MegaPath’s Black Friday Strategy

Black Friday will soon be upon us. This is the day after Thanksgiving that marks the traditional start to the Christmas shopping season. It’s a day that retailers brace for and depend on. For as Black Friday goes, so goes the profitability of the year.

The name Black Friday is generally attributed to the accounting practice of using red ink to show losses and black ink to show profits. Many retailers struggle all year long just to pay the bills and keep the lights on. Black Friday represents, at least symbolically, the change of the company’s fortunes from red ink to black ink. That’s how important the holiday shopping season is every year. It can be the difference between profit and loss, survival of the business or bankruptcy.

Since Black Friday and its online equivalent called Cyber Monday (The Monday after Black Friday) kickoff the most stressful and highest sales volume month of the year, it behooves retail businesses to have robust processes in place ahead of time. That includes the ability to process credit card transactions rapidly and securely. Lose your connection to the credit card processing companies, even for an hour, and you risk a stampede of irate customers out your front door and directly to your competitor. It’s even worse online. If your site is down or slow or you can’t accept credit card payments, your competitors are just a click away.

With this in mind, MegaPath is asking retailers, “Are You Prepared For Black Friday?” Even with predictions that consumers will be spending slightly less this year than last, there will still be a torrent of sales activity this shopping season. In fact, it might be argued that with less spending each customer becomes more valuable. Anything you can do to give that customer a pleasant shopping experience will work to your advantage.

MegaPath is a major competitive telecommunications carrier and leader in managed IP services. They serve the retail sector with high speed network connections specifically designed to support secure payment transactions. They call their service a “Payment Processor Extranet.” As the name implies, this is a specialized form of connectivity unlike simple Internet broadband. MegaPath’s Payment Processor Extranet connects to your retail site-to-site MPLS VPN service to securely carry credit card and other payment information from your point of sale locations to credit, debit gift and private label card payment and check payment processors. You choose which processors you work with and can and or change them at any time. MegaPath provides a fully redundant proactively monitored communications network to the processors to ensure that your transactions will get through.

For gas stations, convenience stores and other retailers not connected in a MPLS network, MegaPath offers “StoreConnect,” an IPSec encrypted service that works over a wide variety of broadband connections including DSL, cable, wireless and T1 lines. Like the Payment Processor Extranet, this service gives smaller retailers access to the leading payment processors for fast, secure and reliable transactions.

One of the most important processes involved in payment transactions is PCI or Payment Card Industry security. This standard involves a firewalled secure network protected by encryption and strong access control. MegaPath’s retail solutions are designed from the ground up to be PCI compliant.

So, what’s it going to be this year? Will you depend on slow dial-up access from your POS terminals that will likely keep your customers waiting and irritated as they stand in line? Or will you make the transaction process as transparent to your customers as possible with fast and reliable broadband connectivity? If you choose to make your transactions fast, efficient, reliable and secure, there’s no time to waste. Get more information about MegaPath and other retail connectivity solutions and be ready to make the most from the Black Friday weekend and the entire holiday shopping season.

Agony of the Cell Phone Shopper

Do you enjoy pain? Then treat yourself to a day shopping for cell phones. Motor directly to the closest big name carrier store and let them have at you for a couple of hours. Then drive around till you find the next one and repeat the experience. If you have time left after you've canvassed all the carrier stores, and can still move under your own power, then visit an electronic retail store or two. On your way home, refill that tank of gas you drained during your pilgrimage and relax with a nice bag of ice on your forehead. Why that funny look on your face? You didn't even buy anything, did you?

That's the pleasure of conventional cell phone shopping. A recent study by J.D. Power and Associates shows a general undertone of dissatisfaction with the wireless retail sales experience. Leading the slide were the four horsemen of shopping misery - sales staff, store display, store facility and price/promotion. Not mentioned in the study, but fast becoming a major factor in all shopping decisions, is the fifth horseman known as gas prices. Just how far afield are you willing to go searching for the perfect phone when you can almost hear the liquid gold being sucked through your fuel injectors?

Avoiding horseman number five may wind up permeating everything we do. As the price of gas shoots right past $4 a gallon, perhaps on its way to a full fin, every news program is riddled with stories about our shock & awe and how fast we're changing our habits to cope. A common practice now is to combine shopping trips into a few well planned bursts instead of ambling all over town to compare products and check prices.

Another approach is to just stop shopping altogether... at least in the physical world. With a Web browser and a broadband connection you can shop for just about anything and not spend of drop of fuel. If you're careful, you can even avoid paying for the fuel used to bring the product to your door.

Shopping for cell phones and plans online offers other advantages as well. Let's see how it deals with those four reported shopping dissatisfiers. First, you won't have to contend with the sales staff because there is no salesperson guarding the gate. You browse in, look around to your heart's content taking as much time you want, and browse right back out if you wish. This gives you time to look at various pictures of all the phones, read the detailed specs that are never on display in the stores, check the pricing and compare one carrier's offerings against the others.

If and only if you want help, you click on a link to ask questions or otherwise get assistance. Or call a toll free number to hear a human voice. Compare that to fending off an overly eager commissioned "associate" who is all over you within seconds of crossing their threshold. It's not that store sales people don't mean well. It's just that they are so darn motivated to sell something and not always thoroughly versed in the nuances of their product line. Don't even think about asking for a fair comparison with a competing carrier's product. That's just begging for it.

Store displays are somewhat hit and miss, providing their contribution to customer dissatisfaction. Not all models are necessarily mounted for your viewing pleasure. Some are in-stock. others aren't. The really big fancy displays are the phones that are being heavily promoted. Even these only offer a limited number of bullet points. You have to think to ask for further detail and probably wait while someone looks up the information.

Compare that to the online experience where the virtual world offers enough space so that every phone model available can get a full photo and text display. You can even search out user reviews to see what people who bought the phone really think of it. Go ahead and ask for user reviews in a store. Then quick say "just kidding" before it gets unpleasant.

Speaking of the bricks and mortar experience, how much fun is it to get your phone activated? My experience is anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of crushing boredom. It depends on how well the system is working that and how many phones, if any, your particular sales associate has personally activated. When you buy it online, that's all taken care of behind the scenes and your phone shows up ready to use.

What about prices and promotions? Go ahead and compare online pricing for cell phones with major carrier plans and see for yourself. You may be astonished to see that the prices, rebates and special offers of things like free Bluetooth headphones are better than you'll find at a carrier store or even a big box electronics store. Free phones are more common than not, with big discounts on those high priced smartphones. Some models even offer a free phone when ordered with service, and then a cash back rebate on the free phone. In the bricks and mortar world, that's pretty much unheard of.

A final advantage of the virtual world is that it never closes. You want to buy a cell phone in the middle of the night? Go ahead. It's the same experience as during the day. It's liberating to be able to shop when you please, take as much time as you want, and not have to squeeze a side trip or two into your daily schedule. Why, you'll even have your purchased beamed down to you like in Star Trek. OK, not that fast. It will take a couple of days and the starship will say UPS or FedEx instead of USS Enterprise.