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View all news of Paybyweb
Posted on July 18, 2019Website Updated
Check out our new site! We now offer lots
WEBSITE UPDATED
of new features and services that were not
offered in the past
Web Design Services
Have an idea for a product or service? Paybyweb can help you get it on the Web. From obtaining your domain name to getting your site designed and published, we offer it all. We can have your site up in as little as a day or two. Simply provide us the images or content you would like. Your site can include a Home, Services, About Us, Contact, FAQ, Shopping Cart, Testimonials, and more.
Social Media Services
Gain traction on social media by letting Paybyweb help. We can get you noticed on a variety of platforms, including images, hashtags, and more. We can provide complete turnkey social media services to free you up to do more important tasks.
Accepting Credit Cards with a Merchant Account
Paybyweb has been a leading provider of merchant accounts to help companies accept credit cards for over 25 years. We can get you approved in as little as one business day.
Taking Electronic Checks
Since 1992, we have provided thousands of companies with the ability to accept checks electronically. Customers need not sign or mail their check. We even offer to deliver the checks to your bank and deposit into your acct..
Check out all we have to offer at www.PayByWeb.com -
View all news of Payoneer
Posted on July 18, 2019The Impact of US-China Tariffs on eCommerce Sellers
The trade war between the US and China has been going on for many months. In the point of view of US President Trump, tariffs are needed to stop “China’s theft of American intellectual property and forced transfer of American technology”. Meanwhile, President Xi of China is retaliating with tariffs on US goods. While their recent meeting at the G20 Summit in Osaka gave hope that further escalation has been avoided, there are still question marks over finding a long-term solution.
For eCommerce sellers, the China tariffs aren’t just a matter of US trade policy. It’s something that affects their daily work and income.
What Are the US Tariffs?
In 2018, President Trump introduced tariffs of 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products, mostly industrial items used by the manufacturing industry. At the same time, he introduced new 10% tariffs on another $200 billion worth of goods from China, which included consumer items like electronics and furniture, along with a promised increase to 25% in January 2019.
For many companies, this already brought a major shakeup to their normal business practices. Big retailers like Macy’s scrambled to find different suppliers for their furniture and fabric products in case tariffs were increased again.
When January 2019 came around, the promised hike in tariffs was postponed. Retailers and online sellers hoped that the worst was over and that the trade war would die out, especially because representatives from the US and China met to hold talks about US trade policy.
But that proved to be a false hope. In May 2019, the US government raised tariffs from 10% to 25% on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, this time including many consumer goods, like TVs, clothing, and furniture. In response, China also raised tariffs on $110 billion worth of US-made goods.
You can read the full list of products here (but be warned, there are over 6,000 items!). Here are some of the main types of goods included in America’s new China tariffs:
- Perfumes, essential oils, and makeup
- Manicure and pedicure products
- Soaps and shampoo
- Leather bags, trunks, suitcases, and belts
- All types of gloves, including ski gloves, hockey gloves, and baseball gloves
- Fur and fake fur clothing
- Raincoats
- Paper goods, including paper napkins and tablecloths and envelopes
- Many products made from natural and man-made fabric and fibers, including carpets and wall hangings
- Small electrical items, like hair clippers, TVs, video projectors, and vacuum cleaners
- Clocks and watches
- Furniture
What is the Impact of the US-China Tariffs on eCommerce Sellers?
In practice, tariffs mean that businesses in the US have to pay 25% more for the same goods. If you’re a small retail business or an online eSeller, that means that your costs rose by a quarter.
Many small businesses can’t absorb that kind of drop in profits and have been forced to hand off at least some of the increase to their customers. It’s estimated that the new 25% China tariffs cost an average family of four an extra $767. With products suddenly costing more than everyone was expecting, the average shopper will probably buy fewer items overall, which means less income for vendors.
It’s a serious issue for small businesses, most of whom have already begun planning their holiday season sales. With the China tariffs making products more expensive, many sellers are starting to rethink their purchase lists and order different items that aren’t subjected to the same increase in costs.
China’s Tariffs Affect Traders Too
The trade war goes both ways, as seen by China’s increased tariffs on US goods. As a result, some Chinese manufacturers have to pay more for raw materials, leading to price increases to cover their additional costs. For sellers, that means you’ll end up paying more to cover both China’s tariffs on raw materials reaching the manufacturer and again for US taxes on the finished products.
The biggest worry of all is that the trade war isn’t over yet. On the one hand, President Trump threatened tariffs of 25% on another $325 billion of China-made products, including more consumer items like toys, shoes, and clothing. But there’s also hope that a truce has been reached and that both sides are trying to avoid further escalation.
