9 May, 2024

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where brands collaborate with individuals who have a significant following and influence over a particular audience, often on social media platforms, to promote their products or services. These individuals, known as influencers, leverage their credibility, expertise, or popularity to endorse brands and create authentic connections with their followers.

Here’s how influencer marketing typically works:

  1. Identifying Influencers: Brands identify influencers whose audience aligns with their target market and marketing objectives. Influencers can range from celebrities and macro-influencers with millions of followers to micro-influencers with smaller, but highly engaged, niche audiences.
  2. Campaign Planning: Brands and influencers collaborate to develop a campaign strategy that outlines the goals, messaging, deliverables, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This may include sponsored posts, product reviews, giveaways, or other creative content.
  3. Content Creation: Influencers create content that features the brand’s products or services in an authentic and engaging way. This content may take various forms, such as photos, videos, stories, or blog posts, depending on the platform and audience preferences.
  4. Publishing and Promotion: Influencers publish the sponsored content on their social media channels, tagging the brand and using designated hashtags or mentions to increase visibility. They may also cross-promote the content on other platforms or collaborate with other influencers to amplify reach.
  5. Engagement and Measurement: Brands track the performance of the influencer campaign by monitoring metrics such as reach, engagement, website traffic, and conversions. They analyze the effectiveness of the campaign against predefined KPIs and adjust strategies as needed for future campaigns.

Influencer marketing offers several benefits for brands, including:

  • Authenticity: Influencers have built trust and credibility with their audience, making their endorsements more authentic and persuasive than traditional advertising.
  • Reach and Engagement: Influencers can help brands reach specific demographics or niche audiences that may be difficult to target through other channels.
  • Content Creation: Influencers produce high-quality, user-generated content that showcases the brand in a relatable context, driving engagement and brand awareness.
  • ROI: Influencer marketing can deliver a strong return on investment (ROI) when executed effectively, generating brand awareness, driving traffic, and increasing sales or conversions.

However, influencer marketing also poses challenges, such as finding the right influencers, ensuring authenticity, measuring ROI accurately, and navigating legal and ethical considerations, such as disclosure and transparency requirements regarding sponsored content.

9 May, 2024

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Essentially, it’s a revenue-sharing arrangement between online merchants and individuals (affiliates) who promote their products or services through various digital channels such as websites, social media, email, or blogs.

Online advice to referrals from influencer in social media. Woman holding megaphone for advertising message to clients flat vector illustration. Affiliate marketing, influence, interaction concept

Here’s how it typically works:

  1. Affiliate Sign-Up: The affiliate joins an affiliate program offered by a merchant or company. This usually involves signing up through an affiliate network or directly with the merchant.
  2. Promotion: The affiliate promotes the merchant’s products or services using unique tracking links provided by the affiliate program. These links allow the merchant to track where the traffic and sales are coming from.
  3. Conversion: When a customer clicks on the affiliate’s link and performs a desired action (such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter), the affiliate earns a commission. The action that triggers the commission can vary depending on the merchant’s objectives, such as sales, leads, or clicks.
  4. Commission Payment: The merchant pays the affiliate a commission for each successful referral, typically on a predetermined schedule (e.g., monthly).

Affiliate marketing benefits both merchants and affiliates. For merchants, it’s a cost-effective way to acquire customers and increase sales without upfront marketing expenses. For affiliates, it offers an opportunity to monetize their online presence by promoting products or services relevant to their audience.

Successful affiliate marketing requires finding the right products or services to promote, understanding the target audience, creating valuable content to drive traffic and conversions, and optimizing campaigns for maximum effectiveness. It’s a dynamic and evolving field influenced by changes in consumer behavior, technology, and industry trends.

24 Sep, 2022

Payment Gateway Integration Service

A payment gateway integration service is nothing but a medium or platform of a merchant service that authorises payment with various options such as debit cards or credit cards, digital wallets, UPI and so on to the online retailor like, eCommerce, SaaS, business, and many more. If we search in Google, we may find many payment gateways out there as the digital marketing has great craze in this Twenty First century and cashless transactions has now become a new trend. Hence, whenever we are making an online transaction a Payment Gateway plays a major role in this process.

