A guy came yesterday for a site visit to make sure that I was worthy to accept credit card payments. He took snaps of my house and my mailbox, and then followed me back to my office. I was able to give him a business card, but had no further artifacts (brochures, licenses…), nor did I have credit card logos displayed. No inventory for him to look at, and no credit card machine or cash register.
He took a picture of my file cabinet.
I showed him websites I had made. I showed him my Basecamp account. I showed him the article from WSJ that mentioned me. Eventually, he agreed that I was conducting business on the premises.
Now I can accept credit card payments. If you’re in business, you might have debated the value of doing this. On the surface, it seems to me that it’ll work out, since we’ve paid PayPal about $30 per transaction, and this new merchant account will run us $20 a month. However, I may never take another credit card transaction, and then I’ll be sorry, won’t I?
The client for whose sake I did this doesn’t take American Express himself, I noticed as I worked on his site last night. I also noticed that he has about 18 pages of stuff on that site which is plastered all over chiropractors’ websites from one coast to the other. I don’t know where they all get this stuff, but I was sort of shocked. I rewrote it all, of course, and learned all about chiropractic in the process.
They have a history of weirdness, it’s true, but then so does mainstream medicine. But this widespread plagiarism from one another’s sites is something else again. I’ve had an absolute rash of it among students this term, too. I wonder whether the copy/paste function is at least partially to blame…
Someone had to come to your house to verify you’re doing business?? That seems weird in the internet age and all.
Did you see my recent post about a professor – a PROFESSOR – who is contributing to one of my books? She sent me material that was copied & pasted right off an encyclopedia website – which *itself* was just an aggregation of material from other sites (and not very well done, I might add). Besides the fact that this person plagiarized material… it’s so annoying when you start a website trail and realize that it’s all just the same material being regurgitated.
@DrTiff –
Two very interesting points. I missed the post you mention — I’m going to go find it, though. I find that truly shocking. But I do wonder whether the mash-up and the system where tweeting something or putting it on your blog or whatever is equivalent to making something up is affecting people’s ideas about copyright. I mean, students who plagiarized papers used to be doing it intentionally to cheat. Now I really feel that a lot of my students — and clients — don’t get what’s wrong with it.
And I think that the checking up on business may also be a result of the plethora of online businesses. What’s to stop someone from saying that they have a business, selling people things that don’t really exist in the real world, taking their money, and disappearing? You can look like a real business for a few thousand dollars, whether you are one or not.
It was still weird, though, trying to prove I’m a real business when all my products are made of electricity.