We believe that supporting locally owned businesses is a key component of a healthy community. The purpose of Social Wave's Merchant Profiles is to help locally owned businesses in Silicon Valley improve their online presence and open a new channel to help them market themselves to local area residents with a multi page online profile.

What Will a Merchant Profile Allow Me to Do?

Whether you already have a website or there's absolutely no mention whatsoever of your business online, a Social Wave merchant profile can help get the word out about your business to your community. Among other things, you can do the following things with your merchant profile.

Creating a Merchant Profile

To create a merchant profile, simply goto your account control panel by clicking on the "My Account" button and then click on the "Set-up Wizard" button under the Merchant Profile Control section. The set-up wizard will walk you through all the steps of creating a great looking merchant profile. You can create a very simple profile in under ten minutes, but if you want a highly informational profile rich with content about your business, expect to spend an hour or moreif you already have write-ups, logos, and photos for your business ready to use. If you do not have materials ready to use, you can start with a simple profile and add to it as you get new info ready to put into it.

The set-up wizard will take you through eight setup steps. Not all steps are required to create your profile. You may click on the continue button at any time if the set-up instructions for the respective step don't apply to your profile or if you just want to skip it and go back to it later. At the very end of the set-up process, you will be presented with display options for your merchant profile. You will be allowed to choose whether you want certain pages to appear or be hidden in your profile. You will also have the opportunity to publish your new profile by "unhiding" it. If you're not ready to publish your profile, you may quit and continue setting up your profile at a later time. Just remember that your profile will not be visible until you publish it.

Your profile will be published the first time you choose show under the show/hide options for your Main Profile in the last step of set-up. Once your profile is published, it will be accessible to the general public. You can also hide your profile again even after you publish it by changing the show/hide status back to "hide" for your Main Profile page.

Ready to start? Register for an account now.

Managing Your Merchant Profile

Once you have a merchant profile created, managing it is easy. You can either go through with the set-up wizard again or you can just click on the edit links sprinkled throughout your profile to edit different pieces of your profile. Of course, you must be logged in under the account that owns the profile to edit it.

Pricing and Services

Social Wave Merchant Profiles is free for all qualifying businesses to use, but if you appreciate what we're doing, please consider upgrading your membership to a premium membership to help us defray the costs of running this site.

If you are not able to set-up a merchant profile or would rather have us do it for you, please email support@socialwave.net and inquire about our merchant profile set-up services. We'll come over, shake your hand, do a little interviewing, take photos, write things up, and get a great looking profile done for as little as $239.

Rules and Restrictions

Small to Medium Sized Businesses Only Please
We don't have any tight definitions on what we consider a small to medium sized business. We'll let you make that judgement yourself and step in only if needed. The idea of our merchant profiles is to make it easier to find smaller businesses in your community online and also to help restore a connection between community businesses and community residents. If your business is big enough to afford sophisticated marketing campaigns or you need more than one level of managerial approval to post a profile, this probably isn't for your business.

Silicon Valley Based Businesses Only
We define a Silicon Valley based business as a business located in Silicon Valley or one that primarily serves Silicon Valley. We define Silicon Valley as the technology innovation center of the known world and a mighty fine place to call home, but don't ask us for specific borders because then you'll start a fight.

No Fraudulent or Abusive Marketing Practices
Again, we don't have any concise definition on what we'd consider fraudulent or abusive marketing, but if your profile creates headaches for us or we get a flurry of complaints, we may take action.

Extended Inactivity
If you haven't logged into the website in over a year, we may remove your profile if we're unsure whether your business still exists or if your information is still accurate.

Incorrect Contact Information
If you change email addresses or phone numbers, please keep your account information up to date so we have a way of contacting you if we have questions. If we're unable to reach you, we may assume that you've moved on and may delete your profile.

• Social Wave Manifesto
• Merchant Profile: Creating Coupons
• Merchant Profiles: Display Reviews from Other Sites