Being a small business is like being a surfer, you’re either riding waves so high it makes you giddy, or just trying to breathe through a lot of water! We’ve been in business now for over 3 years, and over that time, we’ve definitely improved the way we do things, but there are several key tools that we use that we couldn’t do without now. These tools help us no-end to keep on top of the ever growing beast that is Webtogs.

This is our list of the ones we feel to be essential in our day to day lives, both as a small business or from a personal productivity point of view. There are many more that could have gone in, but these are the tops as they say. So in the best chart tradition, here’s our rundown from 5 through to number 1 (cue music)

TWEETDECK Just two of us use it in the office, but it’s the social media hub we’ve come to rely on. Twitter, linkedin, Facebook all come in to here and it helps us keep an eye on customer services issues, lets us spread news about whats going on at Webtogs, and in the wider outdoor world, as well as enabling us to chat with our customers. Flexibility in following people, managing Twitter lists and our FB pages all mean it gets our vote for managing our presence out on the web.

EVERNOTE The Daddy of all note systems, we love One Note, but as we work hard at home as well as at work, having a notebook that synchronises between home, phone and office is invaluable. We love the ability to tag everything to the nth degree and there are some great examples out there such as Steve Horners use for storing routes. I also love the ability to photo our ramblings on the whiteboard, if only it was able to then decipher my Doctor style writing……

37 SIGNALS The guys at 37 signals have produced some awesome tools, but the ones we use are Highrise and Basecamp. Highrise is a contact management software and we use it to store details of all the people we deal with, notes to do with them and ourselves. The ability to access everywhere is crucial. Basecamp is a seriously simple project management tool, that although not favoured by all, helps us keep track of our larger development projects. Both are seriously easy to use, available everywhere and incredibly useful.

DROPBOX A small piece of genius that we have been using for a while now. Automatically installs within your documents on either your smartphone, Mac, PC or tablet  and then auto-syncs anything you put in there between those devices. You now have the ability to specify what you want synchronised within your folders, and it’s ability to just quietly do it’s job without thinking about it is testament to how easy it is to use. So easy I now use it as backup for my parents!

SKYPE Simply put, we couldn’t live without it now. This is our key tool for communicating as a business as we have a warehouse, an office, and people working remotely. Video calling is brilliant, file sharing a doddle, calls are free and we can also use it as backup for taking calls from customers.

So, this is what we couldn’t do without, what’s your experience, and what would make it in to your top 5 list of seriously handy tools ?

Sagepays token system keeps customers card details without actually storing them. They are converted via an encryption process into a secure token or “alias” to ensure that no sensitive customer data is ever put at risk. All we then do is exchange these tokens with our bank and hey presto you’ve checked out quicker than the time it says “lets have a quick wander along the Cuillin Ridge”

Customers will see in their account area a new section over on the left hand menu, simply click on it to add or remove cards – you can also do this as you go through checkout too.

To check out all the new gear heading our way, simply click on the coming soon link that you can access from the home page at the bottom of our left hand navigation menu, everything that is not yet in is listed before you with a shiny blue “coming soon” icon at the top. You can also sign up with your email so we’ll tell you when they have come in through the Warehouse door. Simply click on the product that you fancy, and click the unmissable “Email me when in stock button” – we’ll keep you posted.

You will also see these items if you search specifically on the site – although you won’t see any coming soon items when you navigate through the main navigation menu.

We hope you like this, and get as excited as we are about all the shiny new gear we have coming up!

It’s been incredible to watch just how quickly it has gone up, it has literally been two weeks for them to get to the stage above us in the photgraph. We can’t wait for the new warehouse to come online, especially our warehouse manager Sue, as things are a tad tight in the current one.

We’ll keep you posted as we progress……

1) We can no longer transfer calls, why oh why did they remove this?

2) The ability to punch a number in on the call bar at the bottom of the main window has been removed, for those comrades who make a lot of calls each day, the additional click is frustrating to bring up the dial up window.

