Category Archives: Tips for Your Business

Getting Started, Tips for Your Business, Your Website

Register Online First

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Register Online FirstIf you’re going to own a web store, you’ll need a web address (often called a “root domain“) that will appear online in visitors’ search results, or when they type the name into their browser address bar.

As discussed in my article about getting the right company name, your choice of web address is critical to your business. Choose the name carefully, but when you’ve decided on a great name act right away to take ownership by registering it online.

Register Your Domain

Start by choosing the web hosting company where you will register your domain name. Your web host is an important decision, since you could be with the company for a long time. We use a web hosting company called 1&1 Internet* because they’ve been reliable and make it easy to upgrade service, but it’s important for you to research alternatives on your own.

Unfortunately, many websites that review and compare web hosting companies seem to provide incomplete and inaccurate information – possibly because they’re paid to do so. Don’t make your decision based solely on reviews from websites you don’t know well.

NoteOne way to learn about potential problems with a web host is to search their name and “sucks” (for example, “ExampleHosting sucks”) in Google. Typically the larger the company, the more negative results will appear. You’ll almost always see some complaints unless the company is very small, but it’s important to look through the negative comments, figure out how consistent and rational they seem to be, and use that as a guide.

Once you’ve decided on a web hosting company, compare the domain registration packages that they offer. Many hosts allow you to register a domain and get basic email service on your new domain for around $35 per year. Later on you can upgrade to a full web hosting package when it’s time for you to set up your website.

Having an email address on your domain (like sue@FishFoodSupply.com) can help you look like a legitimate company as you start your business. Most web hosts allow you to access this email account over the web, or you can set up an email client on your PC (like Microsoft Outlook). You can also forward your email to GMail and other accounts.

Register your “.com” domain name to start, and consider registering “.net” and alternate spellings as soon as it seems likely that your business will grow. Be sure to choose the option for private domain registration to avoid publishing your personal contact details online as the domain owner.

You’ll need a personal payment card to register the domain, but should change the automatic billing to your business payment card as soon as you set up your new bank accounts and business payment card.

Until you upgrade to a web hosting package, visitors will likely see a generic, domain parking page at your web address after you register the domain.

What Happens Next?

Your next step is to register your business with your government, just as a brick-and-mortar business does. We’ll discuss that next.

Next: Register with Your Government

 

*This is not a paid endorsement.

Tips for Your Business, Your Money

Set Up Your Bank Accounts

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Set Up Your Bank AccountsYour choice of where to set up the bank and payment card accounts for your new business could have a big impact on daily convenience. You should choose carefully, since it could become difficult to move accounts as your business grows.

It’s often easiest to create separate, linked business accounts at your current bank. But before you do, take a serious look at whether your personal bank is a good choice for your business.

  • Be sure that your bank uses multi-factor authentication to help protect your money from thieves. Multi-factor authentication typically requires you to reply to an automated email any time you try to access your accounts from a computer or browser that the bank doesn’t recognize. Many of the nation’s largest banks still don’t offer this basic protection, and so could put your finances at greater risk.
  • Confirm the checking, savings, and payment card accounts all allow QuickBooks Web Connect (*.qbo) statement downloads (as opposed to only Quicken downloads). This can free you from entering transactions by hand or importing them with less reliable methods.
  • Be sure that the bank provides a free or low-cost business checking account, in addition to a higher-interest savings account where you can move any funds that aren’t needed to pay bills.
  • Ask if your business checking account will have an online bill payer feature to save time when you need to pay supplier invoices by check.

When setting up your new business account, the financial institution will require you to bring the forms you received when you registered with your government, including your business registration, EIN number, and so on.

As you set up your new business accounts you’ll need to transfer in some personal funds to get started. You should also consider getting a checkbook to pay some of your suppliers’ bills.

Paying some supplier invoices by check – as opposed to prepaying by payment card – can be an important way to build a credit history for your company. Even if you never really need to buy items on credit, some future suppliers may ask you to provide references from other vendors whose invoices you’ve paid on time, by check, before they’ll do business with you.

Get a Payment Card Right Away

I personally hate having too many credit cards, and resisted getting a payment card for the new business right away. This was a big mistake: not only does the IRS expect you to consistently charge business expenses to a separate card that’s solely for your business, but use of a business payment card can start saving you money immediately.

That’s because a separate business payment card makes it easier to charge every legitimate expense to your business. This could save a lot of time separating business from personal receipts, and helps ensure that you claim every business expense to save you on taxes.