Hence, we need to know how a payment gateway integration service works but before that we need to know about the various software involves whenever we are making a card-based transaction. The software components of a payment gateway are Issuer Domain-Access Control Server (ACS), Interoperability Domain-Directory Server (DS), The Acquiring Domain-Merchant Plug-In (MPI), Payment Switch. Let us discuss what these are actually:

          Issuer Domain-Access Control Server (ACS): This is the place where the issuing bank operates. The issuing bank provides the card to the card holder who makes the transaction. The issuing bank installs a server which is known as Access Control Server and it is used to accept 3D messages and then process the messages and authenticate the card user and the transaction.

         Interoperability Domain-Directory Server (DS): This also known as the foundation holder which holds the 3D secure mechanism together. The Directory server within it, is installed by the card network. This called a directory server because it serves as the directory between the acquiring bank and the issuing bank. The server also serves as a mapping server where the acquiring bank sends a message to the card network’s Directory Server. After that the Directory Server will receive the message from Merchant Plug-in (MPI) and then checks the card number against the BIN range directory. After that the message is forwarded to the definite issuing bank and then the issuing bank will proceed and validates the card user.

       The Acquiring Domain-Merchant Plug-In (MPI): It is the place where the acquiring bank and the payment gateway sits together. They initiate the transaction and to make this happen entities in acquiring space need to install a “merchant plug-in” (MPI).

        Payment Switch: Payment switch is the independent entity that simplifies the communication between various entities during a payment process. The payment gateway communicates with various stakeholders during a payment processing. It enables the processing of original payments between providers and also accept the request of payment that is why it is considered as highly reliable, and versatile and it can perform billions of payments daily. payment gateway integration service also makes out about which providers to deal with and then formats the message for that provider and gets a response and then changes the response to a generic format and then sends back the response to the caller.

These are the software’s activity involves for making a payment through a payment gateway. Now we have to make out about the process of making the transaction. It includes a several process and they are:

         1.Card Authentication: The most important task for making a transaction is to authenticate the card holder’s account number and also checks if it is the issuer’s card and that is in the 3D secure platform. Then the merchant server software connects with the card network. These are the process that involves in a card authentication.

        2.Payer Authorisation: After the card verification process it involves in the 3D Secure programme. The payer authentication request or response are sent form the merchant-plug in to the access control server to begin the actual authentication. At this point the card holder’s CVV will be verified. Then the Access Control Server will begin authentication and if the authentication becomes successful then it will provide an Account Holder Authentication Value (AVV). For having a successful authenticated transaction, the Account Holder Authentication Value must be sent to the acquirer by the merchant and then it is forwarded to the issuer as the part of that authorisation request. The ACS provider should generate AAV values for all attempts like when the cardholder is not enrolled or declines activation (PARes=A) and when it is fully authenticated (PARes=Y) transaction status. After all these steps are completed then the payment authorisation begins. The merchant then sends a request to the acquirer. The acquirer then submits the request to the card issuing party-account holder’s bank. Then the issuer checks the request and takes the decision if there are enough funds to make the transaction. If there are sufficient funds then the authorisation is made and the funds are deducted and the transaction code is then shared with the MPI.

What is Capture in Payment gateway integration service?

This is the most important part of transaction via a payment gateway. It happens after the successful payment authorisation when the authorised money is transferred from the customer’s account to the merchant’s account and transaction amount will not delivered until the funds are captured. The card network then tells the MPI that the card is authorised and after that the customer’s money is transferred from the customer’s account to the merchant account. Usually, this capture process takes near about 3-4 days to fully complete it and this is for the debit cards. But if we use the credit card then it will take near about 4-28 days to complete it.

               But the transactional capture takes place in two ways and they are:

               Automatically: This takes place when the card capture is automatically sent by the merchant’s acquiring bank on behalf of the merchant and that omits the process of manually putting in a request for fund capture and the funds are immediately captured after the authorisation happens.

               Delayed: The merchant has the option for deciding when the funds will be transferred to his or her account. If the request is not sent under the authorisation period then authorisation will expire and capture fails and this matter is very common for PayPal, here the money will only be received after the customer receives their goods or services.

