South West eCommerce

This week has been a whirlwind and there are a number of half finished thoughts in our heads.  Business is fun and I really feel like we’re winning, but telling you about it is tricky.  So it’s time to kick in with a simple but really important business truth.  We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about selling more, and we are making progress.  Another way to drive up the profit margin is to spend a little less.

The cost of communications can be crippling, We’ve been aware of it and we’ve worked fairly hard to keep the phone bills down over the years.  I feel often like we’re losing that battle, but when I talk to some of our clients, the news of their bills is truly frightening.

So a little while back we started to run a test on Skype, to see whether VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is for us.  Well it’s not completely, but we have certainly cut down the bill for Dave, who spends more time on the road than Graeme does.  Interestingly we researched a lot of other voip providers and found some who would match the Skype price but none who would better it.  So we went with the biggest provider.

By taking an ipod touch with me, I can sit in a wifi enabled cafe and make free calls on the road to anyone who’s on Skype, and cheap calls to landlines and overseas, average calls to mobiles.  This is not a complete replacement for your mobile, but it’s encouraged us to be a little more conscious of our phone usage and has save a level of phone expense into three figure a month.  Worth doing in our books.

As with all sorts of things though, we found another unplanned bonus.  The smart money is moving to voip.  We’ve had one of our biggest new merchants get in touch via Skype, and they checked by email that we could take a Skype call before they called us.  Negotiations from an overseas office were reasonably lengthy and though we couldn’t say they wouldn’t deal with us on regular phones, I’m sure that voip helped us secure an important client.

So it’s worth a try if you’re not on Skype already.  Just click on our link and sign up for a free account.  If your laptop or netbook has a microphone and webcam, you’re already fully equipped and the account is free.  You’ll pay nothing until you make calls to regular phones.  Personally, I think it’s worth going down the ipod road, just make sure you get earphones with a microphone attached.  We’d be happy for your feedback of how it worked, maybe when you’ve had a month to bed it in.

You can check out Skype here.