Blog | Page 90 | Jean Galea

iCloud Explained

Published: September 05, 20162 Comments

Today I sat down for what I hoped would be a quick session of understanding how best to backup our family’s iPhones in a reliable manner. I then proceeded in spending a day trying to understand the utterly confusing world of Apple’s iCloud.

If you are in the same situation, I hope to spare you a few hours through this attempt at explaining the iCloud mess.

We need to consider a few important terms that will help us understand what we can do with iCloud:

iCloud Storage,
iCloud Drive,
iCloud Backup,
iCloud Photo Library,
My Photo Stream.

No wonder people get confused when trying to understand iCloud! Let’s tackle them one by one.

iCloud Storage

iCloud gives you 5GB of storage for free.

You can upgrade your storage to 50GB, 200GB, or 1TB for a reasonable cost.

Once your iCloud Storage is full, your iPhone will stop backing up to iCloud until you purchase additional storage space or free up storage space in iCloud.

iCloud Backup

iCloud Backup is available on iPhones, iPads and iPods. It serves to back up your entire device (or just some aspects of it, depending on your choices) to iCloud.

iCloud Backups count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Drive

Think of this as a sort of Dropbox or Google Drive, however without having direct access to your files through Finder as you would with Dropbox and Google Drive. It allows apps on Macs, iPhones, and iPads to synchronize files using iCloud. So for example, if you create a note on your iPhone and your MacBook is also connected to the internet, that note will also appear on your MacBook a few seconds later.

Your files in iCloud Drive also count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Photo Library

iCloud Photo Library uploads and stores all of your photos and videos in iCloud so you can access them from all your devices.

There are some important differences between iCloud Photo Library and iCloud backup that you should understand before we move on.

iCloud Photo Library: all your devices can access and view individual photos that are stored in the library.

iCloud Backup: you can’t see individual files or photos in your iCloud Backup, even if photos are part of the backup. iCloud Backups are one big file that restores your entire iPhone – there’s no way to access individual files.

If you’re using iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Backup, you could be paying to back up the same photos twice: Once in your iCloud Photo Library, once in your iCloud Backup.

iCloud Photo Library works like the previously mentioned features of iCloud in that that the contents of the photo library count against your available iCloud Storage.

My Photo Stream

My Photo Stream uploads all your new photos and sends them to all your devices. Sounds kind of like iCloud Photo Library, right? But there’s a little difference:

Photos in My Photo Stream do not count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Photo Library permanently uploads and stores your photos and videos in iCloud. My Photo Stream uploads your photos to iCloud so they’re automatically downloaded on devices with My Photo Stream turned on. It only works over Wi-Fi and doesn’t fill up your iCloud Storage space.

The Photo Library is usually the element that takes up most of the storage space in iCloud.

If you want to keep backups of your iPhone photos and videos without running out of storage space on iCloud (the free 5GB), I suggest you use the following strategy:

Turn Off Photo Library As Part Of iCloud Backup
Turn Off iCloud Photo Library
Turn On My Photo Stream on your iPhone and iPad
Turn On My Photo Stream on your Mac or PC

Since My Photo Stream does not count against your available iCloud storage you will not have any problems with space utilisation in your iCloud account. The photos will be transferred to your Mac where you can then include them in your cloud or Time Capsule backups.

🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?

Last updated: April 04, 202122 Comments

PayPal remains one of the most popular ways of accepting online payments, so you’re bound to be using it if you’re involved in online business. A question that comes up sooner or later is whether you should open a separate business account for each of your brands or products.

Separation of Personal and Business PayPal Accounts

First of all, I want to clarify that you should, first of all, have separate personal and business PayPal accounts. This is allowed by PayPal as detailed in this FAQ. You shouldn’t be mixing your personal transactions with those of your business. You should keep separate personal and business bank accounts and you should also do likewise with PayPal. Then link the personal PayPal account to your personal credit card or bank account, and the business PayPal account to your business credit card or bank account.

With that out of the way, the next stage as you continue to grow your business will be launching and selling more than one product. With revenue from both of these products coming in through the same PayPal account, there can be some challenges.

The first challenge you will encounter is that of accounting. Since you will be seeing the total amount of revenue generated from both your businesses, it will be hard to visualise at a glance how much of that revenue belongs to each business. Of course you will also hopefully have good reporting facilities from the e-commerce platform you are using which will somewhat compensate for this disadvantage. Moreover, if you are accepting payments through other systems apart from PayPal (e.g. Stripe/Braintree), you shouldn’t be looking at the revenue stats in PayPal as a measure of how you’re doing because that figure will be missing all other payments that would have come through via the other payments systems.