24 Sep, 2022

Registered Office

Whenever we want to form a limited company, we all need to go through a process which is known as Company Formation Process. The most necessary requirement for this process is to deliver companies house with the address of our Registered Office. Hence, a Registered Office is known as the official address of an incorporated company or any legal entity. A registered physical office is required for incorporated organizations to receive formal notices form government departments, or may be from banks, shareholders or may be from investors and the general public. In United Kingdom and many other law countries, the registered office address does not need to be in that place where the organisation performs its real business. In the United Kingdom all legal notice for an incorporated organisation is posted or they are hand delivered to the registered office. Under the regulations which was implemented in the United Kingdom says in the year 1 October 2009, says that now company directors use the registered office instead their home address for contact on the company’s house register. All they need is to keep all the previous record at the registered office and these must be available for public inspection.

But there are differences between a corporate office and a registered office. We all know that every business has different types of requirements and responsibilities and whenever a company wants to do business as a corporation then that company must have a corporate office at the same time it should have a registered office. A corporate office is that office where the business is conducted and it also called the main office or the Head Quarters. It is that place where the executives maintain their office. On the other hand, a Registered Office is formed in order to receive the legal documents and this address can not be a Post Office Box, it must be a physical address where someone is present who is called a service agent and he has to receive the legal documents during the business hour. 

State law must require a corporation in order to handle a registered office in the state of incorporation. This means any company that incorporated in one state can not set up the registered office in the other state. But for corporate offices, a company can set up its corporate office anywhere and state law does not need it at all to keep the office in the state of incorporation. As a result, many corporations have their corporate office outside the state.

However, there are many benefits also using registered office address service. By using this service, we can enable to keep our home address off from the public which will help to prevent unwanted people visiting our home. Instead of displaying our home address on all of our company websites, we can display any country’s address and that will help our company to form a prestigious image and impression which lead further for gaining new clients and customers. This is more necessary when we are trying to win over or to give impressions potential business partnerships and joint-ventures or we may want seek financing from credit companies or Business Angel groups.

There are some processes that include to buy a registered office and suppose we want to buy London Registered Office and both clients and non-clients can access the service of a registered office for a yearly token. There are three ways to purchase a registered office address and they are discussed below:

 1.SIMPLE BUY A REGISTERED OFFICE ONLINE:  First, we have to choose a London’s registered office page and then we have to click the order button and after that we can purchase the registered office page, all we need to do is to fill up an application form with providing our company details. We do not have to import the company details and also, we do not need to call them. All we need to do is to provide details like name and address etc.

We will receive an email from them that contains the welcoming message after the registration of two hours. After that our new address can be used. But we need to keep the public record of new registered address.

2.ADD IT TO THE COMPANY FORMATION PACKAGE: During the application process we are free to include the address service of formation package. The details of the registered office will be filled by the Companies House along with the application form and they do not need to be contracted separately. The main advantages of company formation process is that we can change our registered office address in future if we need that.

CREATE AN ACCOUNT WITH OUR COMPANY FORMATION LTD:  The non-clients have the accessibility of this free service. Our authentication code and company registration number will be putted to the admin portal and then creating an online account. After that select the London Registered Office service after importing our existing company into the online system. After that our newly registered office details will be sent to the Companies House (It is the registrar of United Kingdom for companies) within the next 24 hours and the public record will be updated. After the completion of this process, we can file the annual returns and resolutions and we can update our company details and report the changes made to Companies House using the admin portal.

     Legal notices and statutory mails from the agencies of the United Kingdom’s government such as, HMRC and Companies House will be sent to our registered office in London. 

Our mail will be sent to our address within or outside the United Kingdom and a charge, which is 15% plus the royal mail postage fee will be deducted for sending the mail outside the United Kingdom though it is completely free in the United Kingdom. But we have to remember that the mails that are sent will not include the unofficial business-related mails. We must have to purchase another service in order to avail those unofficial business-related mails.

24 Sep, 2022

Virtual Phone Number

A Virtual Phone Number, also called as Direct Inward Dialling is that telephone number that is not tied to a specific phone device that allows the user to redirect the calls from one number to another number, IP address or devices. Generally, these types of numbers are designed to forward calls to any pre-set phone numbers which is chosen by the client. Hence it acts as a gateway between traditional calls and VoIP. 

In this rate race business competition, we all need a reliable communication system which will help to grow business with the help of communication. But a good business telephone system is very costly and it is quite tough to implement it in small business. Hence, the solution is a virtual phone number because it is an affordable solution and it will help to expand our business.

