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Overview of the Best Payment Solutions for SMBs

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Overview of the Best Payment Solutions for SMBs

Small business owners are always looking for the best payment solutions they can find. This is because payment solutions are one of the most important aspects of any commercial business.

In this article, we will take a look at the most popular payment methods and tools, including merchant accounts, e-commerce payments, and more.

10 Best Payment Solutions for SMBs

There are many payment solutions for small business owners looking to build profitable brands; whatever the goal may be, merchants need to make sure they can get it done quickly and cheaply.

Here are some of the best options that you can choose from to optimize your financial operations:

1. Merchant accounts

Businesses of all sizes use merchant accounts for e-commerce payments, phone orders, internet charges, donations, retail purchases, and more. The convenience lets you provide your customer with places on your website to enter information about what they want to buy or donate.

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In addition, you must have a merchant account to accept credit cards on your website, which provides additional security and privacy benefits thanks to SSL encryption. A merchant account can also process payments through a mobile phone for even more convenience.

2. E-commerce payments

Another service many people turn to is e-commerce payments. They allow business owners to have a professional website that integrates secure transactions and automated checkout safely within the existing platform you use every day.

Stripe, for instance, provides a solution you can quickly integrate into websites and mobile apps. It’s easy to get started on the site by setting up your company profile and then creating forms that collect user data or accept orders while processing card information or invoices from users who are ready to buy something without going through separate shopping carts or payment pages.

3. PayPal

For 12 years, PayPal has been one of the go-to online payment systems for merchants and consumers. It has grown into a multi-billion dollar company and is now in 190 markets worldwide.

PayPal can be used to make purchases on e-commerce platforms and send and receive money from friends and family (person-to-person payments).

PayPal has free tools to use when selling with social media, mobile ads, email marketing, and more. It has been widely used by businesses that have outsourced their work to personal virtual assistants and other freelancers, which is currently booming. You can also withdraw funds or deposit them into your bank account when needed.

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4. Dwolla

Providing an alternative to PayPal, Dwolla is a payment system that allows you to send and receive electronic funds without having any additional information about the user. It’s easy to set up and free for 30 days. They also have affordable rates after the trial period expires.

There are no chargebacks, monthly fees, or hidden costs with this service which saves users money every time they use it. To sign up, all you need to do is provide your full name and email address, plus a password and phone number to get started!

5. Spell

Spell is an excellent platform for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s a cloud-based solution that makes it easy to take payments and manage your finances. Spell is perfect for companies that want to streamline their operations and make it easier to accept payments.

The tool offers a variety of features, including online payments and invoicing, that make it easy for businesses to manage their finances all in one platform. Spell also has low processing fees, making it a cost-effective solution for small and medium enterprises.

6. Stripe

Stripe works directly with businesses worldwide, from small shops in California to huge companies like Tesla, Lyft, Target, Microsoft, Instacart, Farfetch, Petco, and more. It’s a simple interface that makes it easy for both users and business owners to get started with the benefit of having a low monthly fee.

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Stripe doesn’t take a percentage of what you earn, so you keep more money right from the start. This platform even covers cross-border payments, which have always been a headache to manage in the past.

7. Amazon Pay

Merchants who sell on Amazon can use Amazon Pay to receive payments using their merchant account quickly. You can set up your account without worrying about additional fees or complex interfaces. Of course, you’ll need approval from Amazon before you’re able to accept payments, but everything else is streamlined for simplicity.

8. Apple Pay

Apple Pay is an exclusive solution for mobile payments that works with both iOS and Mac devices. All you need is an iPhone 6 or newer phone, Apple Watch, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, or iPad Pro. You can also accept credit cards on the web without installing any additional software on your computer. It’s simple to set up and offers quick payment processing and secure transactions.

9. Square

Square is an all-in-one business solution that takes no commission fees. Square handles all of your transactions (including cash back at physical stores), invoices, inventory management, reports & graphs, customer information management, point of sale ordering, employee management, and more.

10. Square Cash

Square has simplified payments even more by offering a standalone service, Cash App. It’s a peer-to-peer payment service where you can send money from your debit card to anyone who uses the app. The best part is there are no fees unless you want to expedite the transfer with a unique code.

Choosing The Most Suitable Solution For Your Business

The best payment solutions for small and medium-sized businesses can offer a range of pricing plans to suit their customers’ needs. For example, if you offer monthly or annual billing options and pay-as-you-go, you have more flexibility to meet the budget constraints of your customer base. The key is relying on one model and understanding how each type benefits different types of buyers.  

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There are a lot of payment solutions available depending on each individual’s needs and preferences. Some options, like merchant accounts, will require technical knowledge and may incur higher fees than others, such as prepaid credit cards or e-commerce payments.

However, before adopting any of the methods above, you must do your research and find out which solution works best for your small business!


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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples

Introduction

With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.

Types of YouTube Ads

Video Ads

  • Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
  • Types:
    • In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
    • Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.

Display Ads

  • Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
  • Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).

Companion Banners

  • Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
  • Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.

YouTube Ad Specs by Type

Skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
    • Action: 15-20 seconds

Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
  • Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1

Bumper Ads

  • Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
  • File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 640 x 360px
    • Vertical: 480 x 360px

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
  • Headline/Description:
    • Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
    • Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line

Display Ads

  • Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
  • Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
  • File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
  • File Size: Max 150KB.
  • Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
  • Logo Specs:
    • Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
    • File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
    • Max Size: 200KB.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
  • File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).

Conclusion

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!

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Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists

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Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists

Amazon pillows.

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.

To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.

Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

Salesforce’s evolving architecture

It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?

“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”

Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”

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That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.

“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.

Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”

Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot

“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.

For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”

Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”

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It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”

What’s new about Einstein Personalization

Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?

“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”

Finally, trust

One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.

“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”

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