What to do if you have a separate company for each brand

As long as you have separate companies, there should be no issue at all. A company is legally distinct from its owner. Each can and should have its own bank account, credit card, email, etc.

As a result, you will be able to sign each one up individually at PayPal. You will be the representative of your company for each PayPal account, but the PayPal accounts will each belong to the respective company.

And if you don’t have a separate company for each brand?

Here’s when things get tricky. Many business owners create a company and then sell a number of products/brands from that one company. This is usually when the question arises about whether they should have separate PayPal accounts for each product/brand.

There are a number of pros and cons for each way to go and no clear answer to this question.

If you are planning to spin off and sell a particular product or brand, you should always create a separate PayPal account for it and treat it as a separate entity from the rest of your business. During the selling process and the due diligence period, it will be so much easier for you and the buyer if you have a separate PayPal account housing the transaction of just that product that you will be selling off. Otherwise, you will have to filter things that can get messy, plus you won’t be able to just transfer the ownership of that product’s PayPal account to the new owner, which is a disadvantage for them as they won’t get the history of that account. This will affect your selling price so keep that in mind.

For the new owner, having a PayPal account that has been previously set up and having everything working smoothly is a very important bonus. The changeover will be easier and they will have a handy history of every transaction recorded from the inception of that product. Moreover, you have to also keep in mind that PayPal allows lower transaction rates depending on your monthly volume of sales.

Another thing to consider is whether you will have subscriptions and recurring payments processed through PayPal. If that’s the case I would recommend using two separate Paypal accounts as it will be very messy or downright impossible to move over those subscriptions to a new account in the future if needed (for example in the case of a sale of one of the products to a new owner).

Most e-commerce software systems provide additional and handy functionality through PayPal’s IPN system. This can allow you to do things like give refunds from the e-commerce system itself rather than having to log in to your PayPal account to process the refund. If you use PayPal Standard, you can use a single account for multiple sites. If you use PayPal Express, you need to use a separate account for each site. This is because PayPal Standard supports multiple IPN URLs while PayPal Express only supports one.

Now if you decide to go for one PayPal account to cover all your products, it might be a good idea to still pass your payments through separate email addresses linked to the same PayPal account. This is very useful if you are receiving payments from several different sources. To give you a concrete example, imagine a blog having affiliate arrangements with tens or hundreds of product vendors. If they all have their own affiliate systems, as is frequently the case, you would have signed up with each vendor and gave them your PayPal email address. Now if in the future you sell that blog, the new owner would have a very tedious job having to log in to each of these affiliate accounts and change the PayPal email address to his instead of yours. However if you had used an additional email address to your company’s PayPal account, the transition would be much smoother. You would just have to unlink that email address from your company’s PayPal account, and concurrently the new owner would add that email address to his company’s PayPal account. From that moment onwards all payments will reach the new owner’s account, without having to change any settings on the vendors’ side.

An important pro for having just one account for all your brands (if you don’t plan to sell in the immediate future) is easier management. You don’t have to log in to several PayPal accounts to check on things, you just have one account. Another potential issue with having multiple accounts is which account to process expenses from. If it’s not easy for you to associate expenses to a particular product, it might be a struggle to choose which PayPal account to use for them. For example, if you are using a backup service for all your product sites, and you want to make an automatic monthly payment, which PayPal account will you use if you have a number of them? Having just one account eliminates this problem altogether.

Another thing to consider is that PayPal assigns different commission rates based on the volume of transactions per month that an account generates. Thus if you have everything going into one account there might be a better chance for you to get the lowest rate than if you separate the accounts and hence lower the volume of each account.

Hopefully, this is helpful to you when deciding whether to open separate PayPal accounts for each product you own or not. Please leave a comment if you have any further questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

This is post 8 of 11 in the series “PayPal”

Are You Losing out from PayPal’s Exchange Rates?
🤔 Which PayPal Account is Best for You?
💸 Changing Your PayPal Withdrawal Currency
💸 Understanding PayPal Cross Border Fees
How to Withdraw From PayPal into a Maltese Bank Account
💳 Withdrawing Money From PayPal for Non-US Accounts
Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?
🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?
🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless
💳 Linking Virtual Bank Accounts and Cards to PayPal (Revolut, Wise etc)
How to Change Ownership of a PayPal Account

📧 Email Addresses to Set Up When Opening a Company

Last updated: August 11, 202251 Comments

When opening a company one of the first things you should do is choose an email provider. My favorite is Google Apps for Work. You can also use Zoho Apps if you are a small business and want a totally free solution.

Once you’ve got your mail set up you want to set up individual email accounts.