Here are some benefits of having a virtual phone number.

1.A virtual phone number is very cost saving and it has the flexibility for small business also.

2.We can get a virtual phone number alone or as a part of virtual phone system package.

3.Having a virtual phone number will help to access from anywhere and anytime with our personal number’s privacy.

            Traditionally a phone number is designed to work over a single phone and that must be physically connected to the mobile phone and any calls made to this number can only be sent to that physical location. Still now cell phones are dependent on cell towers. Thus, a virtual phone number will provide the business a greater in control and flexibility by removing those physical limitations. Virtual phone numbers are also very advantageous for the companies which have multiple office locations. Instead of ringing the phone in one office, all incoming calls can be forwarded to each and every office. We can do this by making the virtual phone line’s destination a call queue or ring group and that will ring the phone of any employee who is designated as the part of the queue or group either continuously or sequentially. If the office is located outside the customer base then we can assign a local area code to our phone line and it has more chance to receive a call by customer from a local number than a number with area code they do not know. Virtual phone number can save thousands of dollars in business for investing in communication and its equipment because virtual phone line does not require a physical medium such as hardware, equipment or installation or maintenance, it is purely digital. More expensive plans will offer more interesting features such as three-way calling, call waiting and call forwarding etc. Whenever we are searching for any virtual phone number provider we should also check if the provider also provides text or voicemail features in addition with the phone service.

        Virtual phone numbers can be bought through several ways. If the business has the “VOICE OVER INTERENET PROTOCOL”, abbreviated as VoIP, then we can add the virtual phone number to our existing package via the VoIP provider and this basically cost worth 5 dollar to 10 dollars. But if we want to buy a virtual phone system package then the package must have one virtual phone number, a number of extensions and minutes and the minutes are run up on how much time we are talking on the business line. A virtual phone system package basically starting costs worth 10 dollars to 15 dollars with 300 to 500 minutes with one or two virtual phone numbers and this package can go up to 25 dollars to 50 dollars with 2000 to 3000 minutes for two numbers. If we want to get a virtual phone number then we must have to go to provider that sells virtual phone numbers. Some popular virtual phone number providers are stated below:

         GOOGLE VOICE: It offers the users with a free virtual phone number that can be used to call or to send text messages and voicemail. This is a very lucid app for smartphones and computers and we can link the virtual phone number to a mobile or a to a landline number. This package starts at only 10 Dollars per month per user.

MIGHTY CALL:  It is basically a cloud based virtual phone system that offers us many features apart from the phone call such as, text messaging, call forwarding and call waiting are also available with this package and this plan starts with a cost of worth 19.99 Dollar per month

GROSSHOPPER: This provider also enables the features of supporting calls, texts and voicemails and these plans are served only worth 26 Dollar per month and it is up to us which plan suits us the best for our busines.

8X8: It is also a cloud-based Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It is unified communication system that generates the best reliable utility services such as three-way-calling feature, online voice mailing, call forwarding options and group calls. It has also the features of office programme such as Salesforce and Slack. This plan starts worth 12 Dollar per month and per user.

          Though Virtual Phone Numbers have a number of advantages but at the same time it has also some drawbacks. The first problem is its effect on work-life balance. A report says that most of the people are workaholic and with having the feature of making call from anyplace may subject to burnout. Another most common drawback is the inappropriate call reliability because we all know that a virtual phone number is fully internet based and calls are made from the virtual numbers needs an internet system. Hence, the calling quality and audibility can only be clear if the internet connection is strong enough. We have to be sure that our internet connection has a great signal strength and the provider has a good customer service programme. Above all virtual phone numbers are come with a limited minutes, hence we have to sure that we are using those minutes on business call and the minutes are not wasting in non-business calls. 

24 Sep, 2022

Search Engine Optimization

A Search Engine is a programme that is used to search and identify items which are stored in a database which are linked to keywords or characters that are specified by the users and used specially for finding the particular files in the World Wide Web (wwe). So basically, search engine act as a medium of getting the ocean of Knowledge. Some most popular search engines are GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING etc. The use of internet has been increased rapidly in this youth generation and people are investing most of the time for gathering information from the wwe via a search engine. There are two types of people who use search engine. First users are those who search in a search engine to get information. Users do billion of searches in order to get information. Another users are those who try to optimize their websites for getting the top rank in the search result and optimizing an website for Google or other search engine is a very necessary part of getting a large number of audience and the visitors will help to generate revenue for site owners either for the advertisement that is displayed on the website or by purchasing any product from the website.