NoteBe aware that using a personal credit card for business expenses could impact your credit score. A mortgage lender once told me that my credit score fell by around 30 points because a single, personal credit card account that we use to pay monthly advertising expenses often exceeds half its limit, even though we pay the balance in full each month.

Now that your accounts are in place to pay business expenses, it’s time to set up your website.

Next: Set Up Your Website

Tips for Your Business, Your Website

Website Legal Stuff

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Website Legal StuffOnce you’ve decided how to set up your website, it’s a good idea to follow a few basic legal rules to help keep your business trouble-free.

Most of these rules are based on common sense and good ethics – and there can be big financial reasons to follow these guidelines, too. The list below is by no means complete, but it’s an important start.

Use Original Text

As much as possible your website should publish only original text, written by you, to describe your products. Copying and pasting others’ works without permission is definitely unethical, and there’s a more than just a legal risk in copying from other websites.

That’s because search engines like Google can recognize content that looks like it’s copied from existing sites, and could penalize your website with lower search rankings if it appears that you’re using others’ material.

Use Only Images that You Own or License

Never publish others’ images on your website without the copyright owner’s permission. Today reverse image search engines like Tineye make it easy for copyright owners to find content that’s published online without permission, and to take legal action.

If you think your website will use stock photos, check out low-cost stock image sites*. Today many of these sites offer very flexible licenses to use stock images, for as long as you like, for as little as a dollar per image.

Publish a Privacy Page

Your online store should have a privacy page that says how you will use and protect the private information that you collect when visitors buy your products, submit a form, or send you email. It’s a good idea for every page of your website to link to the privacy page from a menu or footer.

Your choice of payment gateway, shopping cart, and online advertising will largely determine what you should say on your privacy page. You can find help from these providers, and it’s also a good idea to survey other websites that use the same services to find common, well-written policies that you can use as examples and follow every day.

Protect Others’ Information

Your privacy statement will require that you do not disclose others’ private information like names, phone numbers, email addresses, and purchase histories. This means that you’ll need to follow safeguards to make sure that you and your suppliers don’t reveal this information to others.

Your payment gateway can securely collect customers’ payment card numbers without ever disclosing them to you. Even so, your shopping cart (and possibly other software) will collect plenty of other information that’s of value to criminals.

For this reason it’s important to follow the security recommendations of your shopping cart provider, and to protect your computers that download and store customer information with antivirus, a firewall, and other up-to-date security. It’s also important that you never disclose customer information to an outside party (such as a fulfillment company) unless they agree in writing to abide by your privacy page.

Show Your Trademark and Copyright

Every page of your website should have one copyright statement (like ©2014 Moonlight CEO), usually in small print on the footer. The first occurrence on each page of your unique product or store name should show your trademark symbol “™”.

Use of these symbols can help keep honest companies from using your material without permission, and can sometimes help persuade other website owners to remove material they’ve copied from your site.

You may eventually need to register your trademark with the USPTO to keep unscrupulous advertisers from using your product name in their ads. That’s because Google and others won’t take action unless you can prove that you have registered your trademark and show the “®” registered symbol.

Once you set up your website and plan for these basic legal requirements, it’s time to choose a shopping cart.

Next: Get the Right Shopping Cart

 

* This is not a paid endorsement.

Serving Customers, Suppliers-Good and Bad, Tips for Your Business

Shipping Your Products

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Shipping Your ProductsIf you sell physical products online (as opposed to electronic downloads), the choice of shipping options presented to your customers and the way that shipping fees are calculated will both be determined by your shopping cart.

Very basic shopping carts (like PayPal Standard) usually calculate shipping fees based on weights that you configure and order quantities, in combination with shipping regions that you define.

Because this basic method only estimates the fees, you’ll find that some customers pay too little, while a few visitors might feel they’re being overcharged and will abandon your shopping cart without a purchase.

More advanced shopping carts can give customers a broader choice of shippers, and generally link with carriers’ online systems to calculate accurate shipping fees based on weights, box sizes, delivery addresses, published rates and any discounts you might have. In the case of our own store, we try to charge every customer exactly the fee calculated by the carrier, including any carrier discount, to minimize shopping cart abandonment and complaints.

Note that once you receive an order, unless you use PayPal you’ll generally need to copy-and-paste the customer information into a system provided by each carrier to print the required shipping label. An advantage with PayPal is that its services all provide an online system to print UPS and USPS labels directly, without the need to copy-and-paste.

