Making it Easy For Clients to Pay You 2
Late the week before last our friend who runs a computer shop here in town was approached to become an agent for Global Chat - VOIP telephony provider. At first he wanted to turn the offer down but Toni prevailed on him to at least look a little deeper into the offer.
Needless to say Toni spotted another good deal and over the weekend he installed Global Chat in his shop and will now begin actively marketing the service and we’ll be involved with that.
Within 24 hours of making the decision to market the product - and before he had anything to demonstrate to customers - he already has firm orders for three accounts and the required equipment.
While I was very keen to move into the VOIP arena on a commercial basis for our small business I was a little reluctant to move away from Skype but one thing convinced me that Skype was not going to be good for us and ultimately for any small business or home office.
To feed credits into your Skype account you must use a credit card - that’s the only way they will accept your money. I found that rather interesting because Skype is owned by eBay and eBay has a fairly firm grip on PayPal and yet you can’t use PayPal to fund your Skype account.
On the other hand Global Chat has about six different ways to fund your account ranging from PayPal and direct deposit through to the more usual method of using your credit card.
So that was a no-contest - we’ve ditched our credit cards and we’re not going back to them just to use Skype when there is an alternative that is happy to take our money in other ways.
