Fall 2010 Webinar Series

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 11:28 am

We’ve received great feedback on the topics we’ve handled with our best practice webinar series over the past couple of years (view the archives).  In addition, we constantly get new ideas from viewers on what they would like to hear about.  With that in mind, we’re happy to announce our Fall Webinar Series.  The four webinar topics delve into

  • The pros and cons of the freemium business model, much in vogue these days
  • The impact of Facebook Credits on your monetization strategy
  • A deeper look into the whole payment ecosystem with updates on recent regulatory changes
  • How to strategically manage your chargebacks

We invite you to register for these webinars and, as always, provide feedback on what you’d like to hear about.

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Sanjay SarathyTags: , , ,
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Best Practices, Marketing Fury, Payments 101.201.301 | No Comments »

The Hidden Benefits of Putting Up a Fight

Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 4:22 pm

Online businesses often ask us about the value of fighting chargebacks.  After all, it’s a relatively small percentage of total revenue (less than one percent if you’re following the rules).  There are, however, several reasons to put up a fight that may not be readily apparent.

There’s an old joke about two guys camping.  They hear a bear outside the tent.  One guy starts panicking, while the other calmly puts on his tennis shoes.  The first guys says “what are you thinking?  You can’t outrun a bear!”  The second guy replies “I don’t have to outrun the bear.  I just have to outrun you.”

Your site doesn’t have to be bullet proof, and you don’t want to make it impossible for someone to get their money back.  However, you do want to make your site a less attractive fraud target compared to your peers.  The web is littered with blog entries and Facebook postings of people telling how to scam a particular merchant.  If you are an easy target, people share that information, and others will victimize your business.  If you take a harder line, though, the fraudsters will look for an easier target.

Analysis of your credit card traffic will also show that you may benefit from educating the banks.  Most merchants see that a handful of banks may make up a reasonable percentage of their transactions.  Our analysis shows a drop in chargebacks received from some of these particular banks as merchants fight chargebacks over time.

Over the first year of fighting chargebacks, Vindicia clients see up to a 1/3 reduction in the total chargeback volume they receive.  While some might opt to only fight specific types of chargebacks, we have repeatedly shown that our merchants benefit from aggressively fighting chargebacks across the board.

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Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Best Practices, Client Services, Data Geek, Marketing Fury | 1 Comment »

Up & to the Right

Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 8:30 am

On Tuesday, Inc. Magazine revealed their 4th annual list of the 5000 fastest growing private companies based on three-year sales growth. Vindicia was recognized as #1068 with a growth rate of 282% over the last three years. We are very honored to have been selected and our growth is a testament to not only the strength of our team and products, but the growing need for consumer billing around digital goods and services. We can’t wait to share the growth rate next year!

Our profile on the list can be found here and many of our neighbors and customers can be found on the San Francisco or San Jose lists.

There was some interesting data in the official press release about the overall makeup, geography & revenues of the list as well.

The Hottest Regions for Fast-Growing Companies

California continues to rule the roost by number of companies on the Inc. 500, with 92, up from 84 last year and 78 in 2008. The Golden State is followed by Texas (52), Virginia (46), New York (36), and Florida (29). These five states place in the same order as last year, and each of them has more companies on the 500 than last year. They now account for more than half of the companies on the list.

The New York City and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas both gain companies this year, and New York has catches up with Washington, with each of them boasting 48 Inc. 500 companies. (Washington had 42 last year; New York had 36.) San Francisco moves up from fifth to third place, with 29 companies (up nine from last year) Los Angeles drops from third to fourth place, with 27 companies (down nine from last year); and Dallas joins the top five, with 23 companies. Chicago drops out of the top five.

The Inc. 500 at a Glance

Computer Hardware is by far the fastest-growing industry on this year’s Inc. 500, with a total growth rate of 7,194 percent. (That’s thanks to the fact that the category contains just two very fast-growing companies.) Logistics & Transportation is second, with a rate of 2,783 percent, and Security is third, with a rate of 2,299 percent.

In total, the companies on the Inc. 500 employ more than 45,000 people. Government Services is the top employer, with 7,011 jobs, followed by Business Products & Services  (5,289), Consumer Products & Services (4,804), IT Services (4,355), and Advertising & Marketing (3,533).

Advertising & Marketing has the most companies on this year’s Inc. 500 list, with 60, followed by Government Services (59), Business Products & Services (45), IT Services (41), and Software (36).