If you’re running a small retail business, you want to get your purchase orders in as soon as possible so that there’s plenty of time for you to receive and market your goods for the holiday shopping season. But with the threat of more tariffs hanging over your head, you might also want to consider holding out a bit longer so that you don’t end up selling items that cost significantly more than you expected. It’s a stressful situation for sellers, who are watching US trade policy anxiously to see if tariffs are going to impact their Christmas.
The post The Impact of US-China Tariffs on eCommerce Sellers appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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View all news of Coinbase
Posted on July 17, 2019Trade smarter, only on Coinbase
Build a data-driven investing strategy with exclusive, unbiased trading signals
Whether you’re new to crypto or a long-time HODLer, it can be confusing to sort the real news from the noise. That’s why we’re making exclusive trading data available to any Coinbase customer — for free — starting today.
Trading signals are up-to-date, trusted, exclusive data only available on Coinbase.com and are meant to help our customers independently create and manage their own crypto strategy. Our goal is to provide accurate, objective measurements of cryptocurrency usage based on the aggregated and anonymized activity of millions of Coinbase customers. These insights are only available to customers signed in to Coinbase — and they are the first of their kind in crypto.
These new signals, which are in addition to the typical market data we already provide, will power a deeper understanding and comparison of cryptocurrencies and their communities so Coinbase customers can think beyond price when building their crypto portfolio.
Trading signal: Top holder activity
What it is: The top holder activity signal is the percentage of Coinbase customers with large balances of an asset (top 10%) who have net increased (bought) or decreased (sold) their positions in that asset through trading over the last 24 hours. This is updated approximately every 2 hours.
Why it’s important: While we can’t predict what crypto prices will do, we can tell you how the largest holders have recently traded with the top holder activity signal.
Trading signals: Typical hold time & Popularity on Coinbase
What they are: The typical hold time signal is the median number of days an asset stays in a Coinbase customer’s account or vault before it’s sold or sent to another address or wallet. The popularity on Coinbase signal is a ranking (out of all tradable assets) of how many customers hold a particular cryptocurrency. These signals are updated approximately every 24 hours.
Why they’re important: For those customers who want to better understand what the average Coinbase customer does, we’re providing data on hold times and popularity. Keep in mind that Coinbase has a wide diversity of customers, with a variety of factors driving their asset hold times and which assets they find interesting.
Trading signal: Price correlation
What it is: The price correlation signal measures how cryptocurrency prices have moved in relation to each other. This is updated approximately every 24 hours.
High positive correlation means those assets’ prices have tended to move in the same direction. High negative correlation means those assets’ prices have tended to move in the opposite direction. Low or no correlation (around 0%) means the assets’ prices haven’t tended to be related.
Why it’s important: Price correlations can help you assess the historical diversity of your portfolio and assess potential risk exposure. For example, if you want to increase your exposure to potential BTC-related price movements, you could buy cryptocurrencies that are highly correlated to BTC. And if you wanted to hedge your bets against BTC-related price movements, you could buy crypto with a high negative correlation. Further, you could make uncorrelated bets with a crypto that has no relationship with BTC.
Keep in mind that regardless of the data, price correlations are historical and not predictive of future correlations.
When considering these trading signals and other market data provided by Coinbase, please keep in mind that they are not and should not be considered investment advice, which Coinbase does not provide. Always make your own independent assessment of whether any particular investment or investment strategy is right for you, your risk tolerance, and financial means, before entering into a transaction. When in doubt, consult with a financial professional.
We think trading signals, backed by verified transactional data, are an important step to raising the level of trust in the cryptoeconomy. Coinbase customers can now use these signals to suit their needs.
Download our iOS and Android apps to see more.
Trade smarter, only on Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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View all news of Coinbase
Posted on July 17, 2019Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019
During the week of June 24, Coinbase.com had two periods of degraded service. On June 25, for a 30 minute period, most customers experienced error messages that prevented them from completing buys, sells, and trades. On June 26, for a 32 minute period, about a third of customers experienced error messages across the site and mobile apps.
Below is a detailed description of the cause as well as the changes we have implemented to prevent any similar service degradations.
June 25
From 15:16 PT to 15:46 PT (22:16–22:46 UTC), buy/sell/trade functionality on Coinbase.com was severely degraded with a 97% error rate. In other words, 97% of buy/sell/trade requests received an error response.
This severe service degradation was caused by an automatic failover of a MongoDB cluster that powers fraud prevention logic as part of a scheduled maintenance. Cluster failovers for scheduled maintenance are typically instantaneous and have minimal customer impact. The failover for this particular cluster lasted 25 minutes due to its size and replication configuration. During this time, queries and commands to the cluster were unable to be completed. Because the cluster is used during the request/response cycles for submitting buys, sells, and trades, requests to these endpoints errored.