3) File transfers are also now listed within the main IM window rather than separately. The amount of times I have closed an IM window only to terminate a file transfer is more than a little irritating

4) Conversely, a pop up for each call you get that stays there when you take a lot of calls is simply frustrating and leads to Window spam. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeese can we have the option for calls to simply appear as a tab on the main window along with conversations.

These are our main requests to enable Skype to return to being a tool of the proletariat and the minimalist, call friendly business application it was before. Vive la revolution!

So this is just a little post to say thanks to all of you who have bought from Webtogs, it means a great deal to us all that you shop with us – Cheers!

Now, before you switch off and file this in the ‘yet-another-corporate-ego-things-are-great-rubbish’ drawer, I actually have a more sour point to make in my post today.

This one is all about, well…. Banks.

Now, for some background. Like nearly all Internet retailers, we accept both credit and debit cards on our site. It’s a fairly well trodden path this, so I won’t bang on for ages, but the important point here, is we have an ‘Internet Merchant Account’ with our bank. So, our customers come to us each day and checkout orders, the transactional side of this process (credit card numbers, order amount, etc) is then sent to our ‘Internet Merchant Account’, via our partner protx. All good.

‘Internet Merchant Accounts’ exist for one main reason, they process what is known as CNP transactions. This stands for ‘Cardholder Not Present’. To put this into context, if you run a shop, petrol station, resteraunt or any other enterprise where customers are actually present, they enter their PIN and make the transaction. These transactions are obviously more secure as the customer is present and uses their PIN, hence the need for seperate merchant accounts. We, in fact, have 2 accounts, one for our web site and one for our shop.

The perceived risk to the banks, for CNP transactions, is mainly default by the retailer. Now, imagine Dodgy Ltd has an Internet site. They sell widgets. As soon as their customers complete checkout, Dodgy Ltd charge their customers card. They then don’t ship the widgets. They carry on like this for as long as they can, before they go bust. Now, at this point, Dodgy Ltd have a raft of angry customers who complain to their bank. The banks then go to Dodgy Ltd and find there is no company or money left. So the banks fork out. (by the way, I made Dodgy Ltd up, if you have a company called this, please (a) understand my dodgy ltd is entirely fictional and (b) consider a name change!)

Now, if you’re still with me, kudos. The net result of all this, is the banks perceive Internet transactions to be risky. Very risky, as it turns out.

So, what do they do about it? Well, here in lies the rub. They either ‘defer’ the retailers credits by up to a month (meaning the customer pays on day 1, the bank then sit on the cash for 30 days and then credit the retailer 3 days after that) or, more commonly, they require security. The method of calculating the required amount of security (read cash cover), varies between banks, but it tends to be between 2 weeks and one months gross billings.

To illustrate, if you run an e-commerce site and you turn over £100 per month in gross sales, the bank will require you to deposit between £50 and £100 into a separate bank account. This separate bank account cannot be directly accessed by the retailer, and doesn’t appear on the retailers balance sheet*. The final cherry on the cake, is this ‘special account’ pays no interest!

Now, we began life with our bank on 30 day deferred settlement. This was painful in cash flow terms, but we could cope. The business then grew and grew, and it got to the point where we simply couldn’t make it work. After negotiating with our bank, we agreed to post a £10,000.00 bond. This was back in Q2 2008. Happily we moved forwards and continued to grow. One fine day in January, our bank called. They now wanted £100,000.00. Yup, that’s right, One Hundred Thousand Pounds. Why? We were growing too fast and our monthly billings had multiplied by a factor of 20.

Don’t think for a second this is just our bank, it’s not. I’ve spoken with 2 other major high street banks and their attitude is identical. We are currently negotiating with a third, and that’s going well, thankfully.

Now, unchecked or irresponsible rapid growth is actually a danger sign. However, to put this into context, at this point (and today, actually), we had NO debt. No overdraft, no loans. We had cash in the bank, quite a bit of it. We were profitable and cash flow positive.

