Month: June 2007

Categories
Business Ideas

Budding Business Ideas

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Telegraph: Young British entrepreneurs are launching a new website to house spare business ideas that can be developed by anyone that finds them interesting. James Murray Wells, the twenty four-year-old multi-millionaire founder of www.glassesdirect.co.uk, and Oli Barrett, founder of new ideas company Connected Capital, are behind the venture. It will be launched this week and is called IdeaVolcano.com
More than 100 entrepreneurs and business advisers have already signed up to the site during its testing phase. Mr Murray Wells said all the entrepreneurs he encountered had more ideas than they could handle and the site would allow them to realise their potential. “There’s a lot of people with good ideas and lots of people that are looking for good ideas,” he said. “That’s what we are hoping to do with Idea Volcano, putting these people together.”
Website will help entrepreneurs to develop business ideas [Telegraph]

Categories
How-To Guides

How To Send And Receive Money Online

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Teentrepreneur.com: Another problem that you will encounter as a young entrepreneur is the process of sending and receiving money online. Standard payment methods such as cheques, postal orders or cash just wont be good enough today in a world of speed. What happens if you need a website designer to do a job in 1 day? You won’t be able to send a cheque as it would take up to 14 days. This is where online money comes into play and this is what Ill be talking about in this article
When eBay was launched in September 1995 there was a great need for a new, innovative service that would allow buyers and sellers to send and receive payment easily and quickly. So many people use credit cards in shops that it would have been silly to not allow them to use them online. Thus Paypal and similar sites such as WorldPay and Nochex were born!
The idea behind a site such as Paypal is very simple. All you do is create an account and link the account to your main bank or credit card account. Therefore when you want to buy something, you can use funds from your bank account, and when you want to receive payment, other people can send you money using their credit card.
How To Pay and Receive Money Online [Teentrepreneur.com]

Categories
Business Ideas

Book A Table Online

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Entrepreneur: If your restaurant isn’t accepting online reservations, you may want to rethink your web presence. About 7,000 high-end restaurants around the world use OpenTable, a San Francisco-based company that allows eager eaters to book online reservations.
The company, which started in 1999, wasn’t accepted by the restaurant community right away, but has slowly gained momentum, especially over the last couple of years. Another perk of the software: You can use it to keep track of idiosyncrasies of hundreds or even thousands of your guests.
Restaurants pay OpenTable a dollar per diner who books through their service. But according to industry insiders, it’s worth it. “It’s not a cheap solution, but it’s a good one,” says Laurence Kretchmer, co-owner of three restaurants with Bobby Flay.
Online Reservations Get Popular [Entrepreneur.com]

Categories
Customer Service

Defusing Angry Customers

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BusinessWeek: If you sell almost any type of product, then you already know that despite your best efforts at managing service and inventory, clients will be displeased from time to time. But don’t simply accept ongoing dissatisfaction as an inevitable part of doing business. Instead, work at improving how you deal with customers whose experience has been less than satisfactory. It could mean the difference between losing customers permanently or keeping them satisfied—maybe even more committed to doing business with you. Here are seven keys.
1. Always acknowledge the customer’s problem.
2. Ask the customer what you can do to make her feel better.
3. Tell your customer that you want to record all the details of the mistake so you can share it with everyone within your company to prevent it from happening again.
4. If the customer has been getting the runaround, and you are still not the person who has the answer, tell the customer that you will find out and call her back.
5. If you can, provide the customer with your name and contact number so that he may call you in the future if issues arise.
6. Never say “It’s our policy.”
7. Never blame your company or someone else in your company.
Dealing with Angry Customers [BusinessWeek]

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Profile: Linda Byerline

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sdbj.com: Linda Byerline hates to admit that her business experience is self-taught. She was a stay-at-home mom with a nursing background when she posted an image of an extra cloth diaper she had made for her daughter on eBay.
Four years later, Byerline runs Happy Heiny’s, which provides cloth diapers online and in retail stores across the world.
“It completely caught us off guard,” she said of the immediate success of the company.
Byerline is planning to open her first “brick-and-mortar” store in El Cajon later this summer after moving the business out of her home this year.
Entrepreneur Profile [sdbj.com]