When it comes to selling online, gaining users’ trust is a serious matter for businesses. Based on a July 2015 poll from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, security and privacy concerns are a big reason consumers are not doing more online. The survey found that 45 percent of respondents have stopped at least one online transaction due to these concerns, such as purchasing items online, commenting via social media, or making Internet-based banking or investment arrangements. With these statistics, what can businesses do to gain the trust of their visitors and shoppers?

Tell Customers What You’ll Do with Their Information

One way to gain trust with online customers is to explain how their information is collected and handled when they visit a businesses’ website. This is accomplished by creating a Privacy Policy that website visitors can review. A privacy policy explains what information is collected from visitors, and how that information is stored, used and disclosed internally and with third parties. Examples of such sharing include giving consumer details to third-party companies that work with the original website owner to help with order fulfillment or customer surveys.

Another way to gain the trust of website users is to explain how personal information is handled when it is entered on a company’s website and when it is transmitted to data centers. Whether entered via an online contact form or when placing an order, names, emails, shipping and billing addresses and telephone numbers are common pieces of information that consumers expect to be safeguarded.  When transmitting consumer information, businesses can provide another layer of security by ensuring the green lock appears next to the web address.

Businesses can do this by using Secure Socket Layers (SSL) Certificates or Transport Layer Security (TLS) Certificates to ensure that each user’s session is encrypted. A privacy policy also may describe how the business’s physical security is setup for its data center to reassure consumers their data is at minimal risk of being intercepted by hackers regardless of the stage of transmission.

Let Customers Contact You at Their Convenience

A business can help establish credibility by creating “About” and “Contact Us” pages on its website. Given the fact that anyone has the opportunity to setup a business presence, providing identifiable and verifiable information can help build trust with visitors and customers.

The “About Us” section may include information about who founded the company and how the company started, along with traditional contact information, such as phone numbers for sales, ordering, ongoing support and social media contacts. Using verified Twitter accounts of the business itself or select departments, such as a dedicated support department, can give visitors additional reassurance that they are dealing with the intended company. To gain consumers’ trust, a business’s information can be validated through third-party certification.

Obtain Independent Verification

Becoming accredited with a third-party agency that’s well known by visitors can help increase trust. Using the Better Business Bureau as an example, consumers will know many details of the company’s past and present business operations. Along with requiring a company to follow a privacy policy and ensuring “secure financial transactions,” businesses must have been in existence for at least six months. Requirements also mandate holding necessary licenses and bonding requirements, along with creating trustworthy advertisements. If online users have any doubt about the legitimacy of a website and its contact details, a business could encourage visitors to follow up with the third-party verifying agency to show the business is committed to honesty and transparency with reputable, independent business agencies.

Sources for the study, statistics and the Better Business Bureau:

https://whybbb.org/

https://whybbb.org/requirements.php

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2016/05/15/new-survey-highlights-startling-erosion-of-online-trust/#7bfcf9016eb0

Some experts are predicting that the recent tax legislation will create a ton of new business creation and activity – just not the kind that lawmakers originally intended. These people are predicting a surge in efforts for reclassification and the organization of cover companies by employees so they can have their salaries recognized as business income, significantly lowering their tax burden as a result.

A central tenant of the Republican bill is that it reduces both corporate and pass-through business tax rates. Corporate profits are now taxed at only 21 percent, and owners of pass-through companies will get to take a 20 percent deduction. While these same experts predict it will take some time to adapt, they believe that as lawyers and accountants delve into the new rules, they will find ways to minimize taxes for their clients using the new tax structure.

A group of tax law professors and lawyers wrote a paper on various ways imaginative and wealthy individuals can use the preferential business tax treatment to reduce their taxes. This academic paper is entitled “The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches Under the New Legislation” (available for download via SSRN), and it chronicles how they believe individuals in various fields and scenarios will create or turn themselves into small businesses to take advantage of the new tax structure.

Below is a brief synopsis of the different strategies. As always, remember that each situation is unique and you should consult your tax professional before implementing any of these strategies – this is definitely not a DIY type of situation.

Partnership Game Changers

Some of the paper’s authors believe that people will transform themselves into self-employed contractors or partnerships, thus turning their wages into pass-through profits and entitling them to the 20 percent deduction.

The IRS lays out pretty strict guidelines on who can be classified as an independent contractor, with a bias toward workers being treated as W-2 employees – so this isn’t a simple path. The most likely candidates are individuals in certain professions, such as law firms. One example given is that associates (partners would already receive the pass-through treatment) could create an LLC and then be hired by the firm. There are provisions that prevent guaranteed payments from qualifying for the deduction; however, many feel these regulations are weakly written and might only apply to S corporations.

Split the Difference

Another strategy professional service pass-through can use is to split their companies into parts. One part would perform the services portion of the business, while the other would own the real estate and/or any productized revenue streams. Separating the service portion of the business would allow the other segments to qualify for profit deductions where they would not otherwise if they were comingled.

Self-Incorporation

Initially, many believed the easiest way to arbitrage the new tax rate structure would be to organize a corporation.

Currently, however, most entrepreneurs avoid forming corporations due to double taxation (profits are taxed at both the corporate level and then again as dividend distributions). The reduced corporate rate of 21 percent combined with the top dividend rate of 20 percent means that even taxpayers in the top brackets will do better not incorporating; however, opportunities for interest earning investments are still available.

