Brad Fallon

Get your copy of the updated "At Work Internet Audience Media Conception Study" here. (This is the updated srvey from the one they did in 2001.) Very interesting stats about internet and media usage.

James Maguire wrote a nice column about My Wedding Favors for ecommerce-guide.com, part of the Internet.com network. Don't let Jennifer see it though -- she's the one that does all the work. I'm just the Search guy.

If you left Paymentech, or you decided not to go with Paymentech because of the way they mistreat their customers, post your comment here to let Paymentech know.

Need proof? Try these Google searches: paymentech merchant account

paymentech (page 3)

paymentech

Anytime you're quoted in the Wall Street Journal it's a good thing. The Online Journal is cool too. Check out the article in the Startup Journal. Best line: "[h]e and his wife set up an online-wedding business of their own that is growing like an out-of-town guest list."

So after shutting the account down last week, Nadia from Paymentech calls me back today to let me know that she and "the committee" have reached a decision.

They will turn our account back on, but the need to keep a "reserve account" of $75,000.00.

Doh!

For those of you keeping score, at an average order size of $100, that's enough to handle approximately 750 orders or enough to cover half a month worth of orders if every single one of them charged back and we had zero funds in our account.

Keep in mind that they have seized $50,000.00 so far. (By the way, that's for orders and product costs that we've already shipped to customers.) If we didn't have enough to cover that, we would have had to tell our 5 employeees to go home and best of luck -- we can't pay you.

The best part was when Nadia said "everything they did was within their contractual rights." I don't think she liked it when I said that, regardless of whether she was right or not, it was morally repugnant.

What these guys do is take everyone's money for month without a peep until there gets to be a decent amount of money there. Then, they seize it and hold it hostage -- and it's up to you to figure out how to go replace the money that they just hijacked.

Here's the math: Yahoo claims that 1 out of every 8 e-commerce stores is a Yahoo store. (Whoa.) Paymentech is their preferred default provider. How many stores do you think they've done this to? How many millions are they sitting on, collecting and not paying interest?

I'm actually trying to find out. Everyone I've talked to has heard a similar story about these processers. For every one fraudulent credit card from Bulgaria (no offense to honest Yahoo store owners in Bulgaria, it's just an example), there is a merchant card processor sitting there extorting money from a bunch of small business owners trying to make a small payroll and help a few employees put food on the table.

Shutting an operating business down, out of the blue, for no reason other than because (1) "we can" and (2) we'd prefer if your money was in our account rather than yours, is reprehensible. Particularly, for a small company that's partnered with Yahoo which is supposed to be the simple and easy "small business solution."

Yahoo stores may be a great solution, but with Paymentech, it's only until you have enough money for it to be worth taking.

This can't be legal. I am currently interviewing law firms that specialize in class action lawsuits. If you know a lawyer that does this, let me know.

More importantly, if you or someone who know has been jilted by Paymentech, please email me. And feel free to post your story here as well.

Oh, and here's how it ended. I told Paymentech's "Senior Risk Manager" that I, fortunately, had a already found another provider that treated their customers better. So we're not processing cards with them anymore and please send me the money. She said "they'd look at in a few months." Until then, they just keep the $50k. Nice.

Oh, and the best part is this. Right now, if we have a return (Paymentech already has the customer's money), then they give the money back out of our bank account -- not the money they previously took from the customer. All in all, I guess it's good work if you can get it.

The good news is that business is booming, the Stomper Apprentice Program starts tomorrow, and you can get a great merchant account with excellent customer service by calling Christine here.

I bet you didn't know there was a Stomper fight song. But one of the new Stomper Apprentices, Wendell, made one. According to him, it's sung to the tune of the Florida State Fight song. (Doesn't he know I went to Florida? Well, my wife went to Florida State so I guess it's ok. :-)

Anyway, here is the official Search Engine Stomper fight song. (Kudos, Wendell.)

The Stomper Song

You got to rank, rank, rank, for good ol' Stomper U!
You got to link, link, link, and get that PR too!
You got to win, win, win, on Google and Ya-hoo!

Anyone who tries to beat us,
Will be grouchy, mad, and vexed.
Because we all know what they don't know
How to use the right anchor text!

We'll be victorious with our linkin' and testin'
And we'll know the game is done
When all our keyphrase searches
Shows us at the top of paaaaage oooonnnnnnneee!

At that's how we will win the search engine game
At good...old...Stomp-er....U!"

[Click here for Paymentech update.]

If you have decided not to go with Paymentech or to switch from Paymentech, post here to let them know. (added 11/6/04)

Paymentech is the default "preferred provider" for Yahoo Stores. They suck (Paymentech, not Yahoo).

Check this out . . . As many of you know, my wife Jennifer runs an online wedding favor business that we launched in January, 2004. Since that time, we have had increasing sales every month, beginning with $11k in January to $165k last month.

To date, we have had 8,173 orders processed with $938,307.30 in revenue, and had three chargebacks. One chargeback we can't remember and two of them were confused customers who couldn't remember what "My Wedding Favors" was when they saw it on their credit card statement. That is a problem rate of about .0003 or .03%.

Andy Jenkins, the Yahoo Store expert, with over 7,000 Yahoo Store owner customers and 40 stores himself, says this is one of the lowest rates he's ever heard of.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday this week, we received an overnight letter from Paymentech. Apparently we were selling too much and they wanted to "evaluate the level of risk exposure".

I have no problem with that; they have every right to get more information about business, ask questions, reevaluate ongoing relationships, etc.

But what they did was shut down our merchant account -- totally out of the blue -- and seize about $50,000.00 in funds for customers that had already paid us for products, some of which have already been drop shipped from other vendors.