There are four types of search engines based on how it works

  1. CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES
  2. HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES
  3. HYBRID SEARH ENGINES
  4. OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES

CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES: These types of search engines occupy crawler or bot or spider for crawling and indexing new content to search database. Example of these types of crawl-based search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex etc.

HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES: These types of search engines are also called as open directory system which is depend on human based activities for listing. First, site owner submits a short description of the site along with the category is to be listed. Then, submitted site is checked manually and after that it is added in the exact category for listing. Keywords that entered in a search box, will be matched with the description of the sites. A good site with good content is always greatly accepted and reviewed rather than a site with having poor content.

HYBRID SEARCH ENGINES: Hybrid search engines are the mixture of both the crawler based and manual indexing for listing the sites in search results. Generally, maximum crawler-based search engines such as Google uses crawler as primary mechanism and human directories as the secondary medium. But still there are some manual filtering of search results that occurs to remove copied and spammy sites. Whenever an website is identified for spammy activities the website owner must have to take the necessary actions to remove the spammy activities and he has to resubmit the site to the search engines.

OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES: Besides all the three above search engines there is other some types of search engines and they are depending upon the usage. Search engines have different types of bots for exclusively displaying images, videos, news, products and local listings. For example, Google News page can be used to search news from different types of newspaper. Some search engines like Dogpile, are made in order to collect meta data of the pages. Some search engines like Swoogle helps us to provide exact search results on specific area.

In order to enhance user experience, all search engines need to be optimised. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the sites to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The more visibility the pages have the more it likely to be catch the attention of the customer. SEO is the basic part of a Digital Marketing because people do billions of searches with commercial intent to find out several information about the product or for the services. Hence, search has become the primary source to bring the digital traffic for brands. That is why greater the visibility of the pages the higher it will be ranked in the search result.

However, Search Engine Optimisation has also some drawbacks as SEO is not an appropriate strategy for website. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of designing and optimising search engine ad-campaign and the difference between SEO and SEM is the paid and unpaid features for getting the rank in search result. A successful internet marketing depends upon the building of a high-quality web page and flatter the user.

Search Engine Optimisation may generate a sufficient return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for search and there is no guarantee of continued referrals. On behalf of the application, SEO can be classified into two groups. First one is called the “WHITE HAT”, this one is recommended by the companies as a part of a good design and another one is called the “BLACK HAT”, and these types of techniques are not recommended by the companies and they do not approve that. White hat allows to produce results that will be last long, on the other hand black hat predicts that their sites may be temporarily or permanently once the search engine notices that what they are doing.

A SEO technique will be only considered as white hat if it comes under the search engine guidelines and shows no duplicity or fraud alerts. But white hat is not just about following the guidelines but to ensure the content of a search engine and then ranks in the same content which the use will notice. White hat basically precises content for the user and not for the search engine and after that it makes the content easily accessible to the online ‘spider’ algorithm.

Black hat SEO techniques offers to improve rankings in a way which are disapproved by the search engines. A black hat technique uses the hidden text as text colour similar to the background in an invisible ‘div’ and then positioned off screen. Search engine may penalize the sites that are using black hat, either by reducing their rankings or throwing out their listing from the database.

24 Sep, 2022

Software Development

“Software” it is the term that changes the world. It is also called the soul of a computerised system. All we know that the computer has changed our world because after the invention of computer the time period of completing a work becomes very less as compared to human effort. From a small mobile to laptop or toy car to big car or aeroplane everything is automated. Now we can drive a car without putting the hands on the steering. Hence everything has become an example of an Artificial Intelligence and all the gadgets or devices whatever we called is run by a Software. Day by day our world is modernised with the help of continuously Software Development. That is why it has great craze on market and software developer are also get well paid too.

Software Development is said to be the series of computer activities which is dedicated to the process of creating, designing and supporting the software. It is called the brain of a computer that allows the computer to be clarified what to do and it is totally independent of hardware.

Software is basically three types they are a) SYSTEM SOFTWARE b) PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE c) APPLICATION SOFTWARE.

