyPortal and Themes
Adding TinyPortal, and TP themes was the final stage for the initial development. Once downloaded, the administration functions of SMF allowed the easy upload and install of these packages.

For more information about Tiny Portal and SMF.

So, you’d like to take a look at SMF, with TinyPortal and Aero_TP theme installed, go to AgentsChat.com and have a gander! Adding a small but nicely presented community to your blog as StevePavlina has done. It will increase the number of people coming back to your blog as well as your forums.