Personal Email Accounts

Each person in the company should, of course, have their own personal email address that they can use on a daily basis for internal and external communication. This is the email address that they can put on their business cards and also use for logging into the various tools that the company uses.

Tools like Slack are now aiming at killing email for internal communication, and they’re having a great of success. However, email is not going away anytime soon as there are many more uses for it apart from internal communication.

For personal email accounts I recommend using this format:

[email protected]

In my case, for example, I would use [email protected]. If the person has a really long name or surname you can use the shortened version or even set up an alias to that account. For example, you can have the mailbox named [email protected] but then also set up an alias for [email protected] and emails sent to that alias will also end up in the person’s inbox. This also applies to people who have a name that’s hard to spell.

Read more: How to start a blog

Need hosting? I recommend Bluehost for starting out with your website. You can read my article on how to create your first website and sign up to Bluehost; it’s a reliable and cheap hosting service that won’t let you down.

Some companies prefer to just use the firstname@ option and omit the last name. This works for very small companies but you will soon run into problems when the second Joe joins your team. You’ll soon end up with a mess, with some people using their first name only and others having to use their first and second names or something unsightly like joe2@.

My recommendation is, therefore, to start right away with the firstname.lastname@ combination. If you get two people with the same first and last names, you can use introduce the initial for their middle name or something similar. For example if you have two people named Joe Smith in your company, the second one can use [email protected].

Generic Email Accounts

Next, you will want to set up a few email accounts to be used for mostly administrative, support, billing and as a first point of contact with your company. Make sure you cover all the business functions of your company.

Here are a few essential ones to start off:

admin@ for administrative purposes such as being a Google Apps admin
support@ for your helpdesk
billing@ for billing and payments
hello@ as a general point of contact
careers@ for job applications
domains@ for domain management

[Read more…]

1Password – My Favorite Password Manager

Last updated: February 12, 20232 Comments

Update October 2019 – Switching to 1Password Subscription

I’ve since switched to the subscription version of 1Password as it is more convenient to make sure everything works well in sync and eliminates the need for Dropbox. It is also much easier to make sure everyone in my family and business has an updated version of 1Password.

It’s important to note that local backups of vaults can still be made even if you’re using the subscription version. If you back up your computer with Time Machine or Backblaze, you’d automatically have a backup of your vaults. With a subscription you still have a local copy of all your data on your device itself. The subscription gives you a backup with 1Password (the company) as well as a way of syncing your data. If something happened to their servers you’d still have a backup of your data on every device where you use 1Password. If you have that device backed up with Time Machine, Backblaze, etc, your data is backed up in triplicate at least (a copy on the 1P server, a copy on every device, copy in your Time Machine).

One thing that should be of concern is where the data is kept and how it’s being secured. It’s completely rational and prudent to be concerned about where you keep your data and with whom you trust to keep it safe. With either option of using Dropbox or 1Password account, your data is hosted in the cloud. In both cases, it’s stored fully encrypted and decrypted locally on your devices when you access your data. By using Dropbox, you are entrusting 1Password to encrypt your data, and entrusting Dropbox to keep it secure. If you migrate to a 1Password account, you remove Dropbox from the equation. This has the effect of of simplifying things considerably, but it still keeps your data secure.

1Password accounts add some extra layers in addition to your Master Password in order to protect your data, which replaces the security that you are currently relying on Dropbox for. The first is the Secret Key, which is generated locally on your device, not known to us or anyone else, never transmitted over the internet, and combined with your Master Password to unlock the encryption keys that protect your data. The second is Secure Remote Password, a zero-knowledge protocol that adds an additional layer of encryption in transit, and authenticates you with the 1Password servers without using your Master Password or Secret Key in order to sync your data to all your devices. So your Master Password protects your data on your device as it always has, your Secret Key protects your data in the cloud, and Secure Remote Password protects your data in transit.

In terms of control over your data, you will always have that with a 1Password account. The data that you have in Dropbox right now will stay as is until you decide to remove it, so you can certainly just pick up right from where you left off, if you choose. Even better though, if you decided to go back to the standalone license model or move to another provider, the data in your 1Password account remains accessible even after you end your subscription, so you can keep anything that you changed in the meantime.

Having logins to more than 500 websites and having to remember them all is no joke, you’d need some superhuman abilities for that. It’s one of those areas where I had to call on some software to help me out.

I started off using LastPass, and it served me well for a number of years. I was using it mostly as an individual on one laptop, but as my business grew I felt the need to share some of the logins with others. Obviously I don’t want to share all my logins so I needed software that allows easy organisation and sharing. Unfortunately LastPass, while having these features, has a really terrible UI. It has no native app for Mac OS, so I was stuck in their browser app which was painfully slow. I wasn’t going to be able to organize those 500+ logins anytime soon with LastPass.