We are currently re-architecting trade functionality to move usage of this cluster out of the request path. We are also updating configuration to ensure failovers will be instantaneous going forward. We have ensured that failovers for this cluster may only be initiated during rare, scheduled downtime, when there will be no impact on customers.
June 26th
From 13:37 PT to 14:09 PT (20:37–21:09 UTC), Coinbase.com experienced sustained error rates across all endpoints. Error rates hovered around 35% for the duration of the incident.
This moderate service degradation was caused by sustained increased query latency on a MongoDB cluster that stores user account data. There were several contributing factors that led to increased query latency and degraded service:
- Before the incident began, a background job performed an aggregation for a large number of accounts, causing excessive reads into cache and cache evictions for the cluster’s storage engine cache.
- Soon after, a large number of real-time price alerts were triggered, causing significantly increased query throughput for this cluster.
- Increased query throughput, combined with the prior cache evictions, caused additional cache pressure and resulted in query queueing and increased query latency. These are initial conclusions; in collaboration with MongoDB our investigation is ongoing.
- Due to increased query latency during the request/response cycle, web workers became saturated, serving HTTP 502s.
Storage engine cache activity for the affected cluster The incident was resolved when we manually failed over the affected cluster to instances with more memory. Since the incident, we’ve done the following:
- We’ve audited working set size across all clusters, resizing instances and/or reducing the working set size as necessary.
- We’ve removed the background job and are performing an audit of similar queries, moving them to analytics nodes.
- We’ve tuned certain high-throughput endpoints that are hit hardest during price alerts.
- We’re continuing ongoing work to reduce load on MongoDB through caching and reading from secondary data stores that can be scaled horizontally.
We take uptime very seriously, and we’re working hard to support the millions of customers that choose Coinbase to manage their cryptocurrency. If you’re interested in solving scaling challenges like those presented here, come work with us.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019 was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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View all news of Gocardless
Posted on July 17, 2019What does SCA mean for recurring payments?
If you’re a merchant based in the European Economic Area (EEA), you might already be aware of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). If you’re not, we’ve written a brief overview of what the new European PSD2 law means for subscription businesses. In a nutshell:
- SCA is part of European PSD2 regulations, which aim to increase the security of electronic payments and account management, as well as reduce payment fraud
- SCA comes into effect on 14 September 2019
- If your business uses a European payment provider to serve customers within the EEA, SCA requires additional proof of identity from your customers when they make certain types of payments
Many businesses are concerned that the extra security measures posed by SCA will increase friction at checkout, leading to a drop-off in conversion. For businesses that take recurring payments, there are broadly three major factors that determine how SCA will affect you. And there are a number of exemptions and out of scope transactions that could help minimise impact on conversion rates.
Ahmed Badr, General Counsel at GoCardless, explores these areas in the videos below, as well as recommending the next steps businesses should take.
How does geography factor into SCA?
While your business and your payment service provider must allow for SCA to be applied, it is your customer’s bank (or card issuer) that will apply the authentication. Looking specifically at payments, and not other areas that SCA is required such as when accessing a payment account, the legislation is not limited in its geographical reach.
In recent guidance, the body responsible for SCA specifications has confirmed that SCA is only strictly required when both a merchant’s payment provider and customer’s bank (or card issuer) are located within the EEA. When only one of those parties is located within the EEA, it must use “best efforts” to apply SCA for payments that require it.
In practice, this means is that if a merchant located outside the EEA is using an EEA-based acquirer, that merchant can still expect the acquirer to support SCA for transactions that take place with EEA-based issuers.
How does payment method factor into SCA?
How you choose to accept payment from your customers impacts how SCA will affect you. SCA primarily targets electronic payments that are initiated by your customer, and that are processed instantly. This means many credit card and debit card payments, as well as bank transfers, will be subject to SCA.
Direct Debits or bank debits, on the other hand, are out of scope of SCA. This includes payments set up and made through GoCardless. The key difference with these payments is that the customer’s payment details are collected without the involvement of the customer’s bank, and this is being done at a different point in time to the payment being processed.
These payments also typically have much lower rates of fraud than card payments or bank transfers.
How does the type of billing factor into SCA?
Broadly speaking, recurring purchases can be billed in one of three ways:
- Invoicing - Your customer pays you variable amounts, at regular or variable intervals, with no fixed end date. (E.g. Professional services.)
- Subscriptions - Your customer pays you fixed amounts, at fixed intervals, with no fixed end date. (E.g. Gym membership.)
- Instalments - Your total product or service cost is broken down into fixed amounts, for your customer to pay at fixed intervals, with a fixed end date. (E.g. Loan repayments.)