Shipping Carriers Compared

Probably 80% of our customers choose UPS when buying from our online store. And as far as we’re concerned, UPS has a number advantages:

  • UPS has top-notch online tracking that provides timely and reliable information about the status of each package.
  • UPS has fair and reliable processes for dealing with lost shipments, damaged goods, and occasional customer fraud, and a willingness to track down root causes and resolve claims quickly.
  • You can change delivery and even recall a package after you’ve sent it, albeit at a significant cost.
  • UPS offers a convenient online system for emailing customers prepaid labels to return products if needed.
  • Insurance of up to $100 is included in the cost of every UPS shipment.

However UPS is not perfect, and some of its practices can really hurt.

  • As far as we can tell, UPS has no transparency when it comes to the big discounts they give different online retailers. We’ve had to plead our case every year with the local UPS rep, and hope they’ll help us out.
  • Any time you fail to catch the smallest customer typo on a shipping address, UPS may charge you an address correction fee of $11.
  • By default, UPS uses a customs clearance service that could charge international customers hidden fees that total more than the cost of shipping; when customers refuse to pay, you might have to refund their purchases and pay insanely high fees to get your package back.

As you might guess, we now use only the US Postal Service (USPS) for shipments outside the USA. The USPS has a number of advantages:

  • Unlike other carriers, the USPS offers consistent and transparent pricing for all its services.
  • You won’t get stuck paying surprise fees for address corrections, returned packages, international customs clearance, and so on.
  • The USPS offers Saturday delivery at no extra charge, and unlike UPS can deliver to PO boxes.
  • Customers pay very low rates for shipping to distant US locations like Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and US military bases.

Sadly, some USPS practices seem to be stuck in the pre-Internet age:

  • Especially when it comes to overseas shipments, the USPS online tracking system often gives unreliable, outdated information.
  • USPS support can be almost impossible to reach, and it could take several hours and multiple phone calls to resolve a single issue.
  • The USPS requires a two week wait before they’ll trace a lost package, and often won’t even report their findings until 21 days after that.

Choose Your Carriers with Care

No matter what carriers you choose, much of your customer service effort will be spent resolving delivery issues. We’ve gotten plenty of complaints about both carriers, and have gotten negative online reviews from customers who seemed angry that we don’t offer a particular service they like.

Note that our online store has no track record with other shippers like FedEx, partially because of lack of integration with PayPal, and partially because of my personal bias arising from bad experiences as a consumer.

Configuring shipping options in our shopping cart was the last big step to start selling online. Next it was time to make our store visible to search engines so that people could find us.

Next: Make Your Website Visible

Advertising Your Products, Tips for Your Business, Your Website

Make Your Website Visible

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Make Your Website VisibleNow that you’re ready to start selling online, it’s time to make your website visible to search engines like Google, Bing and the others.

You can make your website visible through a combination of basic setup steps that announce your presence to the search engines, and search engine optimization (SEO) practices to follow each time you create content on your website, so that prospective customers can find you.

Basic Setup Steps

Your first step to getting found online is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, and also submit your site to Bing. Both free services provide basic tools to help make your website visible, including information about how to set up sitemaps to help the search engines find and display your relevant content to people searching for products like yours.

At the time this was written more than two-thirds of internet searches used Google, so prioritize your work accordingly.

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve the visibility of your web pages to people who are searching online. If you search Google for SEO you’ll find a great many articles and ads related to the topic.

There’s a lot of information available online about SEO. Some of the advice is valuable, but a lot of it is definitely not, as you’ll learn with experience.  One website I’ve liked that provides free information (along with paid tools) is MOZ.com*, which currently offers a free beginner’s guide to SEO that could be helpful if you’re just starting out.

Avoid Beginner Mistakes

A common SEO beginner mistake is to place too much emphasis on your product or company name in web page titles, headline text, and so on. If few people know your brand, you should focus on figuring out the terms that they’re likely to search to find your solution, and emphasize those key phrases far above your store or product name.

Beware of companies that advertise SEO services, and especially those that claim to boost your search engine rankings through sale of bogus links, fake content, and other artificial tactics. Search engines will almost certainly spot these illegitimate methods and will penalize your website. And as discussed in the article about Steve’s Marketing Rule, you can be almost certain that these advertised services are a waste of money.

Importance of Online Advertising

Paying for search engine marketing through Google AdWords* (and to a lesser extent its competitors) can have important benefits.