Enter 1Password, an app with a really sleek UI that works perfectly for me. It stores its password vault locally on your laptop and if you need to use it from more than one device you can sync via Dropbox, which is ideal for me as I’m already a heavy Dropbox user. Now I can easily access my login data from my Macbook Air as well as the iPad. My wife can also access some of my logins through a shared vault. You can create many vaults in fact, and share only those you want. Within each vault, you can further categorize and tag logins, which gives me the right amount of organizational functionality that I need.

One great advantage of 1Password is two-factor authentication. Security-wise, the most important thing is to set a very secure Master password, as that is your weakest point when using 1Password. The password vault is stored on your Mac with 256-bit AES encryption, a standard used by financial institutions. Thus even if a thief steals your laptop or maybe your iOS device, unless the device still has 1Password in logged-in mode, they cannot access your passwords, since the vault is encrypted.

[Read more…]

Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?

Last updated: January 09, 2023Leave a Comment

paypal_logo

Note: If you have any questions after reading this and the several other articles relating to PayPal on this site, please leave a comment or contact PayPal directly. Unfortunately due to time constraints I am unable to offer any advice over email so all emails related to PayPal will remain unanswered.

All e-commerce solutions such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads will allow you to select one of out of several e-commerce checkout business solutions offered by PayPal.

The choice is between the following:

PayPal Website Payments Standard
PayPal Express Checkout
PayPal Payments Pro

Understanding which checkout service to use can be quite complicated as the PayPal documentation is not exactly thuser-friendlyriendly, so let’s try to demystify things a little bit here.

PayPal Website Payments Standard

If you use PayPal Website Payments Standard, when your customers check out, they will be directed to a page that allows them to log into their PayPal account or pay by credit card without having to sign up for a PayPal account. This is the best option if you anticipate that most of your customers will not want to sign up for a PayPal account.

It is the most common type of PayPal checkout used and it is available in many more countries than the other two options we are considering here.

PayPal Express Checkout

If you use PayPal Express Checkout, when your customers check out, they will be directed to a page that requires them to log into their PayPal account or create a new one. Therefore, this is the best option if you anticipate that most of your customers either have a PayPal account or will sign up for an account on checkout.

PayPal sees Express Checkout as a payment option that’s offered in addition to other payment choices such as a credit card gateway, and that adding Express is a way to allow PayPal members a very quick and easy way to pay using their PayPal account. PayPal also believes Express Checkout improves conversions/sales.

PayPal Express is available to merchants in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom or the United States.

PayPal Payments Pro

PayPal Payments Pro is a customizable solution that enables merchants to keep buyers on their website during the entire checkout and payment process. Merchants can host their own customized checkout pages and send transactions to PayPal, or they can have PayPal host the checkout pages and also manage security for sales and authorizations. PayPal Payments Pro can accept Paypal and PayPal credit payments, as well as credit and debit card payments. PayPal Payments Pro also includes an optimized mobile checkout experience.

PayPal Payments Pro is only available to merchants in the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom. A monthly service charge applies, and there is an account application process and credit check to complete before the feature can be activated on your account. PayPal Express Checkout must be enabled in order for Website Payments Pro to be offered on your site.

PayPal sees Website Payments Pro as a payment gateway for handling credit cards. That’s exactly what it is. Coupled with Express Checkout, it gives your customers the maximum amount of choice about how to pay: either by credit card directly on your site, or by using their PayPal account to submit payment.

Note: if using PayPal Payments Pro to process credit cards, you must have an SSL certificate.

Conclusion

If you’re still confused or not sure which product to go for, just start off with PayPal Website Payments Standard. Most e-commerce solutions include this by default and it is the easiest to set up. Moreover the other two options might not be available to you, depending on where your business is based.

PayPal Website Payments Standard allows users the choice of signing in or not signing in, and can be considered the default choice; PayPal Express Checkout can be more efficient for PayPal users and may facilitate sales.

It may depend on whether or not you also have a credit card processing option; if you do, you can use PayPal Express Checkout, since the customer will only need to use this option to pay with PayPal funds.

If PayPal is your only payment method, you may want to use PayPal Website Payments Standard so that your customers have the option of using a credit card.

Whichever option you choose, keep in mind that your e-commerce system will probably have its own documentation guiding you on how to set up each of these PayPal solutions, so it shouldn’t be a big issue getting either one set up.

This is post 7 of 11 in the series “PayPal”