Generally speaking, SCA applies to recurring purchases when either the amount or frequency of payments is changing. With invoicing, the amount varies, and thus every payment a customer initiates is subject to SCA. With subscription and instalment payments, only the first payment will be subject to SCA, as the subsequent payments are fixed amounts at a fixed frequency.
Which payments are out of scope of, or exempt from, SCA?
For businesses taking recurring payments, there are a few key exemptions and out of scope areas to be aware of.
Merchant-initiated transactions (MITs)
These are payments from your customer where you as the business initiate the transaction. In these cases, your customer must have given you advance authority to take recurring payments from them for a specified product or service.
Both card payments and Bank Debits like Direct Debit can be MITs. For card payments, SCA will typically also need to be applied when your customer provides you their payment details. However, all following transactions will be out of scope of SCA.
For electronic ‘paperless’ Direct Debits, such as those handled by GoCardless, SCA is not required even during mandate setup - due to the fact that the customer’s bank is not involved at the point of mandate setup. These types of payment also typically present a lower risk of payment fraud.
Learn more about merchant-initiated transactions.
Trusted beneficiaries (“whitelisting”)
As part of SCA, banks and card issuers will allow their customers to create a whitelist of businesses they trust, and for whom they are happy not have SCA applied. If your customer decides to add your business to their list of trusted beneficiaries, SCA will only need to be applied once - at the point of adding you to the whitelist. All of their future payments to you can then be processed without SCA.
Low value transactions
When your customer makes a payment to you that is under €30 (or its equivalent), it may be exempt from SCA.
There are two notable caveats to this. First, every sixth low value transaction your customer makes, SCA will need to be applied. This isn’t just every sixth payment they make to you, it covers all payments they make anywhere.
The second caveat is that if a cumulative payment total of €100 (or its equivalent) is reached before that sixth payment, SCA will need to be applied at that point.
Low risk transactions
If your payment service provider’s overall fraud rates are below certain thresholds, your customer’s bank can choose to not apply SCA under certain transaction values. For values above €500, however, this exemption does not apply.
Take note...
It’s worth noting that while banks are allowed to support exemptions under SCA, they aren’t obliged to. And even if a customer’s bank does support exemptions and a purchase meets the requirements of an exemption, they are still able to apply SCA if they wish. As such, you cannot rely on exemptions to opt out of preparing your payment flows for SCA ahead of September.
Learn more in our detailed list of all key SCA exemptions.
What next?
Take some time to map out your payment flows. Make sure you’re aware of every use case in your business and understand how SCA will apply to each of them.
While it is ultimately your customers’ bank or card issuer that will control SCA, the checkout flow on your website will need to capture the additional proof of identity from your customers. And, your payment service provider will need to be able to facilitate the secure transfer of this data to your customer’s bank or card issuer.
When you’ve mapped out all of your payment flows and understood the use cases where SCA applies, note any necessary changes you’ll need to make ahead of September to be compliant with the regulation. Also make sure you double check with your payment service provider to ensure they will be facilitating your compliance.
Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing more updates about SCA for businesses taking recurring payments. To ensure you don’t miss out, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, and keep an eye on our blog, guides, and support centre.
For now, make sure you read our comprehensive guide to Strong Customer Authentication.
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View all news of Payoneer
Posted on July 16, 2019The Uberization of B2B Payments
Technology has fundamentally transformed the world we live and work in. Borders that have obstructed the way people and businesses communicate, interact, and transact are rapidly eroding. Across virtually all sectors, a newly formed metalayer now sits atop local systems, processes and environments, bringing together the entire business world in an unprecedented, integrated way and democratizing access to global markets for any business of any size anywhere in the world.
As a leader in digital global payments, we at Payoneer relentlessly focus on helping businesses of all sizes succeed in this new digital reality. We’ve build a digital, global, interconnected platform that makes paying and getting paid across borders as easy as sending and receiving local payments. We’ve opened the door to millions of global businesses, enabling them to grow their revenues exponentially by offering their goods and services to the entire world. We’ve paved the way for ecommerce and digital service marketplaces to expand globally, helping to further close the gap between geographies. We are continually humbled by how forces much larger than us have been instrumental in creating this wave of opportunity and transformation that has driven our success. Four major transformational changes in how the world is evolving have impacted the digital payments landscape, and us along with it.
1. Reduced friction in business interactions empowering faster, more accessible transactions
The barriers that used to stand in the way of people and businesses around the world are coming down. We’re seeing a massive reduction in the friction that traditionally hindered cross-border commerce, communication and transactions. A new digital, global infrastructure is increasingly creating more opportunities for everyone involved – buyers and sellers. In recent years, digital marketplaces and platforms have found that supporting global digital commerce with legacy global payments systems is no longer sustainable. We provide these businesses a single partner with a single platform that gives them access to expand their reach globally and pay out to the whole world. We serve as an instrumental partner in addressing their biggest cross-border complexities. Those who previously could only access potential customers from their home market and deal in their own currency can now access anyone from anywhere in the world. We’ve removed the cost and burden that before made global expansion unattainable for most businesses. At the same time, we’ve opened opportunities for local entrepreneurs in every corner of the world to access these marketplaces as well as bill their global clients directly.
