With e-commerce being more and more popular, it’s important to know which gateways are ahead of the game. PayPal currently handles 60% of all online transactions and appears to be leaving the other payment gateways in the dust.
In a test period, the following gateways lead the back with this number of transactions:
Here are some important facts to keep in mind when choosing a payment gateway:
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For those of you who don’t know, Dave Wiskus is a creative officer and designer at Black Pixel, a creative, interdisciplinary collective of 20+ designers, developers and artists who work together to create beautiful application for Apple devices.
Dave gave a great talk at The Next Web 2012 conference in Amsterdam, where he talks about his belief in the future of design, worth a watch:
Hat Tip Mark.
Web Africa has revamped its Business Uncapped offering, leveraging the added capacity it has built into its network, which increased by 8% in the last week alone, delivering a superior service at prices which make it one of the most compelling business internet access offerings on the market.
The new Business Uncapped offering has been designed around the user who is looking for a business solution which is structured to prioritise business-critical traffic simply and efficiently.
“South African business owners are becoming a lot more demanding of their service providers, and rightly so. Business is all happening real-time, whether it’s delivering voice over the network or taking part in real-time trading. Making sure your business can guarantee quality connectivity should be the first priority for the serious business owner,” explains Tim Wyatt-Gunning, CEO of Web Africa.
The Business Uncapped product offers Uncapped ADSL from R299 per month, and now includes, at no extra cost, a .co.za domain, a web hosting package with unlimited traffic and a R400 Google AdWords voucher. In addition, each Business Uncapped subscriber has access to Expert Support in which service queries are handled by only the most experienced call centre agents.
Web Africa business customers’ ADSL usage is prioritised on its network, meaning super-fast, stable connectivity for business-critical applications. The transparent Acceptable Usage Policy means business owners get to see exactly how they are consuming bandwidth and manage their usage to ensure optimal speeds at all times. Web Africa has set itself apart from any other ISP in this regard and business users have openly welcomed the systems.
“While the prices speak for themselves, we believe the quality of the user experience is the real benefit for our business community. Business owners are realising that you get what you pay for. In this instance we are delivering quality connectivity, premium support, complete control at international standards – the business-class lounge, without any pretention,” Wyatt-Gunning concludes.
A couple of days ago Google published an interesting article that looks into Internet in Africa. Google has recognized that more and more people have started using Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa – I must tell you, Google’s showing a lot of Internet in Africa at the moment, I keep reading articles about things they’re doing and working on for Africa.
Google interviewed over 13,000 people in urban centers of 6 African countries and they’re showing of the results now. The countries were, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda. The aim, to understand how and why people use the Internet, what prevents non-users from being online and a ton more.
From this study, InsightsAfrica was born, a free, publicly available collection of information about Internet usage in Africa, specifically those 6 countries I mentioned.
There’s a BUNDLE of information, such as:
There’s a really strong focus on mobile, which is most probably the information everyone will be interested in, so head on over to InsightsAfrica and take a read, it’ll be worth your while if you’re interested in the online space!
Web Africa popped me a line earlier today about a new announcement of theirs, ADSL from as little as just R7.99 per gig. This new promotion affects Web Africa’s Home ADSL range in that the price per Any-Time gig has been dropped to just R7.99. I’m not joking, just R7.99! And by Any-Time, I’m referring to Peak and Off-peak, no weird catches in that regard.
Here’s another way to look at it, for those people who are already customers, imagine you had 2 Gigs of Peak Data and 8 Gigs of Off-Peak Data for R149.00, you’ll now have 10 Gigs of Any-Time Data for exactly the same price.
CEO, Tim Wyatt-Gunning says, “We took the decision to simplify the home offering and bring our customers what they are looking for – fast, reliable connectivity without complicated terms of usage and at the best price possible,”
If you want to find out more, pop on over the the Web Africa website here.
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Chart source: Statista
TPB put out a blog post today, explaining that it doesn’t matter what anyone does, the will prevail and will be available. People often forget that these warez groups are heavily connected and highly clued up with computers, the ‘people’ I refer to are mostly law enforcement types.
Here’s what they had to say:
TPB is not hosted in -insert country here-, as far as we know. “As far as we know?” you might ask! Yes. TPB is set up in a very special way to make sure that it will stay up. This means that noone really knows exactly where the servers are, but we’ve made sure to stay out of the United States of Arrogance and some other countries where the governments do not like free speech.
The only box someone could find is the one in the front, that needs to be public. We have multiple of those, scattered like diarrhea around the world. They contain no storage device, no graphics card. Only a network cable, a cpu and memory. Being nice people, we’ve put small easters egg into each box though, for the hard work put into finding that public machine! Nothing dangerous though, just funny.
Even though this means that TPB can never be pin-pointed to a certain country, the Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read. We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers does not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people does not agree.
Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal. Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.
We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.
This might get interesting!
Are you using social media to market your company or brand? Are you using social media to generate leads for your business?
I’ll bet that while it works to a degree, it leaves much to be desired. Firstly, while social media is a fantastic tool, it’s pretty useless unless we know how to use it effectively and properly. Social media is all about communicating with prospective and current clients.
By communicating with clients, we’re building relationships with them. Sales has become about building strong relationships and nurturing them. In order to win clients over, they also need to feel that they can trust us. Building trust is not so easy. Our customers need to feel that they are in safe and capable hands.
This brings me to the this post’s topic. How much trust can we gain within 140 characters? Or from a Facebook update? Quite a bit actually. There are companies out there that are getting social media right. Woolworths, First National Bank and Afrihost come to mind. These companies have a strong social media presence and deliver fantastic customer service with social media.
However, if you’re starting out and you aren’t an established company with a substantial following, you are going to have to start somewhere. A blog is that somewhere. Here’s why. Not many people may know you yet. Sure, you have a website and it has all your details on it. So what? You’re just another company out there.
People do business with people. People write blogs. Blogs give insights into companies that business websites do not. Blogs reveal your human side. Your blog could explain how you manufacture your products, where they are sourced and how you give back to the community. They can reveal the inspiration to your latest design.
The nice thing that I like about blogs is the promotion of interaction. Readers can leave a comment, contributing conversation around your post, and ultimately around your business, company or product. In fact, it can create quite a stir about you too.
Writing about a specific topic helps teach people about that topic. The secret here is that you don’t need to know everything about that topic. You don’t need to be a guru. You just need to know it and understand it. You need to be able to explain it to people who know nothing about it and help them comprehend it. To them, you will be the expert. You will be the go-to person. The person that took the time to help. In fact, the more you actually help someone, the more successful you will be.
Think about it. In this day and age, we are marketing and selling nearly everything. Including ourselves. Imagine trying to sell a cellphone to somebody. You can tell them all the features, but how will it benefit them specifically? You’re not selling this cellphone to this person. You’re helping them buy it. You’re making it easier for them and yourself.
While it may not be the easiest thing to do within a tweet or a Facebook update, a blog certainly is the right platform to help people and build your credibility. Social media can now be used properly as a means to send traffic to your blog, as well as providing real time customer care. With social media, you direct people to your useful content and if your content is any good, and it must be, your readers will share your content with their friends and followers via their social networks.
Installing the appropriate plugins on a blog will allow you visitors to share your useful content that much easier. A rule to remember though, is that social media is a medium of two way communication, not only one way self promotion. Share links about your industry and the people or topics that inspire you. Your message should be a well balanced one, always promoting conversation.
What do you think? Is a blog essential to a social media strategy or not?
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