  • Creating effective paid search ad campaigns will require you to research and prioritize keywords that people use to find products like yours online, and could help keep you focused on using these terms as you create new web content.
  • I doubt Google would admit it, but I believe there’s a strong correlation between paying Google for their search engine advertising and the free (also called organic) search results people see when they search for your product category.

Next, we’ll cover a few more of the basics of online adverting.

Next: Advertise Online

 

* This is not a paid endorsement.

Suppliers-Good and Bad, Tips for Your Business, Your Money

Steve’s First Rule of Money

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Steve's First Rule of Money

Steve’s Marketing Rule, discussed in the previous story, is really just a corollary to a general rule that I’ve always found to be true.

While this general rule doesn’t have much to do with selling online, I think it’s worth sharing.

Steve’s First Rule of Money:

Never trust anyone who tries to sell you anything with a measurable monetary return.

Specifically, this rule says that you should be very skeptical of anyone who is making the slightest effort to sell you financial investments, insurance, marketing services, or anything else with a monetary return that someone could possibly measure or predict.

Proof

There are plenty of professionals who can analyze the expected return of just about any investment. And, smart marketers know how to measure the return of almost any ad campaign or marketing service.

You can be sure that if experts believe that an investment is likely to deliver even a slight advantage  (or, in the case of insurance, slightly lower costs than the competition) word will get out, people will rush to buy the offering, and there’s hardly a need to promote it.

Friends in Need

Of course, this also holds true of anyone who asks to borrow money. Individuals who pose an acceptable risk can find ways to secure a loan, whether from a bank or a pawn shop. If you value your relationship with that person, give them money instead of loaning it.

Next, we’ll talk about a costly marketing trap that I discovered the hard way.

Next: Amazon Is No Friend

Advertising Your Products, Suppliers-Good and Bad, Tips for Your Business

Amazon Is No Friend

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Amazon Is No FriendAs a consumer it’s hard to imagine a better online shopping experience than you get with Amazon. The company does an outstanding job selling and delivering products, while also promoting items that are shipped to you by other retailers.

I’ve always found transactions on Amazon to be fast and trouble-free, and I’ve been satisfied with their customer service for as long as I can remember.

However, because of their market power – and some behaviors that I feel are outright irresponsible – I think that you should approach Amazon with great suspicion when it comes to your online business.

Fierce Competitor

Let’s face it: many consumers would be happy to buy a slightly inferior or more expensive product from Amazon than a comparable product from your website. Amazon makes it so easy to buy and return items – and there’s so much trust in their store – that the risk is practically zero.

This is the natural and deserved advantage that Amazon gets from its good customer service. But it also means that you should think twice about starting an online store if Amazon sells even somewhat competitive items.

Our Mistake

Knowing that customers feel comfortable with items they find on Amazon, we signed up for their Seller Central program to display our ads whenever Amazon visitors searched for items like ours. People who clicked the ads were taken to our website, where they found detailed information and accurate shipping rates quoted in real-time by UPS and others.

Shocked, then Angry

Amazon Affiliate Ad
Soon after we started advertising on Amazon, websites offering fake discounts on our products appeared

Soon after joining the program we found ads appearing on websites all over the Internet, offering bogus discounts and nonexistent free shipping on our products. It turns out that the ads are published by Amazon affiliates, who Amazon pays a commission to bring buyers to its website regardless of the products sold.

So many affiliate websites offer bogus discounts on our products that people who search for our company name on Google often click the results that show enticing fake offers. We know because frustrated shoppers contact our customer service staff, demanding that we make good on the bogus ads.

Amazon Affiliate Paid Search Ad
Affiliates ran ads above the Google search results, showing our trademark alongside the bogus offers

Next, the affiliates began running large ads above Google’s search results, showing our company name and the bogus offers.

Feeling confident that Amazon would handle the issue fairly, we contacted the company to ask that they stop the affiliates’ ads that offer fake discounts on our products. Amazon’s reply was a real surprise.

It Gets Much Worse

Instead of putting a stop to fake offers published by its affiliates, the email reply from Amazon seems to blame our company with the odd pretext that our website, like many stores, offers our customers accurate shipping rates calculated in real time by UPS and others.

We concluded that Amazon makes a thin excuse for paying its affiliates to act irresponsibly. Not wanting to reward that behavior, we stopped our Amazon Seller Central ads.

And then things got really ugly.