Let us discuss what these three types of software are.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE: This software is created to provide core functions such as disk managements, operating systems, utilities, hardware management and other utility operations that is why their utility areas are very specific.

PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE: These types of software are made in order to create a programme. They give the programmers some tools such as text editors, compilers, linkers and debuggers in order to create codes. These types of software have a wide area of implementations that is why programming software are very necessary because every software is run by a specific programme and coding.

APPLICATION SOFTWARE: This type of software is very essential because that is made in order to help users to perform tasks that is why this type of software has a great area of implementations. Application software are also called any application or apps. Media players, data management software are the main example of application software and applications are like any web or mobile application that is used to shop on amazon or share or upload pictures with facebook or Instagram.

          Besides all these a fourth type software is there which is known as Embedded Software. But this is not a conventional software this type of software is used to control machines such as cars, industrial robots, telecommunication network etc and all these devices along with the software together they are called the INTERNET OF THINGS which is abbreviated as IOT. Hence this type of software is used in Artificial Intelligence, called AI.

          Software Development is generally performed by Programmers or Software Engineers or by the Software Developers and sometimes their work is connected with each other.

Programmers or Coders write the source code in order to programme the computer to perform specific task such as processing online orders, merging database, routing communications, conducting searches or displaying text and graphics. Programmers expound the instructions from software developer and software engineers and use the programming language such as C++ or JAVA to bring out them.

Software Engineer usually uses the engineering principles to create software and systems to work out problems. Basically they use modelling language to conceive solutions further they can be applied when facing problems in a very simple way. Software Engineering solutions choose the path of scientific method they must work in the real world.

Software Developer has a less formal role as compared to software engineer because their area of implementation is involved with specific project area including writing codes. At the same time they drive the overall software development lifecycle including manging the development teams and processes and also conducting the software testing and maintenance. The work of the software development does not confine to coders or development teams. Many professionals like scientists or device fabricator or also hardware makers also create codes although they are not a primarily software developer. It is also not confined to traditional Information technologies or as a software business.

But we have to remember that there is an important distinction between custom software development and commercial software development. Custom software development is the procedure of creating, deploying and maintaining the software for a specific set of users, functions or may be for an organisation where as commercial software is designed for a variety of requirements which allows it to be marketed and distributed commercially.

Developing a software is involved the following steps and they are as follows:

SELECTING METHODOLOGY: It creates a frame work and here software development is applied. It defines an overall process or road map for the project. Some methodologies are Rapid Application Development (RAD), Scaled Agile Framework (SAF), Agile Development etc.

GATHERING REQUIREMENTS: It is to make out the document what is required by the user.

CHOOSING OR BUILDING AN ARCHITECTURE: In this step we have to build an architecture within which the software will operate.

DEVELOPING A DESIGN: In this step we have to develop a design in order to solve a specific problem which is presented by requirements which often includes the process models and story boards.

CONSTRUCTING A CODE: Here we have to construct a code in the correct programming language that involves peer and team review to eliminate problems and to produce quality software faster.

TESTING: It includes the pre-planned scenarios as a part of software design and coding and also we have to conduct a performance testing to simulate load testing.

MANAGING CONFIGURATION AND DEFECTS: In this step we have to manage and configure the defects in order to understand all the software artifacts (requirements, design, code, test) and build  distinct version of software.

DEPLOYING: Here we have to deploy the software for user and to respond for the user problems.

MIGRATING DATA: Here we have to migrate data to the new and updated software if needed.

MANAGING AND MEASURING THE PROJECT: In this step we have to manage and measure the project in order to maintain quality and delivery over the application lifecycle and to evaluate the development process.

24 Sep, 2022

Payment Gateway Integration

In today’s busy life no one wants to stand behind a huge line of people in a bank or outside the ATM for receiving or sending money because the world has occupied the cashless transaction. A Payment Gateway does the magic of cashless transactions. A payment gateway is that technology which captures and transfer payment data from the customer to the acquirer and after that transfers the payment acceptance or decline back to the customer. A payment gateway ensures the customer card details are valid or not then checks whether there is enough fund to make the transaction successfully and it enables the merchant to get paid. It encrypts the card details and also ensures that the details are passed securely. Hence, a payment gateway is the middleman between the customer and the merchant in a very secured manner.

