The Snowboard Shop (Badgie’s Ltd) opened for business on the 5th October 2007. After a whole lot of planning we managed to open both our retail premises in Fleet and Hampshire and launch online at http://www.thesnowboardshop.co.uk at the same time.

We have many years experience in the snowboarding industry and we are very passionate about the sport. Since we opened the store we have enjoyed a very successful first winter and, with a little help from Protx, we have managed to sell lots of snowboard products all over the UK and Europe.

We appreciate how important the internet has become for the retail sector and we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be able to securely sell our products 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to the whole of the UK and beyond.

We knew we needed to create a fully secure, easy to navigate, content rich website that customers could find easily through the search engines. We also needed our customers to be able to pay for our products through the website with ease. We spent a great deal of time researching who would be the best payment provider that could provide our customers with a high level of security and ourselves with an easy to use system.

We carried out a lot of research into who would be the best payment provider for us to use. We looked at a handful of other payment providers but for us Protx was the obvious choice. As a small start up company, it’s nice to know that we have a guaranteed set fee every month and so there are no nasty surprises. £20 per month allows us to process 1,000 transactions a quarter which for now is just great.

There were a few other aspects we focused on when choosing our payment provider. First of all it was important for us to find a payment service provider who could provide our customers with a fully secure online facility to purchase our products. Secondly, it was also important to find a payment service provider that could provide us with a high level of fraud screening.

In the current age, attempted online fraud is extremely common. Protx provides a series of fraud checks that helps us to decide which transactions are potentially fraudulent. This way we can void suspicious transactions and reduce our risk of fraud.

We found the service provided by Protx ticked all our boxes in that it was extremely secure and simple to administer.

The implementation of Protx into our shopping cart was quick and straight forward. Most of the set up was done online. We found Protx to be highly efficient and this made the integration a very painless task. We had to do some straight forward testing and once this was completed we were allowed to ‘go live’ with Protx.

We have now been live with Protx since October 2007. The integration with our website has been very smooth and has enabled us to sell lots of products to customers across the whole of the UK. It’s a great feeling to be able to lock up the doors to our shop at the end of the working day, and an even better feeling to know that we are continuing to sell whilst we are closed!

We have only had cause to contact Protx a few times since we have gone live to ask a couple of technical questions. On all occasions we were able to get through to the Protx technical team almost immediately with no waiting around. We found them to be extremely helpful and knowledgeable about their system solving any problems instantly.

In an effort to keep our website as secure as possible we have recently added 3D Secure fraud screening to our Protx account. All this took was a quick call to the Protx technical team who advised us how to enable this service ourselves within our Protx control panel. Now we can enjoy even more peace of mind with no additional costs from Protx.

We are constantly pushing our business forward and are currently working on another couple of websites to complement our current offering. This time the process will be a little easier, there is no research needed for the choice of payment provider, it’s going to be Protx!

To visit the Snowboard Shop website please go to http://www.thesnowboardshop.co.uk