Yes, Paypal did their absolute best to kill our business. I suppose they probably weren’t trying to, but they honestly couldn’t have done any more damage to us if they had been trying. Right out of the box they made it almost impossible to work with them, because their system literally didn’t work the way it says it does on the website and the documentation. Their higher level techs admitted that they knew it didn’t but didn’t seem to care.

When we launched things definitely went from bad to worse. Their system caused issues with multiple orders and didn’t track the orders properly and left us with a over a thousand orders that had to be reconciled manually. We upgraded to a different system that we could control more at the paypal reps suggestion only to find that a few days into it, some stupid accountant in their risk depart read a totally fake attack article on a scam website. It’s clearly a scam website for a government related organization about toll free service that doesn’t exist and only goes back to a fake address in the Netherlands. It’s clearly a scam site with the phone number 800-000-0000 etc and no names of any kind. Yet Rochelle didn’t look at the source at all and shut us down completely without any notice or so much as an email, which is apparently what they do in some cases to scam websites. She didn’t contact their account rep or research anything she just shut us off cold because of her own mistake.

Read the full article about how a single girl at paypal made a mistake and shut our business off cold and then made it even worse by lying and trying to cover it up.

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Getting a letter from the FCC demanding what could be trucks full of paperwork, essentially every scrap of paper on every customer we’ve ever had, is right up there with getting a letter from the IRS saying they’re auditing you for the last 7 years. It would have been extremely long, difficult and expensive even if we made it through without much damage. We were very fortunate to have talked to the right attorney. Neil Ende and the Technology Law group wrote one letter responding to the FCC attorneys, and we never heard from them again.

I had already bought a new high speed printer because I assumed we were going to have to rent a truck to get all the paperwork they were demanding to Washington. But Neil Ende was like the Jedi master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who convinced the storm troopers that these weren’t the droids they were looking for. He pointed out numerous issues with their request, questioned their jurisdiction, explained that we weren’t really a phone company but an internet search service, and changed the game entirely on them. Ultimately I think he simply showed them that we weren’t an easy or maybe even appropriate target to go after and they left us alone. That was just over two years ago.

Neil Ende epitomized the difference between a good lawyer and a great one, in that he had the experience and understanding to see a totally different approach that was a hundred times better than even winning the dispute.

We have used Efax for several years and I’ve written about Efax’s poor customer service before. I put up with a few price increases and honestly knew there were cheaper services.

The service also went down hill lately and some people (especially anyone from Paetec) had problems faxing things to us. So I knew we had to get a new service. But the straw that broke the camels back was after my credit card was compromised I got an email from efax at 8pm Sunday night. I don’t know if it was shut off Sunday night because nobody tried to fax me and complained until Monday morning.

They saw the credit card data they’ve used for years come back as “lost or stolen” and they still went ahead and shut down a good customer at essentially the same time they sent out the email notice. No grace period or time to contact them, they shut you down and then let you pay for it to restart it after the fact. Needless to say, I didn’t give J2, Efax or their all Indian call center a new credit card. I changed to a new (less expensive) service and had it up and working within two hours.

Check out the efax comparison and the problems we had with Efax

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Are you looking for professional recordings for your voicemail greetings and menus? A professional recording gives your whole business a much more professional image. We just had a new professional recording made for our phone system by Snap Recordings. I’ll write more about it in a little bit after it’s uploaded to the phone system.

I write about the good ones, but I’m also going to point a few bad choices we made along the way. First National Merchant Solutions isn’t all bad, but it definitely has some issues. I signed up with First National Merchant Solutions in 2003 and have used them for the past six years and my business has grown from a couple thousand dollars a month if that, to over a million dollar a year business. So I’ve stuck with them through a few issues and been a loyal customer. I was in their affiliate program before although I really didn’t promote it because I really wasn’t sending people to them for the commissions.

The bad side is definitely their customer service. And support for their payfuse gateway is non existent. I say that because it took weeks to get the login and password and it recently took five days of calling every day and having to fight with customer service just to get someone from payfuse to actually call you back. Payfuse definitely has issues and if I was doing this again, I’d definitely use a more main stream service. The interface works once you figure it out, but it’s very funky and awkward. And you can’t make refunds on orders late at night. When you ask them about it during the day it works but late at night some things don’t seem to work for some reason.

I’m going to go back to paying $50 a month for paypal’s payflow pro instead of payfuse. I thought it was worth it because it would remove one issue between the merchant account and the shopping cart, but it doesn’t. It puts one in between that nobody can solve or fix anything on.

When I initially started my business, I signed up with a very local small hosting business. Later I went to a very large nationwide service. The small one had limitations and the large one (which looked great up front) turned out to be a nightmare. So I was looking for a good web hosting company “in between” the big and small companies I had used when I found Guardian Digital from a referral from one of my customers. They were close by in Allendale NJ. I’ve since moved a little further away but am still close enough to meet with them in person when necessary, which is nice.

I’ve been with them now through moves, marriages, a few kids, and numerous growing pains through the years. They are large enough to be reliable and have several good people that know what they’re doing. They also took the time to understand what we were trying to do and have done a lot more than just host our site. They have done a lot of programming on our main look up tool (the Instant 800 Lookup now called the Toll Free Search Engine).

All of the people at Guardian Digital are reliable, responsive and extremely competent and are both friends and yet very professional. They put up with a lot at times and they deliver. They’re one of the main services that I’ve built my business on for many years.

Excellence far Exceeding Expectations…

That’s the only way to describe the work of Adina at Flamingo Design.  We definitely lucked out, finding the right person to add an amazing artistic touch and professional look to our 20 document.  It was  complex document with several different forms, and charts etc.  Adina was extremely responsive and quickly took our project from a basic word document and brought it to life. 

I will definitely use Flamingo Design for all of our graphic design work in the future.  They were very economical and did absolutely superior work.  The best way to illustrate the quality of her work is probably to show you the before and after.

Here’s the BEFORE:

And here’s the AFTER:

I think it’s also important to note that I put this up on my own website simply as an added way to thank Flamingo Design and Adina in particular.  I don’t usually do this, but it came out so great and we were really so pleased that we wanted to do something extra to express our appreciation of their work for us.

This was posted a couple years ago before I even used the wordpress blog format.