We experienced problems today adding our business credit card to our PayPal account.

It eventually transpired that a company, we made a previous purchase from online, used our email address and credit card number to open a Czech PayPal account.

Stupidly, by using our email address they weren’t able to effectively verify this account but learning that this happened came as a shock.

Kudos to PayPal for their fantastic customer service.  Wait time was less than a minute, the three people I had to speak with were all extremely professional and we didn’t have to explain ourselves from the beginning when being transferred to the next operator.  They identified the rogue account once I gave them my credit card number and were happy to wait online whilst i reset the rogue account’s pasword, took a look inside it, removed my credit card info and closed the account down.

We know exactly where the information came from because we use unique email addresses for every business we deal with.  There is a possibility that this company got hacked and were unaware of it, but seeing as this new PayPal account was set up in Czech Koronas and the company we orderd from is also based there, we’re inclinded to think that this was a deliberate attempt at misusing customer information. 

No harm was done so this isn’t something we’ll take time to investigate but it is in PayPal’s hands now and we’re curious to know if the origin company will reply to our enquiry into what may have happened.

UWT4Me.com is to this day one of the best businesses and websites we’ve created.  We became telcom agents for the company "United World Telecom" in December 2002 and, although the promotion was tough, we developed an impressively successful business in about 12 months.

This really was the first website of significance that we created and, despite the fact that the site has not been updated for about 3 years (possibly longer) we have received residual monthly income of about $500. 

The main selling point for UWT4Me.com is that we have 676 customers registered.  This is far more valuable than the website itself or the domain name.

At it’s peak, we attracted a lot of Thai businesses and were earning over $3,000 a month in commissions.  Once the market changed, the business was overlooked in favor of other money-making opportunities.

The website itself, whilst dated by today’s standards set a lot of precedents.  The ‘telecom wizard‘ was unique to the industry and was designed to help visitors choose the best telecom service.  We designed what can only be described as an "intelligent mail-parsing sequential auto-responder" to parse welcome emails from United World Telecom and to re-format them and forward them to our customers directly.

Whilst the residual income is most definitely appreciated and has kept a roof over our head during some tough times, there’s no denying that a business windfall of $6,000 would give us a lot of flexibility to promote and to develop our other sites. 

If we do not get a sale then instead we’ll consider updating the site ourselves and using Adwords to build it back up again.

Below are the real-time auction updates. We’ve chosen to test Sitepoint out this time as it has an excellent reputation and may set the way to us advertising some of our older sites for sale too.
 

We were very impressed today with Ebay’s Live support.

Their site has a bug whereby it’s not possible to chance both your country and your business-type together.  We found a work-around to do this and I had the assistant’s undivided attention for about 15 minutes.

It is rare that we ask for the opportunity to complete a customer satisfaction survey but we really wanted to express to Ebay how appreciative we were about their sincere live-support feature. 

These days it is rare for a live suport to actually work.  Most times the support rep chooses between a handful of canned responses which often are not 100% relevant to your enquiry.  Other times the support represenative seems to only know one phrase:  "Please open a support ticket".

In this case, our wait time was less than a minute, our problem was quite technical and unprecedented and we really felt like we were being taken care of.

Kudos to Ebay for the excellent work.

Now that we have converted an estalished ebay personal account to our business account, we shall begin placing some of our Art From Steel statues for auction.

The previous design for this blog has been terrible and we never intended to keep it online for so long. 

Today we have removed the HTML pages from the front of the site and replaced them with this blog instead.

Every day we gain new marketing ideas and skills online.  We’ll be using this blog to keep you updated on these.

This blog post is extremely useful if you spend a lot of money through PayPal fees every month.

By applying to receive ‘merchant rates’ you can cut your fees significantly.  What is incredible is how easy the application process is (you should be automatically approved after just a few mouse clicks).  It’s interesting that the application page is so deeply hidden within PayPal’s many pages that you probably will never find it without help.

The original article is called ‘What PayPal Won’t Tell You’.

All our emails now have a clever new signature that displays our blog updates in rotation and invites customers to add our RSS feed.

You can use this with any RSS feed that you create. Simply open a free account with Feedburner and use their ‘Publicize > Headline Animator’ feature.

Thanks go to Bob Bloom for alerting us to this great tool.