2. A newly formed, interconnected metalayer uniting businesses globally
Historically, infrastructure powering commerce has been limited to a county’s physical borders. Cross-border trade was simply not open to all economies and small businesses. With the development of the internet, the whole business world is now essentially connected on the same digital infrastructure, irrespective of what lies beneath. Developed and developing nations can now connect, interact and transact, unfettered. We keep commerce on this level frictionless by providing payments that arrive as requested, on time, and at a fraction of a cost. Just because the world gets a lot smaller, it doesn’t mean we understand each other or operate in jurisdictions that are even remotely similar. Financial networks remain highly regulated and the knowledge and manpower required for global banking compliance is substantial and consequential. Our contribution has always been to provide a localized market knowledge and engagement, multi-lingual support, industry-leading compliance and risk management teams, and an unmatched financial network – over a decade in the making – with multi-layer banking redundancy covering the entire world. The world has found a way to unite businesses globally and we’ve built a better way for them to buy and sell from one another.
3. An ever-shrinking gap between market and talent
We’re seeing the developed world and developing worlds come closer together every day and the gap between talent and market is disappearing almost entirely. Today, participation in the global economy is not limited to where you are in the world and doesn’t depend on how large your business is – you can be a sole proprietor, entrepreneur, or small business owner anywhere on the planet and you now have access to a wealth of new opportunities to build and grow a global, digital business. If you have something of value to offer the world – content, a service, an idea, a tangible good – whatever it is, there’s an entire world of opportunity that’s now accessible. This explosion of new opportunity has been transformational and in turn, we’re democratizing access to global payments the way technology is democratizing access to commerce. Just a decade ago, opening a cross-border business involved a substantial undertaking. Now, we provide any sized business access to all the tools they need to stay in their home market and invite customers across the globe to make payments as if they were paying a local business.
4. The emergence of digital intermediaries redrafting the landscape of global commerce
Much of this new opportunity is in part due to the appearance of natively digital platforms and marketplaces redrawing the global supply chain. How buyers and sellers connect in the digital economy is reshaping the future of commerce. It’s reshaping opportunities for businesses of all sizes, across the world and enabling more participants to grow and expand their businesses in a global economy. The businesses powering these platforms aren’t making things that are being bought – they’re creating a space for commerce where one did not previously exist. Players in this new global economy need basic access to the flow of funds, and the tools and guidance to grow their businesses. This is where we come in. We go beyond payments by offering data, compliance and risk management solutions, a tax management platform, working capital funding, instant access to partners that provide logistics, marketing, advisory services, and a range of other tools for success.
Payments are merely a piece of a world that is rapidly uberizing. Payments need to change at the rate that commerce is evolving. Creating the infrastructure is only the first step to contributing to the global economy. Providing the opportunity without the necessary tools for success is not enough – offering the flow of payments doesn’t constitute uberization. In the world of commerce, it means going beyond to ensure that buyers and sellers are not only closer, able to find each other and transact, but also to thrive.
The post The Uberization of B2B Payments appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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View all news of Gocardless
Posted on July 15, 2019Qu'est ce que l'Authentification forte du client ? (2 minutes)
Qu'est-ce que l'Authentification forte du client (ou SCA, pour Strong Customer Authentification) et quelles sont ses conséquences pour les commerçants au Royaume-Uni et en Europe ?
Si vous n'en avez pas encore entendu parler, vous êtes loin d'être seul. Selon l'étude de Mastercard réalisée sur des commerçants européens à la fin de l'année 2018, 75 % d'entre eux ne savent pas ce qu'est la SCA et ce qu'elle implique pour eux. Pourtant, la SCA devrait entrer en viguer en septembre 2019 et amener des modifications importantes dans les conditions de sécurité des achats en ligne.
Dans la vidéo ci-dessous, le Responsable marketing produits de GoCardless, Timmy Neilsen, vous donne un aperçu de deux minutes de la SCA et ses conséquences pour les commerçants en Europe et au Royaume-Uni.
À retenir
Qu'est-ce que l'Authentification forte du client exactement ?
En résumé, la SCA fait partie d'une législation à l'échelle européenne : la directive DSP2.