The affiliate ads with bogus offers on our products continued after we stopped advertising with Amazon, of course. But now when you search for our product name and click the big ads with the fake offers, you’re taken to Amazon’s web page that displays our product images and names, with the misleading message that they are all “Currently unavailable” and a list of cheap alternatives you can buy from Amazon.

Lesson Learned

Early-on another business owner told us that fulfilling products through Amazon can be a big mistake, too, since Amazon has a reputation for using the data they collect to seek out and replace successful products with their own, aggressively undercutting the original sellers on price.

We could have saved a great deal of time, money and frustration if we’d only heeded those early warnings about doing business with Amazon.

Thank goodness our company’s products have positive word of mouth. It seems certain that Amazon harms our business, but more and more customers still find our products without being lured away by bogus ads.

Next: Focus On Customer Service

Serving Customers, Tips for Your Business

Email Is Dangerous

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Email Is DangerousEven though our online store publishes a toll-free number on every page of our website, we still find that most people prefer to communicate by email before and after a sale.

Email definitely has advantages, but we’ve found that it can present so many potential problems that you need to use special care with your messages to avoid misunderstandings and bad word of mouth.

For all of your business and personal email, we recommend that you always start by following one primary rule.

First Rule of Email:

Never write anything in any email that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see.

Because email creates a permanent record that can be forwarded to anyone on the Internet, it’s important to write only clear, courteous messages that reflect positively on you and your company. People we don’t know have published excerpts of our emails online, so we’ve learned that every sentence we write, even if taken out of context, must sound positive and professional.

Here are some other guidelines for writing customer emails.

  • Say something positive to start. Even if it’s only to say thank you or we’re sorry, setting the right tone will encourage readers to give you the benefit of the doubt as they read your text.
  • Put action items very near the beginning. If you need, say, for a customer to provide more information, make your request within the first few lines to improve the odds that it will be read.
  • Be as brief as you possibly can, while taking care to fully answer all of the customer’s questions.
  • Say that your company will take responsibility for any problem without blaming suppliers or individuals, using the word “we” instead of “I” whenever possible to help your company look bigger than you are.
  • Don’t assume that a person is combative just because their email sounds harsh. The tone of email is difficult to control when writing, and even harder to interpret when reading. If an email sounds argumentative, consider responding with a helpful phone call. Regardless of how you follow up, be prompt and polite.

It’s perfectly OK to monitor your business inbox by forwarding messages to a personal web mail account (like Gmail or Yahoo!) but you should only reply using the company email account provided by your web host.

Email Scams

Be on the lookout for email scams, of course. Fraudsters constantly evolve their tactics, and as noted in our story about keeping your money safe, it’s essential to treat all email links and attachments with utmost suspicion, even if the message appears to be from someone you know.

As your business grows, you’re likely to encounter one especially annoying email scam that starts with an innocent sounding product inquiry. Often the message is poorly written, and the writer might use a web mail account with a common, domestic sounding name.

Once you reply to that first inquiry, you’re likely to get an urgent request for pricing on a large quantity of your product. You also might get the feeling that the writer is copying text from your website with no idea what your product does. These are clues that you could be dealing with a fraudster. A Google search for that email address might reveal that others have seen similar requests from that account. If so, stop the communication right away.

What’s Next?

As your online business grows you’ll need to balance the demands of your day job with your new business. We’ll talk more about this topic in the next article about moonlighting tips.

Next: Moonlighting Tips

Getting Started, Running Your Business, Tips for Your Business

Grow Your Business

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Grow Your Business

Once you start to sell online and prove your product idea, you can help your business grow by following some simple advice from a really smart CEO at a company where I once worked.

This CEO is unusual because he shares so much information about running a company with his workers. It’s no coincidence that so many of his former employees now run businesses of their own.

Here is a key piece of advice that the CEO told us about running a business.

A CEO really has only two jobs:

  1. choose a small number of real priorities to focus on right now, and
  2. find and retain the right people to work with.

This concept sounds simple, but it can be a real challenge in practice – especially since time is limited and new priorities often arise.

Choose Your Priorities

The CEO’s first job is to not get too distracted by day-to-day issues that don’t impact the survival of the business. There are plenty of things you can focus on that might bring some improvement; your job is to choose a very few priorities that can make the greatest impact.

That doesn’t mean that you should ignore the many lower-priority issues you’ll face every day. However, you should focus enough of your efforts so that those few really critical concerns get all the attention they need.

As our business grew we found that our top priorities changed significantly. When the company first started I had to focus on building enough products by myself to meet demand, and finding ways to begin advertising without draining the family’s savings.