But a question may arise in our mind that why do we need the payment gateway medium as it works as a middle man. Here is the answer but before that we have to assume that we don’t have the card in present and we want to make a shopping and as we don’t have the card right now in order to swipe in merchant’s POS terminal we can not make the transaction as POS terminal needs the card to swipe. Hence, we have to rely on customer’s card information but how can we be so sure that customer is putting the right information on the payment page. Hence, in this method the fraud risk is much higher and we can easily be exposed to fraudsters about our business besides that fraudsters also have the knowledge about the illegal way to initiate the transaction and here the payment gateway does the miracle. In a word, a payment gateway is the gatekeeper of our customer’s payment data. Different types of payment gateway offer different payment page. Emerchantpay’s payment gateway offers us the options described below for the payment page

HOSTED PAYMENT PAGE: A hosted payment page is that type of payment page where customers are redirected whenever they are prepared to check out that is why it is called the out-of-the-box payment page.

SERVER TO SERVER INTEGRATION: It is the direct communication between two servers one is merchant’s server and the other is payment gateway server that is why a server-to-server integration is known as Direct Integration. After requesting the card details on the payment page, a direct transaction can be initiated and customer can easily make the payment without being redirected to the payment gateway’s payment page and that results a faster checkout

CLIENT-SIDE ENCRYPTION: This permits the merchant to make it simplify our PCI compliance requirements and it also offers us to accept payments on our website while encrypting card data on our browser.

Customer enters their credit card or debit card details on their payment page which includes the Card Holder’s Name, Card Expiration Date, CVV (CARD VARIFICATION VALUE) and all these information are passed onto our payment gateway. Then the payment gateway checks the card whether it is fraud or not before sending it to the acquirer bank. After that the acquiring back sends this information to the card schemes whether it is VISA or MASTER CARD etc in a very secured manner. After that the card schemes checks another fraud check before sending the data to the issuing bank. After all these processes the issuing bank authorises the transaction.

The Integrated payment gateway technology used to connect with a gateway is an API and using an API integration, the provider will perform all the necessary tasks in order to make the transaction. There are four things to integrate the payment gateway and they are discussed below:

EVALUATE API QUALITY: The API should be simple and flexible so that we can code directly or through Software Developer Kit. Copy-and-paste-ready code samples should be available because they are very easy to use and they use very less room and they make the integration process faster.

EVALUATE THE SECURITY: As the payment gateway is the matter of transferring money so it should have the highly secured system. There are two types of security we all should know about

           1.FRAUD AND CHARGEBACK MANAGEMENT: All the gateways have some types of fraud protection but the stronger it is the more our customers are safe. The gateway we choose should have the necessary tools to protect our customers and the protection not only should be at the time of purchase but also after the purchase (with charge back alerts and notifications). Aside from fraud management a payment gateway also protects the merchant from expired cards, insufficient fund, closed accounts or exceeding credit limits.

           2.PCI COMPLIANCE: Every payment gateway should be obedient with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). If possible then find out the gateway we are choosing has ways to reduce the burden of PCI Compliance.

EVALUATE PAYMENT PROCESSING FEATURE: The most important thing to integrate payment gateway is to add more features because most of the customers are attracted through interesting features and customer will choose those payment gateway which offers them most. Having high level support for global transactions will give the border sales and that will help to expand our business. Having the ability to accept all kind of payments with all kind of currencies will help us to increase conversions. That is why a multi-currency payment gateway helps to increase the border sale. International gateway services offers multiple currency options so that customer can pay as per their currency choice.

EVALUATE THE SUPPORT: One of the best ways to integrate the payment gateway is to have the customer support option because it is the key to have good relation between the merchant and the customer. In addition, with the technical support we should have ready access for consulting and solving the payment solutions will help to grow our platform. A 24*7 chat support is one of the best options to know customer’s queries and solving the queries will help to tighten the bond between the merchant and the customer 

24 Sep, 2022

Search Engine Advertisement

Whenever we are browsing any search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, we all might have noticed that sometimes an advertisement is displaying on the search engine, this concept is globally known as “SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISEMENT”, abbreviated as “SEA”. The advertisements are often displayed in the form of images or text, shown on the search engine result page (SERP). This technique is globally known as the best source of income for the search engine provider and search engine advertisement is cost effective way to improve business and brands. There is also a technique, is known as Search Engine Marketing, abbreviated as “SEM” and combination of search engine marketing and search engine advertisement is the branch of online marketing and surrounds all elements to enhance the visibility of a website in the search engine result page. Search engine advertisement involves in the posting ads on the search engine result page using the method of “CPC” which is also known as “Cost Per Click” and booking these ads in the search engine result page is based on bids on keywords for which the ads will be placed. A good ranking is always depending upon the optimisation of text ads and offers and clear control of ads will help to increase traffic.