En pratique, il s'agit d'une double authentification qui sera désormais demandée pour tout achat en ligne. Lorsque votre client achètera un produit de votre entreprise sur Internet, il devra fournir deux types de données d'identification supplémentaires, en plus de ses données de paiement. Ces données requises pourront prendrela forme suivante :
- Un élément que votre client connaît, comme un mot de passe
- Un élément que votre client possède, comme un numéro de portable (qui pourra recevoir un code à usage unique)
- Un élément propre à votre client, comme une empreinte digitale
Dans quels cas l'Authentification forte du client s'appliquera-t-elle ?
La SCA concernera toute transaction impliquant des parties situées toutes deux dans l'Espace économique européen (EEE), aussi bien le fournisseur de services de paiement l'entreprise que la banque du client final.
Si l'une de ces parties est située en dehors de l'Europe, la règle exige du fournisseur de services de paiement basé en Europe qu'il déploie « tous les efforts possibles » pour appliquer la SCA.
En quoi l'Authentification forte du client m'affecte-t-elle ?
La SCA sera appliquée par la banque du client, mais il est probable qu'elle soit gérée par un lecteur da carte. Cependant, en tant que commerçant, vous devez disposer d'un processus de paiement adapté.
Votre fournisseur de services de paiement sera certainement préparé, mais il serait judicieux de lire toute publication qu'il a pu produire sur ce sujet afin de comprendre son approche et ce que cela implique pour vous.
L'Authentification forte du client va-t-elle baisser mon taux de conversion ?
Ce paramètre inquiète de nombreuses entreprises. En effet, il se peut que la SCA complique l'expérience de paiement aux yeux de votre client, entraînant une chute du taux de conversion.
Cependant, la SCA ne s'applique pas à de nombreux cas, où la double authentification peut ne pas être requise, par exemple :
- Les paiements considérés comme étant à faible risque, selon un ensemble de critères définis
- Les paiements inférieurs à 30 €
- Les abonnements d'un montant fixe
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View all news of Payoneer
Posted on July 11, 2019ACoS – What Is It and How Do I Calculate It?
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Shai Venezia, co-founder of PPC Winner
For most of us, understanding the concept of advertising cost of sales (ACoS), i.e., the amount of money spent on advertising for each dollar of sales generated through PPC, isn’t too hard to understand, right?
Then it starts to get complicated! When is an ACoS good and when is it bad? Why is 50% sometimes a good ACoS and sometimes it isn’t??? This where most of us start to get confused, go into panic mode and make all sorts of decisions that can be detrimental to our profits.
The purpose of this article is to remove the confusion surrounding ACoS and help you achieve the correct advertising cost of sales for your specific product throughout your selling cycle. We’ll be going over how to calculate your ACoS, determine your marketing strategy and, finally, how this information can be applied to your paid advertising campaigns.
The ACoS Formula
Let’s break down the ACoS formula using an example:
- Your product sells for $10
- You create an advertising campaign costing $35
- You sell 10 products for total revenue of $100
To calculate your ACoS, divide the total amount you spend on ads ($35) by the total sales made through these ads ($100). This will give you an ACoS of 35%.
Before you can take advantage of this data, you’ll need to calculate your breakeven ACoS — the percentage at which you are spending the same amount on advertising as your profit margin.
Your profit margin is the actual amount left after subtracting all your expenses from your income. This includes all taxes, fees, production costs, transportation and so on. There may be other considerations for specific products, such as damage to fragile items.
Let’s break down the profit margin formula with an example:
- You sell your product for $10
- Your product costs you $1 to manufacture
- You spend an additional $4 on transport, packaging, taxes and fees.
To calculate your profit margin, subtract your expenses ($5) from your gross revenue ($10). This will give you a profit margin of $5.
To calculate your breakeven ACoS, divide your profit margin ($5) by 10 and multiply by 100. In our example, this would give you a breakeven ACoS of 50%.
Things are now getting a lot more interesting so please pay close attention! This is the bit that saves you money!
Step #1: Know Your Marketing Strategy!
Before your product launch, it’s important to determine your target ACoS. Doing so means outlining your advertising objectives. Surprisingly enough, not all advertising is aimed at making a profit and sometimes you ACoS will be high and you may even take a loss.
This is particularly true when your business is first getting started and you’re focusing on product launches and brand awareness. Just know that in these cases, it’s perfectly normal to have a high ACoS. Remember the adage – you have to spend money to make money.
Step #2: Getting Noticed with Sponsored Ads
After many months of research, hard work and investment of time and money, your product has finally made it to Amazon. So where are the thousands of customers you were expecting? Could it be that they just don’t know you exist? Or they cannot find you among the other dozens of pages selling the same or similar product?
Now is the time to use sponsored ads to increase sales. While your long-term goal should be to improve organic rankings, now you’ll want to sell as much as you can through PPC ads while promoting your brand.