Today the challenges have shifted because the business is so much larger. Right now the priorities include maintaining the same good levels of customer service, working with suppliers to keep enough components in stock, and positioning the company for longer-term growth.

Find the Right People

If you’re starting a company that sells physical goods, finding the right people at first will amount to choosing your suppliers carefully. Our early priorities were to find one or two reliable suppliers, and to treat those businesses unusually well by communicating frequently and paying promptly.

We found it very helpful to call key individuals at those companies often enough to develop a good business relationship. Eventually I asked those contacts to recommend other suppliers in the marketplace who didn’t compete. I’d also ask if I could mention the referrer’s name as I approached those new suppliers. With those introductions from other suppliers, I found it much easier to get larger, lower-cost vendors to work with us.

As your company grows, you may soon reach a point where you can no longer handle manufacturing, fulfillment, and customer service by yourself. At this stage you’ll need to decide whether to hire your first employees, or find the right outsourcer.

Next: What’s an Outsourcer?

Running Your Business, Suppliers-Good and Bad, Tips for Your Business, Your Money

QuickBooks Hell

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QuickBooks HellAs your business grows – and especially once you start to work with outside suppliers – you’ll likely need an accounting software package. For most businesses QuickBooks is the unavoidable choice. If you want to get help from an accountant or eventually hire a bookkeeper QuickBooks is practically mandatory.

QuickBooks has the potential to make seemingly impossible tasks look easy. Once you get QuickBooks configured right, it’s gratifying to see your transaction history loaded into tax software like TurboTax, and to see the correct IRS forms completed almost instantly. And, you’ll sleep better knowing you’ll have precise profit-and-loss data within a few days after the close of each month. You’ll also know exactly how much sales tax to send to your state each quarter (if required), and you’ll be confident that the bills you’re paying are correct.

Unfortunately, QuickBooks can also make many basic, daily record keeping tasks seem impossibly difficult. Even after reading books on double-entry accounting principles used by the software, I found that setting up and maintaining my company’s books with QuickBooks was hugely frustrating, and it seemed to consume limitless amounts of time.

While I’m no Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and can’t offer specific help setting up QuickBooks for your business, I can share a few pointers that I wish I’d known before wasting what seemed like an eternity in QuickBooks Hell.

Keys to QuickBooks

Used correctly, QuickBooks can provide a great deal of value in tracking and reconciling items such as:

  • Bills, payment card charges, and business expenses in general
  • Key business accounts including your checking account, online merchant account, and sales taxes payable to your state
  • Purchase orders, and the payments that you send to suppliers
  • High-level financial results, with the ability to feed this data to TurboTax

However, we find other activities to be impossibly difficult with QuickBooks:

Before finding our really smart CPA, we paid several other accountants to try and make our QuickBooks setup workable. We quickly learned that while many people call themselves ‘experts,’ most were only familiar enough with QuickBooks to make it work for one particular type of business. Nobody seemed to understand the software well enough to help us set up efficient processes for our online store.

Setting Up QuickBooks for an eCommerce Store

Fortunately, after trying to manage inventory for several years with an expensive version of QuickBooks, we eventually found our great CPA. We followed his advice to discard that version of QuickBooks, buy the more basic QuickBooks Pro (often sold for under $200), and start fresh with the features that we found usable. We also switched to planning our inventory with an Excel spreadsheet, and then entering the correct information into QuickBooks at the end of each month.

For our particular business, here are some of the key guidelines we eventually learned with help from our smart CPA.

  • Don’t import individual online transactions into QuickBooks; instead, create QuickBooks entries dated the last day of each month to match the few top-line totals (like Payments received, Payment fees, and Refunds sent) reported for the month by your payment processor.
  • If you sell physical goods, don’t use QuickBooks to manage builds or forecast inventory; instead, enter monthly inventory adjustments in QuickBooks, using the data you track in Excel, so that QuickBooks can calculate your Cost of Goods Sold and the value of inventory on hand.
  • Don’t choose a bad eCommerce platform, payment gateway, or software add-on only because it claims to integrate with QuickBooks. We learned this the hard way, after testing and rejecting many alternatives.

Using these guidelines we’re now able to close our books within a few days after the close of each month, and to easily track the information needed to pay suppliers and tax authorities. And, our sales revenue in QuickBooks exactly matches the 1099K report that PayPal sends to the IRS each year.

If you’ve got questions not answered here, please visit our discussion forum.