Our unverified account has never processed a single payment, and yet with the amount of ID they require for something as simple as a contact name change you could get a passport in some countries.

Business Contact Name Change
To process your name change request, you need to fax in additional information. Please provide a current photo identification and one of the other following documents:

• A copy of a valid photo identification showing your new name.
• Acceptable forms of photo identification are a driver’s license, passport or any other state or government issued photo identification.
• A copy of a recent utility bill showing your new name and address exactly as they appear on your PayPal account.
• A copy of a recent bank statement for the bank account listed on your PayPal account (if applicable).

Please include a letter on company stationery indicating the primary email address, current name, address and telephone number on the PayPal account, the reason for the name change, and the new business contact name.

So that we can process your request efficiently, please ensure that your documents are valid and legible. As always, any personal identification information that you submit to PayPal will remain secure and will never be transmitted to any third party.

PayPal have never had a rep as a particularly customer friendly organisation, but this isn’t even beneficial to them! With no transactions in the past and less documentation than this required for establishing a NEW account it doesn’t pose any credible threat so far as hijacked accounts/money laundering/whatever goes, and they need to spend time reviewing documents sent in a thoroughly nonstandard way. The bank account verification process is pretty good in terms of automation (albeit risky — you’re essentially giving PayPal license to do whatever with all funds in that account) — this is most certainly not.

Anyone have any good, low % fee or cost/transaction way of hooking into CBA’s Evolve system? The application doesn’t warrant us spending heaps setting it up just yet, and PayPal are good at making things way too risky and difficult. Grumble.

It’s frustrating, because it’s self-inflicted, relatively fixable, and a prime example of terrible stewardship on my part. It trickles out of my account in minor transactions of around $20, and I just don’t miss the money as much as I should. The problem is, if the transfer gets screwed up, various people dependent particularly on email (less so websites — they can withstand being down for a period of time, but for most clients of mine email is THE crucial application) cease to function until the DNS mends itself.

For this reason, I’ve not been brave (foolish?) enough to entrust the task to a service such as ODesk or RentACoder, even though either has the potential to totally take the headache away for a pretty minimal cost. I know that the odds of something going wrong between the exposure of core hosting passwords to strangers, in a process that is the web equivalent of a heart bypass, are pretty unacceptably high to simply palm off to some stranger for a chunk of change. Part of the problem is the kind of business continuity capabilities faced by many of my clients aren’t such that service notifications provide any particular benefit: it’s not as though they have any particular remedy for ‘scheduled maintenance’ in terms of notifying clients, as, unlike larger businesses, their websites are not frequently visited as first point of contact for vast numbers of existing and prospective clients of their own, and public apologies or notifications are meaningless.

Similarly, the scope of client education for such a minor undertaking is itself quite formidable — this sort of outage is highly occasional and the clients are so varied that there are no particular processes in place for dealing with it. Micro web agencies aren’t generally well equipped to do this sort of thing, simply as a byproduct of the nature of the provider/client relationship. In my work with larger businesses (especially where SaaS is a core offering) where the relationship is less provider/client and more embedded (i.e. I don’t end up functioning as an external party!) we have of course formulated plans for continuity and notification, but this cannot be the case as simply or readily for smaller, more fragmented organisations.

These issues have produced something of a perfect storm, where minor recurrent losses are the path of least resistance in a situation that requires a fair amount of (non-financial, tangible and intangible) investment to correct course. This, combined with the fact that I don’t have enough clients to justify writing migration code, and the general awfulness (particularly the glacial slowness)of WHM/other proprietary host management software, has meant I’ve yet to embark on an exercise with little visible benefit. Over 50% of this task is stuff you can’t outsource, or at least shouldn’t: client education and maintaining relationships.

Small business owners: how do you balance this need for process improvement and cost saving with the reality of day-to-day busyness and your obligations as a provider?