ISIS Has Kiwis jumping at shadows

Islamophobia or just downright stupidity? According to TVNZ news, New Zealand businesses with names like Isis or Issis are getting resistence from customers and having to change their names.

There are dozens of New Zealand businesses operating under the name Isis or Issis, which is the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess.

TVNZ

This reminds me of a tale I heard 30 years ago about a company that had spent years building up their diet food business around a product called Aids. Their business got wiped out by the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s. Ironically one of the early names for AIDS was "Slim" as late term sufferers lost a nearly all their body weight.

Now suddenly the world is focussing on the organisation sometimes called "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" or ISIL, sometimes the Levant gets translated as Syria and thus ISIL becomes ISIS.  Except, of course, this isn't even the name of the organisation. It's name is in Arabic and is more accurately represented as ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fīl-ʻIraq wa ash-Shām (I have no idea what that initialises as, but the French Government has started referring to them as 'Daesh').

Suddenly we are told that people are refusing to do business with businesses with names similar to ISIS. How stupid can you get? Daesh isn't I.S.I.S.; I.S.i.S. isn't Isis. Isis isn't Issis. None of these businesses are related in any way to Daesh.

How New Zealand Retailers Can Get Online in an Afternoon For Free

I stumbled on this article that was written for Australian businesses, but most of the services  they mention are just as applicable to New Zealand businesses.

"Unfortunately there is still a lot of snake oil out there as well as well meaning but misguided advice from web practitioners as to what is actually required. Many business owners have already been badly burnt with expensive or unusable website solutions.

"Fortunately these days it’s incredibly easy and cheap to set up an online business.

"Solutions such as Weebly allow anyone to setup an online store in an afternoon for free, and there are plenty of other similar free or inexpensive solutions to choose from."

I'd recommend this article to anyone even vaguely thinking of excuses for not setting up an on-line presence for their business.

Full article: How Australian Retailers Can Get Online in an Arvo For Free

Credit Card Merchant Accounts

A week or so back there was a discussion on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to about obtaining on-line merchant accounts for credit cards that would accept multiple currencies.

The answer is that New Zealand banks try to restrict their customers to only accepting NZ currency and place all kinds of barriers in the way of businesses that want to accept payments in foreign currency. No wonder so many smaller NZ businesses are forced into accepting paypal and incurring their relatively high merchant charges.

We're in a global economy and if you want to sell to people in larger countries you usually need to accept their currency. This is especially true of Americans and the English but also applies to a lesser extent to Europeans and even Australians. With information products I can sell globally, it only requires a few photons to go down the fibre cable to the world internet. Even for physical products its' possible to ship from New Zealand to the major markets of the world ... just ask the people who have been exporting cheese, meat and wool for the last 120 years.

Call me disloyal, but I get my business cards printed in Australia ... I simply can't find a New Zealand printer who can give me anything like the convenience and price of the Australian offering. They have a .co.nz site and accept NZ Dollars, and it wasn't until I checked the whois on the domain before placing my first order that I even realised that I was dealing with a foreign company.

If you look at the US market, accepting credit cards is a competitive business and there are a lot of people offering this service. It took me under a minute to find Ms Merchant Account whose banner proclaims you can start accepting credit cards today with low discount rates and they are prepared to accept on-line transactions and foreign currency transactions.

So, why aren't our banks offering us services like this? Have they simply had a nod and a wink and decided not to compete?