As a result of this, we naturally entered into negotiations with the bank. We explained that, as a result of our business model, there simply wasn’t any default risk to the bank. You see, we don’t ever charge our customers until the goods have been shipped. So unless Royal Mail steal all of our parcels, we’re fairly clear on this one. We also hold 100% of our stock, in our own warehouse (this is actually very rare for an e-retailer).

Several weeks, meetings, phone calls and frustrated rants later, we had got nowhere. The bank simply didn’t understand our business model and couldn’t see that we didn’t present a risk. They consistently argued that whilst our model may be risk free now, we could change it on a whim and start to charge our customers before dispatch, or even fraudulently (thanks for that, by the way!). This simply isn’t the case, it would be horribly expensive to change the many procedures that control our stock management, checkout, billing integration, logistics and end of day procedures. As for fraudulent charging of our customers cards (putting to one side the moral aspects of this), we don’t store our customers card details, so this would be almost impossible.

Anyway, this is on going as I write. We will, no doubt, move banks at some point, but for now, it seems to be put up or get lost. Now, thankfully, we’ve got enough cash to cover this, but I’d hate to think what would happen to a similar business who didn’t. We’re a growing, new economy business. We’re employing new people, providing revenue to all our partners, and generally a nice bunch of people (OK, granted, that’s not an economic positive, but we are, really!). The irony in all this, is that the banks are creating what they fear the most, in issuing punitive demands for cash cover or delaying payment of revenue for long periods of time, they are creating very default risk these policies are designed to prevent. But, i guess, as long as the banks don’t have to pay, it’s all OK.

On a final note, I was chatting with someone (a junior someone to be fair) from one of the major banks about moving our account over and was talking about what we did as a business. After explaining our model and market in some detail, he replied “Is there much call for outdoor gear in Gillingham?”….

*We’re actually looking into this right now, so don’t quote me on that!

The product videos were relatively easy but the real toughy so far has been the gear guides we are starting to shoot on helping peole to choose Jackets / Boots etc, they took more than a few takes so every time I see those blooper reels, I have a certain amount of sympathy. Whats going to be interesting is to see what everyone thinks of them, do they help people come to a decision or is there anything we could do better? Stay tuned to Webtogs TV

Our old friends at eMarketer has some good tats showing how US online retail grew 6% in 2008 compared with 2% for the high street, and we all know Amazon’s grew 31%. ASOS, who focus on the internet clothing fashion space also saw strong revenue growth and profits in 2008.

In fact, US eCommerce sales are expected to grow 12.5% in 2009, 11.1% in 2010, and 9.9% in 2011. The majority of this growth will be in categories such as online fashion, groceries, and household goods.

With better presentation, more information, reviews, advice, better security, and fast broadband systems – there is plenty of rationale behind these figures.

As that famous pop group once sang (I forget their name!) – “things – can only get better”.

Right, so it’s time to start our first Twitter contest and we’d like to start with one of the coolest brands right now “Icebreaker”. The aim is to do a competition every single month from now on and we’ll also be offering some exclusive ones just for existing followers.

We’re giving away one of the following this month (draw ends Friday 30th Jan 2009):

An Icebreaker Rock Zip Fleece Top – Women
OR
An Icebreaker Rock Zip Fleece Top – Men

Want to win one? All you have to do is the following:

• Follow @webtogs on twitter
• Simply tweet “Just entered to win a cool Icebreaker Rock Zip Fleece Top for Fri 30th Jan. Just follow @webtogs and retweet. http://bit.ly/togsjan09 “

Here is the current (updated every minute) of all entries, showing your odds to win.

The contest is open to anywhere in the UK and Europe and is completely free to enter.

Good luck!

Here are some pictures of the Icebreaker tops:

Icebreaker Rock Women

Icebreaker Rock Zip Mens

P.S. Thanks to @simonianson for helping out with some inspiration for this.