If you run an online business, or are at least trying to run an online business, you must have felt the urge to buy a smartphone such as the new Nexus S by now. Being able to check your emails, calculate your tax return, call your clients, shop for merchandise and perform thousands of other tasks all from the palm of your hand is, indeed, handy.
There are advantages to be had from working with a smartphone. Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and RIM’s Blackberry are all fantastic business tools, but for small online businesses, especially those with just one or maybe two employees, they can be a recipe for disaster.
Security Risk
With the opportunity to cram a ton of information, including all your passwords for email accounts and potentially information about your company’s business merchant account etc, onto your smartphone, losing it is a disaster. Imagine leaving your briefcase with the keys to your office in it, along with your every conversation by email and text message, links to all your favourite websites and pictures of your kids too.
To be safe, you need to have a separate work and personal phone. Plus you should purge your phone at least every week to keep it clear of too many emails, and you should never save your passwords, no matter how annoying it is to type them in every time. Having a password to access your phone is a good idea too.
Signal + Battery Power
All the power of your super smart phone can be brought crashing down by a simple tunnel. You don’t want to be on a crucial call only to lose signal or power. This not only looks unprofessional to clients, it can even cause you to lose business and sales if your business requires a response from you via your phone.
Restricting the use of your smartphone as a main point of contact to periods when it is just unavoidable will save you from any of this. People will trust you more if you call them from a landline anyway and you will be in a better position to use a computer while on the phone too.
Concentrate Less
Having all your business calls and emails coming through your palm sized unit can force you to have your nose in your phone all the time. This is not only uncomfortable; it is annoying for your friends and family and does not paint a good impression for clients.
The answer is no! Having a proper station from which to run your online business will always be much more efficient and comfortable than using just a smartphone. Smartphones are great devices and can really help your business, but restricting yourself to one portal is madness.
As a leading payment service provider, we at Lancore know a thing or two about security and the smartphone route of business simply isn’t secure as your primary means of running your companies comings and goings.
Opening an ecommerce website is a lot like opening a high street shop. You can’t just throw all your merchandise on the floor and stick a cashier at the back and open the doors. You need to seduce your customer, you need to offer incentives, you need to make it easy for them to find and move around inside and you need to show off you products effectively.
It all depends on you really…
Payment companies Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have all fallen victim to digital attacks at the beginning of December due to their withdrawal of service to WikiLeaks. A group of online campaigners, under the name Anonymous have been behind a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the company’s websites after they stopped serving WikiLeaks in the wake of its release of classified US embassy cables. A DDoS attack basically bombards the target website with page requests to the extent that the site can’t cope and crashes.
With companies such as Google, Facebook, Cisco, Intel and British Telecom all expressing an interest in a newly proposed ‘silicon valley’, now would seem like a great time to be doing business in the UK. The proposal, pitch by PM David Cameron, is based in and around Shoreditch and the Olympic Park in London and is aimed at encouraging a swath of new innovative companies, as well as big name technology brands to set up shop in the UK at a new purpose built global hub.
Lancore could well be your financial saviour.
In a bold move, Google has decided to sue the US Government because they feel they were unfairly excluded from a $58m contract to over haul their email systems. The law suit says that Google feels the terms of the contract make it impossible for them to offer their products; despite the fact it was told there would be “full and open competition “ and its ‘Google Apps’ could provide an equal if not better service. Google was supposedly told that only Microsoft’s business software could be used. Google had produced a special version of its apps for government systems to address all the security issues, but the Department for the Interior claimed the product did not comply with their security requirements.
When you open an online business or make the wise decision to move your business online, you will need a partner who knows how to handle your money in a fast, reliable and professional manner which allows you to relax safe in the knowledge that all the hard background work is being done for you. That way you can focus on what you started a business for in the first place.
When you look at your website what do you see? A business card you are proud to direct your potential clients towards? A valuable platform which reliably sells all your products? A shaky place where you are either too scared or too technologically unsure to change anything for fear of erasing the internet? However you might view your website you may not have changed anything or have even touched it for a while. Time to act!
You may have one of the best websites in the business, with all the latest Flash functionalities and interactive charts rinsed through your site, but if you don’t have an active Twitter account for your business you are already missing out on a significant number of potential customers.
