Blogcentric
Justifying $3
Had lunch today. Not Lobster.
Let me not beat around the bush on this one. We’re in a cafe. The cafe owner comes over to tell us about the specials of the day. Chicken & Vegetable Pie, some variety of soup…and “the lobster is now $3 more because it’s much bigger”.
Okaaay…
See that last part? The “We charge $3 more because the lobster is bigger part”? Read the rest of this entry »
Assessing Pain is no different in Business
I was having a quick business meeting today, when mid meeting, it occurred to me that I was assessing a problem for a business in an almost identical way to a common clinical pain assessment technique.
Back in 1997, I started my career as an Ambo. Back then we were taught to always assess “pain” by following a simple process, identified by the acronym
PQRST. It stands for…
- Provokes (What is causing/provoking your pain?)
- Quality (What does the pain feel like? We always asked the patient to “describe” the pain to get an understanding of the problem)
- Radiation (Where is the pain? In one specific place? In many places?)
- Severity (How sever is this pain? Rate it on a scale of 1-10 relative to your own experience with pain)
- Time on onset (When did the pain start?)
It occurred to me that I can also use this simple process in business. It also occurred to me that I was doing it anyway…I just didn’t match it up with my clinical training until now.
This process can be applied to any situation in business. The principle of understanding the history of a problem cannot be ignored. Read the rest of this entry »
If PayPal, Paymate and eWAY got into a fight…who would win?
As a builder of shopping cart websites, it’s not only my job to be able to build the actual site, but it’s also my job to provide you with sound advice as to what payment gateway to use. Not just from a functional perspective, but from a fiscal one too.
So today, we’re doing the low down on two well-known gateways…Paypal (an eBay Company) and Paymate, and one “not so well known” provider, eWAY.
For this exercise, we took four fairly low turnover scenarios. For Small Biz and SME’s with an annual revenue of more than $100k minimum, we’ll be looking at this later next week when we compare some payment gateway providers with full merchant facilities offered by banks. (This is a longer than normal blog, so bear with me. The detail is necessary!)
Our scenario categories for this exercise are:
- eBay Seller $3,000 in sales per annum
- Hobbyist $14,000 in sales per annum
- Startup $30,000 in sales per annum
- Small Biz $60,000 in sales per annum
Before we begin on the numbers, let us first examine each provider and their pro’s and con’s.
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