OTHER IMPORTANT SUBJECTS - COVERED IN DEPTH

DAILY CASH FLOW REPORT:

One of the most important things you will need to do each morning is your cash flow "Daily Report". We use a special software program to create ours, which makes it a breeze to do, and takes less than a few minutes each day!

In order to compile your daily report, you will need the following 3 things from the last twenty four hour period:

• Number of Orders Received for all products
• Number of Refunds Processed for all products
• Number of Unique Visitors that came to your site

Your goal is to figure out your "Dollars Per Unique Visitor", therefore you need to know how many sales you made, how many refunds you processed, and how many unique visitors came to your site.

If your sales are down, or your refunds are way up, you'll want to keep informed of this and by taking only few minutes each day, you can create a running report that will give you insight into what exactly your situation is.

You can obtain the number of orders, and refunds from your merchant admin area. You can obtain the number of unique visitors through your stats tracking system.

If you don't have a stats tracking system in place, don't worry. We cover setting up the very popular "Web Trends Live" service near the end of this manual.

For more information on the software used to create the daily report please visit: http://www.statsprogram.com

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DEALING WITH ORDER PROBLEMS:

While you are collecting the data for the Daily Report, and are totalling the number of sales made, and refunds processed the previous day, make sure to also pay careful attention to FAILED orders.

These are usually visible in your administration area, for whichever credit card company processes your orders.

Regardless of which company takes care of your card processing, you should be able to see the following, at a glance:

• Successful Orders
• Declined Credit Card Orders
• Failed Electronic Checking Orders
• Refunds you have Processed

If you use Verisign/Signio, these are available in your "Daily Activity Report" or "PayFlow Link Reports". Accessing this date through PayFlow links main screen is preferable, because included on one page it shows the customers name, the price, and name of the product they tried to order, and what the response was.

If you're processing system does not offer you access to the important data we have mentioned, you should ask if they are able to provide it to you. It is terribly important that you be able to view, and act upon declined, or duplicate charges without too much trouble. The successful orders should take care of themselves, but you're the one that has to deal with the customer chargebacks if a duplicate charge goes unnoticed!

If you click on the Transaction ID (which is not showing in example below for security reasons) it allows you to click and see further information, such as the customers address, telephone number, email address, etc. This is very helpful information for the customers who's orders were NOT successfully processed.

The main screen also shows the processing code, so you can easily see who's order was declined, and in many cases, why it was declined.

Our example below shows a handful of orders, however, the "1000" code shows us that these people attempted to order via electronic check, but were declined. This is usually caused by incorrect or missing electronic check data, such as the routing number.

You can see the first person in the list tried twice, with no success. He needs to be contacted, with an offer of assistance.

Do not wait too long to contact this person. If you wait 2 or 3 days, chances are this person won't even remember what the were ordering in the first place!

In order to contact this person, we click on the Transaction ID number for the failed order, and obtain the telephone number, and email address, so that we may contact him/her.

For the first contact, email is fine. Chances are, if someone tries twice to order, they really want the product, and won't mind receiving a helpful email, and a follow up telephone call if you don't see their order come in anytime in the next few days.

Ideally, you should take the person's name, email address, and telephone number for the declined orders, and add them to a dated list on your desktop after you contact them for the first time. Later on, when you see that their order has been successfully processed, you can remove them from your list. That way, no one is overlooked.

You can create an ICQ note for the "dated list" mentioned above. Each time you load ICQ, (which should be in the early morning), the note will appear on your screen!

You can also use a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Works, but you may find that it's not as easy to access, and probably won't be something you care to keep open all day. Depending on how much RAM you have, it may suck up too many system resources, and crash your computer!

At the time I am writing this I have 184 MB of RAM, and on some days, depending on how many programs I have open, I simply can't risk opening an Excel file when it's not necessary. The ICQ note is already open on my desktop, so in my opinion, it's far superior to a spreadsheet.

IMPORTANT OFF TOPIC TIP: Always, always save your work frequently. While writing this specific page, I crashed my system twice and lost all content each time. Right now, I'm on the third re-write!

If you email someone, and offer assistance with their order, but don't see any new order from them within 3 days, you can always call them, and offer to accept their order over the phone.

Prior to calling the person on the phone who's original order attempt was unsuccessful, make sure to open up your transaction terminal, (if you don't keep it open all day), and any administration area you may need to create this person a username, and password. That way, they don't have to wait on the phone while you get prepared!

When you have processed their order on the phone, ALWAYS be sure to add them to your autoresponder series, so they can receive any follow up messages you use, just as if they'd placed their order online. This is especially important if your autoresponder is set to submit a receipt upon receiving an order.

If your autoresponder is not set up to send instant customer receipts, you definitely need to start doing that now. If not, you may find during the month of February and March, all you're doing is sending customer receipts for income tax purposes! Quite certainly your time can be better spent...

The second person to receive a "1000" code in the example above tried to order twice as well, however we can see that on the second try, his order went through, without difficulty. We do not NEED to contact him.

If you have some spare time, you can certainly send this person a follow up email at the time you see their order has been processed. In the email make sure to state you are aware he/she had a few initial problems ordering, and that if they do have ANY further trouble from that point on, that you are available to provide customer support.

If possible, offer some tips that may help prevent any future problems, such as "When logging into the password protected area, make sure you don't use any CAPITAL LETTERS, or else you will receive a login error."

If I was the customer, after having some initial problem I know I would feel better receiving an email from the company, with an assurance of immediate support, should I need it in the future. I believe this is especially true for people that just made their first online purchase.

Transaction Reponse Codes - What do they mean?

Each type of transaction has it's own response code. You must familiarize yourself with what these mean, because if someone has a problem with their order, and requests a real time Human Click chat with you, you will need to know at a glance exactly what the problem is, and won't have time to go digging through HELP files to figure out what a 12, or 1000 code means.

At first it's hard to remember all of them, so you might want to print them out, with their meanings, and leave this by your computer somewhere, for easy reference. If you consult with the HELP system provided by your processing company, you should find the list there.

If you're able to, try and keep the merchant transaction window open all day that allows you to access your order reports. If you get into a chat with someone who crashed prior to viewing the "Your order has been approved" page, they'll want to know the status of their purchase, and won't want to wait while you open your browser, access the admin area, and dig around for any signs of their order.

Additionally, if you can get it set up, it's ideal to have an email go out automatically containing helpful information, and troubleshooting tips for order problems, the minute someone's order has been declined. That way, if, or when they open their email program to contact you by email for help, the "troubleshooting tips" page will already be there, waiting for them. It should have a subject line similar to the following, so it can catch their attention:

<Name>, we see you had problems ordering <product name>

Or:

<Name>, assistance for ordering <product name>

If you've already created your visual screen shot tutorials covering the subject of order problems, you can simply include a link in the email, leading to that web page!