Conclusion

Change often means opportunity when it comes to tax law. The new tax law substantially shakes up business taxation, and as professionals sort through the finer details, new strategies will emerge for some taxpayers.

In the past, small business owners sometimes lacked the resources – both financial and human – to capitalize upon the latest productivity and customer service technologies. Fortunately, the pace of change and the proliferation of new software programs have begun to make innovative technology accessible and affordable. Chatbots – software programs that can hold a two-way conversation with people – are a prime example of accessible and affordable technology.

Why Now?

Language is a complex process and, until recently, teaching a machine how to understand different jargon, accents and all the other variables involved in speech was only partially successful. Today, programmers use different methods to teach a machine to learn a language through experience, which is why the iPhone’s Siri gets better at understanding what you want the longer you use it. As the chatbots have become smarter, consumers have become happier dealing with them. In your everyday life, it is likely that you encounter chatbots in various modes – confirming a doctor’s appointment, ordering prescription medications or conducting simple financial transactions with your bank.

The technology research group Gartner has predicted that customers will soon interact via chatbots and other AI technology for a whopping 85 percent of their dealings with various companies used for personal and business purposes.

Small Businesses Reap Benefits

As consumer acceptance has increased, many small businesses have been quick to adopt chatbot technology to provide a consistent and affordable level of quality in customer service. Even businesses that provide professional services, such as banks and financial institutions, are using technology to manage and answer simple requests, forwarding more complex inquiries to a human being. For many small businesses, putting a live chatbot tool on their website to respond to questions typed in by website visitors has proven invaluable, providing a degree of customized service that a small firm with just a few employees would find difficult to deliver.

Chatbot’s Fastest Growth

Experts suggest we should expect to see chatbots take off in a variety of business sectors – especially those where customer service is a make or break proposition.

• Restaurants – Some national restaurant chains are already using chatbots that customers can access through their Facebook messenger (instant messaging service) account to order food for delivery. Other quick-service chains have installed bots that act like waiters – answering questions, reading the menu, making recommendations and handling payment transactions.
• Education or training – Facebook recently developed an experimental program –modeled on Albert Einstein – to provide answers and conduct conversations with consumers. This could be the springboard for a variety of educational purposes, using historical or fictional characters to make education accessible and fun for more people.
• Personal Assistants – Consumers are becoming more comfortable with using voice commands for a variety of purposes in their work and home life. Perhaps the best-known examples are services like Amazon Echo and Google Home. These home-based assistants are connected to an operating system and can obey commands that include reprogramming heat/cooling systems, playing music or looking online for movies playing nearby. There are many ways they can assist people who run home-based businesses – locating a delivery service, determining where the nearest Fed Ex pickup point is, or finding flight and hotel recommendations.

Chatbots may be a relatively new trend in many industries, but their efficacy in natural and sophisticated customer dialogue suggests that they will play an increasingly important role in the future.

Whether a business owner wants to sell a website or he has been approached by an individual expressing interest in purchasing it, understanding what it’s worth is essential to a fair sale for everyone involved.

Initial Factors 

To determine what a website is worth to a potential buyer, it needs to undergo a performance review. Evaluation factors can include looking at the number of sales the website has generated over the past year compared to previous years or other competitors. Additional considerations include how much the website is used to gain new customers relative to other sales channels, such as in-person and cold sales calls or in-bound customer calls.

Valuing a Website Based On Its Attributes

A different way to look at a website is by its attributes. One of these attributes is what Top Level Domain the website address ends with. Most web users are familiar with the .com ending on a website, but many websites and associated email addresses end with .net, .org, .biz or .info. This often depends on the type of the organization that owns and uses the domain and the website they’ve built. If a website ends with a .com, it can have less confusion than a website with a .net or .biz domain.

Other considerations include how customers remember the name. For example, a long website that needs to be spelled out in person or over the phone, makes it less likely for customers to recall it and later visit it. Another attribute is to ensure the domain name is not subject to copyright protection.

Valuing a Web Site Based on Its Search Engine Relevancy

One way to value a website is through its ability to garner visibility and traffic through a backlink. A backlink is when a URL on a third-party website points visitors to the owner’s website. One consideration when building backlinks is whether or not the backlink is from a well-respected and relevant source, compared to a website known for producing spam or one that might be blacklisted. Backlinks on well-respected websites increase SEO value, while backlinks on lesser-trusted websites may detract from SEO rankings.

For example, if a backlink for a law firm is on a local bar association’s website, the backlink will generally gain greater favor for the law firm. If, however, a backlink is on a legal website known for spam, the backlink will not have the same effect. Websites with better reputations that provide backlinks to the website for sale can potentially increase the site’s value.

Another important area to focus on is a website’s traffic statistics. Measuring how much traffic is generated from search engines is important because it shows how well traffic is garnered from an existing search engine optimization strategy. Depending on the SEO efficiency, value can be determined based on if the existing strategy can be built upon or if the website needs a different SEO approach.

Valuing a website is highly subjective, and these are not all the factors that buyers and sellers take in account, but understanding what the marketplace looks for is a good place to start.