Ground Mail Fever

We are pretty excited here about our upcoming release, especially, with the new ground mail feature. Sign up for our special Beta release, and get a sneak peek a few weeks before our official release.

So what’s so exciting about sending invoice by ground mail?

2ndSite will:

1. Print the invoice.
2. Put the invoice into an envelope.
3. Include a return envelope.
4. Seal the envelope.
5. Add the proper postage.
6. Send it out first class via the United States Postal Service (USPS).

What does that mean for you?

• Peace of Mind. With just a few clicks, your invoicing will be taken care of and you can relax.
• Avoid the pain of printer problems such as paper jams and out of ink scenarios.
• Buy less envelops, stamps, printer paper, expensive ink cartridges, and even avoid some paper cuts.
• Avoid the trip to the post office or the local mailbox and save time. You might even save some gas.
• Your clients can quickly access the online version of the invoice where they can review their account history and if you permit, pay by credit card.
• You save time and get paid faster.

Ground Mail Specs:

• Invoices are sent via first class business mail.
• Each invoice will be into the mail stream within one business day.
• Invoices are SENT in a double paned #10 window envelop showing both you and your client’s address.
• Invoices are printed on perforated paper, so your clients can easily tear away the payment stub and include it in the return envelope.
• Invoices will also include a secure URL where your clients can access their account online and view, print and pay their invoices (if you let them use these features).
• Each invoice includes a return envelope so it’s easy for your client to mail you their payment (including the envelope is proven to speed up the payment process).

More information on our ground release can be found at an earlier blog post, and what say we leave it at that for now.

FreshBooks in Good Company on ZDnet

I was rolling through our web stats this morning and I noticed that last week FreshBooks was featured in an article by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZDnet.

It’s our first time on the Ziff Davis Network (ZDnet), and I have been an avid reader of Dion’s blog since I discovered it last fall, so this is a great way to enter ZDnet – currently one of the most highly trafficked and authoritative technology networks online today.

Anyhow, here is the kicker. FreshBooks was one of four companies featured in the “Back-Office and Sales Infrastructure” category. Who were the other four? Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Live. What a group we’re running with!

As a side note, FreshBooks is re-branding next week. It will be interesting to see how this works out with press coverage and referrals of this kind. I’ll keep you posted with anything we learn along the way.

New Payment Gateway

FreshBooks has recently become an E-Commerce Development Partner with Velocity Pay.

Velocity Pay is a payment gateway specifically catered to the UK. Payment gateways allow you to accept payment by credit card for your invoices. In addition, Velocity Pay supports our ‘auto-billing’ feature which allows you to automatically charge your client’s credit card on a recurring basis. We will be releasing the new payment gateway into our live application in our next release of FreshBooks.

Velocity Pay has been a pleasure to work with and I personally recommend them. Their customer support was great and they got back to my emails in a timely manor. They even got back to me outside of their advertised office hours.

My gratitude goes out to our dedicated users who first recommend Velocity Pay to us. It was first recommended to us via a forum post found here.

Send Your Invoices by Postal Service In One Click

Who sends over 1 billion pieces of mail through global postal services? Who counts the world’s largest financial institutions amongst its clients?

FreshBooks newest partner, that’s who.

We are very pleased to announce that FreshBooks newest release is almost ready for you to use. The big news is that this release will allow you to send your invoices through the ground mail postal service as well as by email (which we have always helped you do). Here are some excerpts from the email we sent to existing FreshBooks users last Thursday morning:

“Once you have chosen to send an invoice by ground mail, the service will print the invoice, put the invoice and a return envelope into an envelope addressed to your client, lick the envelope, and send it first class via the US Postal service.

It takes one click. No envelopes to buy. No trips to the mailbox. Beauty.”

We are delivering this service because you have told us what a pain it is to send that handful of invoices to those clients who demand to get their invoices in the mail. To tell you the truth, we have always been surprised by the number of FreshBooks clients who only use FreshBooks to create and print their invoices and NEVER send them by email. This service is going to be a big help for those of you who use your FreshBooks account like this to simply create, print and post your invoices.