Their letter said, "In light of the risk exposure, PTI has suspended the funding of bankcard deposits to MY WEDDING FAVORS. PTI requests the following be submitted so a full review of the account can be completed:"

It goes on to request a bunch of reasonable requests (that we provided the very next day), but now they are trying to hold OUR money in a big reserve account -- just because they can. "For up to 10 months" according to their representative.

Does anyone else think this is ridiculous? We've had no problems for nine months, and then all of a sudden with zero warning they just shut it down and take our money.

Is this legal? (I know -- I'm the one that went to law school, but I must have been gone the day we covered extortion in our contracts class.)

The funny part was they said we only "applied" for $500,000 in annual revenues so that was the problem. (Back in January when we signed up through Yahoo's recommendation we estimated $500k when it asked for annual sales prediction.) At the time, of course, I thought I was being wildly optimistic.

So they wait until we're up to $900k in sales for the year, without ever hearing a peep from them, and then they shut us down out of the blue, take our money and tell us we can't have it back for ten months. Very nice.

At least there's a happy ending. There are good merchant accounts out there. Andy, the Yahoo Store expert, recommended Advanced Credit Systems and they got us up and running quickly. If you need a good merchant account, I highly recommend them. And if you're using Paymentech, you may want to switch before it's too late. Call 1-800-814-3163 and ask for Christine. She knows the merchant account business inside and out and will help you get a merchant account that doesn't suck.

I wonder how much Paymentech made on our $900,000 in sales before they tried to put us out of business . . . . If you've heard of anything similar, let me know. If they don't give our money back in a reasonable time (like now) there's got to be a class action lawsuit there somewhere. As Dan Rather would say, "It makes you hot enough to melt the wax out of your ears."

As many of you have probably noticed, the first page of Yahoo has shrunk from the Top 20 listings to the Top 10. So now it's that much harder for you to get your web site on the coveted first page.

The interesting question is, "Why?"

Does Yahoo just want to be more like Google? Perhaps. My early theory is that if fewer sites are on the first page organically, then more people will buy the placement through Overture, pushing the bid prices up. This, of course, would be good for Overture and good for Yahoo.

Another reason, of course, could involve server load and page loading issues. If most people only click on the top few results most of the time, why bother to calculate and load the second half results every single time, and why make people load the larger pages in their browsers? Pages that are half as long will load a little faster in your browser.

All sounds good, but all of those rankings in the Top 11-20 are certainly going to take a traffic dive. That said, if you are bidding on Overture, position #4 definitely looks better on the top right (like Google) than it did only at the bottom of the page. Now, if you are the #4 bidder, you get to be at the very top on the right and the first one at the bottom of the page (which is now much closer sincer there are only 10 results).

Check out Chris Rihardson's hilarious article in Web Pro News today: "Is Microsoft Spamming the Search Engines."

Too funny. Microsoft is using cloaked doorway pages and javascript redirects to rank for certain competive keywords. This practice would get any other site banned. But what kind of a search engine would you have if it didn't include microsoft.com?

Perhaps they'll just ban the doorway pages. Or perhaps they'll do nothing -- as it often seems they do when you see your competitors' spammy pages that last forever.

And maybe Miscrosoft is testing how their own search engine is able to deal with spam. Perhaps. But as Chris says, the real question is, "What the heck is Microsoft thinking?"

Search is still getting hotter. Second quarter search revenues are up 40% from one year ago, according to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Paid search was almost a billion in Q2 -- about 40% of all online ad spending.

People have been asking how they can make sure they get all my emails. The best list to be on is the Stomper list. If you're not already on it, go to www.instantseoexpert.com, scroll partway down, and put in your name and email address to receive my e-course "The 7 Biggest SEO Mistakes that Webmasters Make." Stomper customers are automatically on the main list. Also, you can join my specific blog list over on the left.

Question: What's a "Mega" teleseminar?

Answer: One that lasts four hours. Whew!

A few weeks ago, Andy Jenkins and I did a Customers Only teleseminar for Stomper customers. We planned to stay on the line until every question was answered -- and it ended up at over four hours. We had a great time answering everyone's questions, and now Andy has edited it down to 3.5 hours and it's available for download.

Stomping the Search Engines was already a terrific course in how to drive your site to the top of the search engines. It includes 8 hours of audio in a comprehensive, nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step guide to getting great search engine rankings. Read the customer reviews here.

It also includes 5 hours of my interviews with some of the other top SEO experts in the world.

But now we've added over 3 hours of live Q&A; with actual Stomper owners. This wasn't a muted call where Andy read questions and I answered what I thought the question was. It was a live, give and take dialog with four hours of meaty SEO content. We had actual real-life examples, live questions, and follow-up questions to drill down into some one-of-a-kind content to help you get your web site to the top of Google and Yahoo.

If you haven't gotten the Stomper yet, go here to check it out: www.instantseoexpert.com. At the very least, you can get my free e-course titled "The 7 Biggest SEO Mistakes That Webmasters Make."

Oh, and you can also get, immediately, a free 45-minute interview where I explain the whole program (with real-life examples), of how I stomp the Search Engines -- and more importantly how you can too. Check it out now: Instant SEO Expert.

The Stomper Live Q&A; Mega 3.5 Hour Teleseminar is now available as a download for all Search Engine Stompers.

Wish there was a faster way to search through your emails and hard drive and find something? There is. Microsoft bought Lookout, and you can use it now. If you use Outlook, you may not know you want it, but you do. Get it here.

Interesting column in the Wall Street Journal today about parents getting access to their public schools. The more "access" and parental involvement, the better the school. And the more choice the parents have, the more that schools want to deal with parents. Go figure.