At this stage, you want to appear on the first page for all the essential keywords in your category. It will cost you in terms of your ACoS but it is worth the visibility it will give your products. The benefits of this strategy far outweigh the losses.
By using PPC ads, you’ll introduce your product to the Amazon algorithm, allowing you to learn which keywords or phrases Amazon chooses to show your product. This tells you which keywords are needed to promote organic sales.
If Amazon is showing your product in irrelevant places, e.g., the meat mallet you are selling is appearing in searches for hammers, you know that that there is something wrong with the listing, in which case it’s time to go back adjust your backend search terms.
You’ll push sales and your ACoS may be higher than your breakeven! Why? Because it’s important to get as much exposure on Amazon as possible. Should you be worried? Absolutely not! This is all part of the grand plan!
Step #3: Adjusting Your Strategy According to Your Product
So when should your ACoS come in at the breakeven point or below? We’ve already established that when you first get started, it should be high, but what about when you have an existing store?
Let’s say that you’ve been selling for a while and your product is doing well under certain keywords organically and even appearing on page one for those keywords. Now is the time to set your ACoS to breakeven or below because now you are aiming for profit!
On the other hand, if you have a product that you need to liquidate, a high ACoS may become unavoidable, and even beneficial. After all, if your products are just taking up storage space, it’ll likely be more beneficial to cut your losses and invest in unloading inventory.
READY TO GET STARTED?
PPC Winner is here to help! We’re here to help you create the ultimate target ACoS, ensuring that you don’t overbid or underbid on keywords and waste your hard-earned advertising dollars.
Shai Venezia is both the co-founder of PPC Winner and an expert in online advertising.The post ACoS – What Is It and How Do I Calculate It? appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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Posted on July 11, 2019Payoneer Goes Beyond Payments: Interview with Irina Marciano, Payoneer’s Head of PR
At Payoneer, we’ve always been more than a simple payments company. Although our core business is providing payments solutions, our real focus goes far beyond that.
At heart, we’re all about helping businesses to grow. That’s our real work. Our Head of PR, Irina Marciano, summed it all up perfectly in her recent interview with B2BNXT. As Irina puts it, our mission is to:
“Help companies expand into new geographies, tap into the digital economy, and access opportunity that they’ve never been able to reach before.”
Whether you’re an individual freelancer or a multinational corporation, whether you’re based in Bangladesh or Boston, Payoneer is here to help you to grow your business from one milestone to the next.
That’s why Irina says that our real value as a company isn’t our advanced technology or lower-cost payment solutions, even though those are important. In Irina’s words, the real value is this:
“The biggest thing we have is the 4 million users we work with, and the ability to bring them together.”
We held a Payoneer forum last year in Shenzhen, China, which was attended by 1,700 Payoneer users, and only by Payoneer users. We attracted these numbers because we weren’t trying to sell anything; all we wanted was to discover how we can bring more value to our users. It’s our users who make Payoneer a success, and our users who keep driving us forward, every day, to find more ways to help them succeed. It’s a perfect circle.
For Irina, this is what makes working for Payoneer so fulfilling. She says:
“As a PR person working at a company like this, my job is half done, because I believe in the message”
Watch Irina’s full interview here.
Sign up to Payoneer and join our 4 million satisfied users and help your business grow.
The post Payoneer Goes Beyond Payments: Interview with Irina Marciano, Payoneer’s Head of PR appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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Posted on July 10, 2019Continuous Integration at Coinbase: How we optimized CircleCI for speed & cut our build times by…
Continuous Integration at Coinbase: How we optimized CircleCI for speed and cut our build times by 75%
Tuning a continuous integration server presents an interesting challenge — infrastructure engineers need to balance build speed, cost, and queue times on a system that many developers do not have extensive experience managing at scale. The results, when done right, can be a major benefit to your company as illustrated by the recent journey we took to improve our CI setup.
Continuous Integration at Coinbase
As Coinbase has grown, keeping our developers happy with our internal tools has been a high priority. For most of Coinbase’s history we have used CircleCI server, which has been a performant and low-maintenance tool. As the company and our codebase have grown, however, the demands on our CI server have increased as well. Prior to the optimizations described here, builds for the monorail application that runs Coinbase.com had increased significantly in length (doubling or tripling the previous average build times) and developers commonly complained about lengthy or non-finishing builds.
Our CI builds were no longer meeting our expectations, and it was with the previous issues in mind that we decided to embark on a campaign to get our setup back into shape.
It’s worth sharing here that Coinbase specifically uses the on-premise server version of CircleCI rather than their cloud offering — hosting our own infrastructure is important to us for security reasons, and these concepts specifically apply to self-managed CI clusters.