The top woman-run company is Lexicon Consulting (No. 4 overall), based in El Cajon, California. Lexicon creates mock Iraqi and Afghan villages used to train military personnel. The firm, founded by Jamie Arundell-Latshaw in 2005, recorded revenue of $17.9 million in 2009 and a three-year growth rate of 14,018 percent. The top minority-run company is WDFA Marketing (No. 5 overall), a San Francisco–based firm that specializes in guerrilla, grass-roots, and micro-marketing. WDFA, founded by Raj Prasad, posted revenue of $38.4 million in 2009 and a three-year growth rate of 13,350 percent.

The Inc. 500 posted aggregate revenue of $11.3 billion, down 39 percent from last year. Median three-year growth is 1,231 percent, up almost 40 percent over last year. The top five industries by total revenue are Consumer Products & Services ($1.9 billion), Government Services ($1.4 billion), Advertising & Marketing ($1 billion), Business Products & Services ($872 million), and Energy ($661 million).

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Gene HoffmanTags: , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in Data Geek, Industry News, Marketing Fury, Vindicia Press Release | 1 Comment »

Sharing is Only for Kids

Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 4:59 pm

I received an interesting email from Visa recently, and it bears wider dissemmination.  The crux of the message was a reminder that it violates Visa regulations to share card numbers between merchants.  This is probably obvious in some contexts (i.e. if you sell your customer list to another company, you better not pass along their card numbers).  In other cases, though, folks may not realize they’re breaking the rules.

Assume you run an online video service.  You have an affiliate that sells pizza.  They allow someone to buy their pizza, then ask the pizza-buyer if they’d also like to rent a movie online.  If so, they route the user to your site.

So far, so good… but this is also where people get into trouble.  If the affiliate passes in basic information (their affiliate ID, the genre of movie in the advertisement, etc.) that’s OK.  However, the affiliate is explicitly prohibited from passing along the payment information.  Would it be more convenient for the customer if the payment info passed in?  Probably.  However, it’s against the Visa regulations.  It’s also a violation of rules with the FTC, unless you have explicit permission to do so from the customer.

Just a friendly reminder to be careful about passing this sort of information between affiliates.

http://www.paymentsnews.com/2010/04/visa-prohibits-web-merchants-from-passing-along-cardholder-info.html

and

http://www.retailing.org/advanced_consent_marketing_guidelines

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Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Best Practices, Client Services | No Comments »

2010, So Far

Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 9:56 pm

The first half of 2010 has been amazing for Vindicia. We are growing new customer GAAP revenue more than 250% year over year while exceeding our new bookings targets by an average of 80%. We’ve secured wins with some of the largest companies in technology, publishing, and media, and in doing so have shown that online billing is increasingly relevant across all industry segments, not just the early adopters. We look forward to telling everyone more about the world renowned companies who, over the last few months, have chosen Vindicia CashBox to replace their existing subscription system or to roll out new, industry changing offerings as those new projects come to market.

What I’m even more excited about is what we have in store for the second half of 2010.

  • Bookings have gotten off to a great start since July 1st, with wins in each of our key business segments in what had historically been a slow quarter.
  • We continue to innovate on the R&D front. We ended the tension between marketing optimization of the checkout process and responsibility for PCI compliance with our release of HOA in the first half. Going forward, look for us to support a greater set of use cases for subscription and microtransaction billing and expect even further expansion of our payment method support as our client and demographic base takes us to all parts of the world. Most importantly, we’re adding additional technology to enable our best practices that support the entire lifecycle of our clients’ online business and allow us to improve our already industry leading customer retention system.
  • With our record growth, we’re hiring and ramping the teams in all areas of the companies to keep up – if you’re interested in joining one of the fastest growing SaaS companies, please take a look at our careers page. We’ve entered that growth stage when I return from a business trip and meet brand new employees, and maybe you can be one of those new faces.

We started Vindicia because we believe that content and services can be sold online. We’re excited to see the market responding to that message and we’re proud of the new services and even categories we’re enabling. The switch to an “as-a-Service” business model across content, gaming, and software is creating vast new opportunities and unheard of cool new products. We at Vindicia get an early look at what is in store for everyone on the Internet and I can tell you that we’re feeling like kids on the night before Christmas. We’re helping build online revenue so our clients can build the online games, tools, and entertainment for the next 100 years.

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Gene HoffmanTags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Gene Hoffman in CEO Blog | No Comments »
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