iPhone and Avangate engineers

How can you throw away your visitors

Hey, when you post some potential annoying content on your website or blog please keep in mind that it may hurt your visitors.

Today TechCruch published a video material that plays automatically and ... it cannot be stopped! Imagine what I did after 2 seconds I opened the website ....

Search BOSS from Yahoo

Yahoo opened this week the innovation gates: Search BOSS ("Build your Own Search Service"). The company is changing this way its strategy by offering access to the search engine to external applications. Thus, as Microsoft did with its ISV plan, Yahoo will have the opportunity to build a huge business around its search engine.

More details can be found on Yahoo Developer Network.

How to make 10,000 bucks

We will make a very simple math exercise today.

Let's suppose that your sales are going quite well for the summer time. Let's say that at the end of the day you have an average of 100 daily sales; in 30 days you will have 3000 sales; let's suppose that the product costs 29 bucks; that means that at the end of the month you have 87,000 USD in sales; applying the standard 8% processing fee will result in a 80,040 USD in your pocket.

Now, the little question is how can you generate more revenues with the same number of customers :)

The answer is quite simple: by selling additional services. For a small amount the customer can opt in to receive a backup CD along with the order or he can obtain to increase the download availability for 24 months. Now, adding a small profit of 5 USD on top of 70% of your existing 3000 sales, the final profit will be 90,540 USD - meaning that an additional 10,500 USD monthly profit just came up :)

Customized top level domains and the winners

ICANN recently agreed to support customized top level domain names (e.g. ".avangate", ".daniel"). I will not talk about this decision but about who will win on a long term from this decision.

If today it is quite simple to guess the website of a company of interest (e.g. avangate.com), in the feature the options you will have will be unlimited (or almost). The most recommended solution will be to search the company name using a preferred search engine. Now, can you guess who is the winner? :)

Customer feedback

Today we had an email thread inside the company collecting feedback received from customers during last days.

A collection born very quick :

"You have the best techsupport in this world. Please take care of this!"

"NICE!!! You guys are awesome."

"you know that you are my friend, my friend"

" Absolutely fabulous, thank you and your team! Please send best regards to them! You know now, that with this quick work, we will expect everything done so fast??:-))) Really, we appreciate it very much! "

And the winner is:

"you are the God of e-commerce"

How should we feel after reading the feedback?

Internet black holes revealed

One of the biggest Internet black hole can be finally indexed by the search engines. The announcement has been made by Google and Yahoo.

The technical solution offered by Adobe is a special flash player that allows the search engines to harvest inside the binary SWF files.

After more than 10 years of flash technology, Adobe implemented this strategy to sustain the Flash market which will become a new wave of building the web. Why did it take so long?

Tips and hacks: Order interface

Following one of my previous posts regarding the CSS capabilities, we will discover today how the order interface can be controlled by using basic CSS commands.

In order to access the interface HTML code just access your Control Panel account and go to "Interface design" section.

Hide the languages selector
#order__header__languages {display: none;}

Hide the currencies selector
#order__header__currencies {display: none;}

Change the width of the shopping cart forms
#order__header, #order__content {width:760px !important;}

And so on... Basically the entire interface can be controlled by overwriting the CSS styles. All you have to do is to search in the HTML source for the specific style you want to change and add the CSS directives. On top of that, my colleagues from technical support are magicians and they will guide you if necessary.

Good luck!

Happy 1st of July

Today was a tremendous day for the Avangate platform. We released a lot of advanced new features:

• license lifetime for pricing options
• recurrent payments for American Express payments
• PostePay payment method for the Italian customers
• new information included in the IPN: sales costs for each product - for advanced integrations
  

What are the major benefits? The software industry is based on the "license" keyword. With Avangate the second keyword can be "imagination".

A software product can be set to be sold in a many combination by using the pricing options schemes, recurrent payment and the most advanced license management platform: buy for 1 month of for 12 months, for 5 users of for 10 users, with gold or platinum support, for MAC of for Windows platforms, etc.

Imagine how complex can be your offer now based on only one product :)

I dedicate this day to our development team. Congratulation guys!