Here is another scenario where the new services will really help you and perhaps your clients:

“Take a moment and imagine you (or perhaps a client of yours) have 5,000 clients that you manually send invoices to every month using the ground postal service. To mail all those invoices probably costs around $2,500/month in postage, plus materials, plus time and effort. Ouch. The total expense is probably about $50,000/year plus a whole lot of wasted time. How do you stop that kind of pain? By helping transition those 5,000 ground mail clients to 5,000 online clients. And by transitioning them smoothly.

Imagine you could save about $50,000 a year, simply by sending your invoices by email instead of by post. It really could be that easy. The trick is getting your clients from “snail mail” to email to save that money, and that’s where FreshBooks comes in. That’s what we are going to help you, your clients and their clients do.”

Finally, we invited all our users to have a look at the new service before we release it live to the public. If you want to try it, go here and sign up and we will send you an email when it’s ready for testing.

Insiders Get the Inside Scoop

Quick note…we have spent a good chunk of today putting the finishing touches on an email to our users about the upcoming release. It’s a rather long email, with lots of juicey details, and it’s an email for everyone who has signed up for 2ndSite. We’ll post excerpts here once the insiders get the first crack at it. So if you are a 2ndSite user, be sure to check you inbox mid-morning tommorrow!

Brand Murder Soon To Be Solved

Just a reminder that the 2ndSite Brand Murder Mystery is winding down. But there is still time to dust off your deerstalker’s hat and win prizes! Have a guess, write an alternative ending, post a comment, or refer some friends. You can also sign-up to have the last chilling episode delivered to your door.

Happy detecting!

One Step Beyond

Part of my job here at 2ndSite is to set up and manage PPC campaigns for our clients. It can be a lengthy process, partly because it takes time to research the client’s web stats, industry, product/service, customers and competition. I do this to get the information needed to develop scenarios of who might be searching and why, define their search terms, and write ads that they can’t help but click on (ideally). Basically, it’s getting into searchers’ heads.

That’s the really fun and interesting part. Then there’s the necessary part of going through the steps to set up a campaign with, say, Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing (nee Overture).

Doing this in AdWords is relatively painless. What hurts me is setting up Yahoo! Serch Marketing campaigns. For example, the very first thing you have to do is select a category for keywords. Now, if you already have a category you want to use, just hit the drop down menu and select your option.

But wait! Then you have to select the radio button next to the category you’ve chosen, otherwise the default option stays as the blank box.

I know it doesn’t seem like much, but when you have to do this over and over again for say, 200 ads, that extra small step becomes a thorn in my side.

It doesn’t end there. Yahoo! must be weary of hearing this, but please, will someone tell me why it’s so difficult to find a support phone number on their site? (+1 (866) 747-7327. Don’t ask me how I got this. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.)

Okay, just one more thing for today. When I submit an ad, it’s sent to Yahoo!’s editorial process for review. If it gets declined – say I put in a broken url – I cannot simply fix the url and resubmit, oh no. I have to download the ad in an Excel spreadsheet (which, by the way does not contain any of the keywords I painstakingly identified to use with the ad) and go through the whole process again. Yes, from step number one (see above).

We like getting feedback like this from our users at 2ndSite because they’re easy changes to implement and makes using the service smoother. In the interest of me being able to spend more time on the cool client stuff, I’m hoping someone at Yahoo! will do the same.

Pixel Perfect Design in the Works

Here is a small fix I would like to mention. The buttons on the grey bar were slightly different on FireFox when compared with Internet Explorer. The buttons were nice and centred on IE, but were one pixel higher on FireFox which made them look a little tight.

In IE (left). In FireFox (right).

As a result, we decided to make them bigger. Here are the before and after screen shots on FireFox.

Before (left). After (right).

We have already made this change for our next release. However, even a small change like increasing the height requires a lot of testing. When we made this change, we had to take a look at all affected pages in different versions of IE, FireFox, Netscape, Opera as well as their MAC equivalents. We also had to login as the administrator, client and staff to make sure the grey bar looked good for all users.

2ndSite Hits 50,000 Users

Last Friday 2ndSite crossed the 50,000 users threshold (we still need to update our site to reflect it…sometime today I hope).

Thanks to everyone for helping us get here… one of my new year’s predictions was that we would reach 100,000 by the end of 2006, and at the rate we are growing, we are right on track. That said, we’ll take all the help we can get, so if you know any web designers or developers, free lancers or home based businesses who want to make their billing painless, please tell them about 2ndSite. Thanks!