Search engine advertisement is one of the best ways of digital marketing and this will lead us to generate a handsome revenue. One of the main objectives of search engine advertisement is significantly increase the Click-Through Rate (The ratio of clicks per page view) because the number of clicks can be easily increased by the posting of advertisement. The conversion rate plays a major role for search engine advertisement because in the end it determines the costs of the advertisement and then it shows the “Return on Advertising Spend”, abbreviated as “ROAS”. It shows the actual profit achieved per advertising expense in dollars. 

Search engine is also used to bring out advertising pressure by page view from the display campaign. Generally, advertisements are used in the e-commerce industry where search engine advertisement helps to convert the user to a buyer. Hence, the main objective of search engine advertising is the conversion in the form of sales. Some popular search engine platforms are Google ads, Bing ads, Yahoo ads etc.

GOOGLE ADS: Google ads is basically nothing but a product of Alphabet Inc which helps the marketers a higher range of opportunities in the search engine advertising field. There is a technique of placing the ads through ads and that is called auctioning. Later it will define how the advertising costs are. The advertisers will bid on a specific keyword or they pay for clicks. This phenomenon is known as PPC (PAY PER CLICKS) or CPC (COST PER CLICK). Some factors that play a vital role in final placement of text ads or banners are quality of the text ads, quality of the landing page, relevance of the keywords and the positive history of the Ad-word account. Most common forms of advertising that are possible by using the google ads are:

        1.CLASSIC TEXT ADS: An advertiser chooses a specific keyword or         keywords with which their text ads will be displayed on a definite position in the search engine result page which will result in creating the campaign that consists of ad group and each and every ad group is categorised into advertisement that is based on the specified keywords. If any user tries to search any of those keywords the corresponding ad that is linked, will be displayed on search engine result page.

        2.PRODUCT LISTING ADS: Google ads offers us to place the product ads that are directly created from a product file that is brought about by the customer. The modulation is done by specifying the structured data in the data feed.

       3.DISPLAY ADS: These ads are in the form of images or text that are placed on the google networking platform and the registration for this network is done by the Google AdSense platform.

Google AdWords provides us to combine different types of forms of advertisement of search engine advertisements such as, text ads, and display ads, and all these are possible by Google AdWords. That is why Google Ads is the best tool for search engine advertisement in the world. Some other mentionable tools are Bing, Yahoo, Amazon etc.

       4.VIDEO ADS: The advertisers on the Google AdWords programme can also put down advertisement on YouTube. Text or video ads can place for this purpose.

       5.GMAIL ADS: We can also book ads in Gmail accounts if we use the Google Ads. Payment will be initiated via PCC or CPM.

With the help of Ads Express programme, Google puts forward small companies to have the possibilities to use search engine advertisement without creating their own campaign and the files required to generate is done by Google itself. The advertisers only have to provide advertising budget.

BING or YAHOO ADS: Bing and Yahoo together they also provide their own search engine advertising platform and they function as same as Google ads. But due to the dominance of Google ads it is considered as the most useful search engine advertising platform in Europe where as Bing and Yahoo has big craze in the market of USA to use them as a search engine advertising platform.

In search engine advertising platform, there is various kinds of rules for posting ads and they are:

              PPC (PAY PER CLICK): It also known as Cost per click or CPC. Here the advertisers clarify how much they want to pay per click. 

              CPA (COST PER ACQUISITION): Here the advertisers clarify how much they desire to pay per conversion achieved through the advertising measure.

              CPT (COST PER THOUSAND): Here the advertisers clarify how much they desired to pay per thousand impressions of advertisements.

              CPC (COST PER CALL): Here the advertisers specify how much they are willing to pay per visit.

               CPL (COST PER LEAD): Here the advertisers clarifies the amount they are wanting to pay for the leads such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a PDF and all are depending upon the web portal.