The Four Golden Signals
We found the first key to optimizing any CI system to be observability, as without a way to measure the effects of your tweaks and changes it’s impossible to truly know whether or not you actually made an improvement. In our case, server-hosted CircleCI uses a nomad cluster for builds, and at the time did not provide any method of monitoring your cluster or the nodes within. We had to build systems of our own, and we decided a good approach would be using the framework of the four golden signals, Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation.
Latency
Latency is the total amount of time it takes to service a request. In a CI system, this can be considered to be the total amount of time a build takes to run from start to finish. Latency is better measured on a per-repo or even per-build basis as build length can vary hugely based on the project.
To measure this, we built a small application that queried CircleCI’s API regularly for build lengths, and then shipped over that information to Datadog to allow us to build graphs and visualizations of average build times. This allowed us to chart the results of our improvement experiments empirically and automatically rather than relying on anecdotal or manually curated results as we had done previously.
CircleCI API results Traffic
Traffic is the amount of demand being placed on your system at any one time. In a CI system, this can be represented by the total number of concurrently running builds.
We were able to measure this by using the same system we built to measure latency metrics. This came in handy when determining the upper and lower bounds for the use of our build resources as it allowed us to see exactly how many jobs were running at any one time.
Errors
Errors are the total amount of requests or calls that fail. In a CI system this can be represented by the total number of builds that fail due to infrastructural reasons. It’s important here to make a distinction between builds that fail correctly, due to tests, linting, code errors, etc. rather than builds that fail due to platform issues.
One issue we encountered was that occasionally AWS would give us “bad” instances when spinning up new builders that would run much slower than a normal “good” instance. Adding error detection into our builder startup scripts allowed us to terminate these and spin up new nodes before they could slow down our running builds.
Saturation
Saturation is how “full” your service is, or how much of your system resources are being used. In a CI system, this is fairly straightforward — how much I/O, CPU, and memory are the builders under load using.
To measure saturation for our setup we were able to tap into cluster metrics by installing a Datadog Agent on each of our builders, which allowed us to get a view into system stats across the cluster.
Datadog job statistics Identifying the Root Cause
Once your monitoring setup is in place it becomes easier to dig into the root cause of build slowdowns. One of the difficulties in diagnosing CI problems without cluster-wide monitoring is that it can be hard to identify which builders are experiencing load at any one time or how that load affects your builds. Latency monitoring can allow you to figure out which builds are taking the longest, and saturation monitoring can allow you to identify the nodes running those builds for closer investigation.
For us, the new latency measuring we added allowed us to quickly confirm what we had previously guessed: not every build was equal. Some builds ran at the quick speeds we had previously been experiencing but other builds would drag on for far longer than we expected.
In our case this discovery was the big breakthrough — once we could quickly identify builds with increased latency and find the saturated nodes the problem quickly revealed itself: resource contention between starting builds! Due to the large number of tests for our larger builds we use CircleCI’s parallelization feature to split up our tests and run them across the fleet in separate docker containers. Each test container also requires another set of support containers (Redis, MongoDB, etc.) in order to replicate the production environment. Starting all of the necessary containers for each build is a resource-intensive operation, requiring significant amounts of I/O and CPU. Since Nomad uses bin-packing for job distributions our builders would sometimes launch up to 5 different sets of these containers at once, causing massive slow-downs before tests could even start running.
Build Experimentation
Setting up a development environment is key to debugging CI problems once found as it allows you to push your system to its limits while ensuring that none of your testing affects productivity in production. Coinbase maintains a development cluster for CircleCI that we use to test out new versions before pushing them out to production, but in order to investigate our options we turned the cluster into a smaller replica of our production instance, allowing us to effectively load test CircleCI builders. Keeping your development cluster as close as possible to production can help ensure any solutions you find are reflective of what can actually help in a real environment.
Once we had identified why our builds were encountering issues, and we’d set up an environment to run experiments in, we could start developing a solution. We repeatedly ran the same large builds that were causing the problems on our production cluster on different sizes and types of EC2 instances in order to figure out which was the most time and cost-effective options to use.
EC2 instance type comparison While we previously had been using smaller numbers of large instances to run our builds it turns out the optimal setup for our cluster was actually a very large number of smaller instances (m5.larges in our case) — small enough that CircleCI would only ship one parallelized build container to each instance, preventing the build trampling issues that were the cause of the slow downs. A nice side effect of identifying the correct instance types was that it actually allowed us to reduce our server cost footprint significantly as we were able to size our cluster more closely to its usage.
Problem? Solved!
Applying your changes to a production environment is the final step. Determining whether the effects of the tuning worked can be done the same way the problems were identified — with the four golden signals.
After we had identified what worked best on our development cluster we quickly implemented the new builder sizing in production. The results? A 75% decrease in build time for our largest builds, significant cost savings due to the right-sizing of our cluster, and most important of all: happy developers!
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