Distribution Channel Management for software products

For a software company the distribution of its software products is a very challenging job. The Internet is offering unlimited opportunities but is opening many doors also for the competition. As a company director, I am sure that you are questioning yourself everyday what you need to do to keep (or target) the leader position.

The modern strategies include these days channel distribution strategies such as exclusivities for resellers, local market prices, marketing development funds and local brand development strategies. How to manage all these? How to protect the channels? How to improve the channels? How to define new channels? And, very important, how to measure all these parameters?

All these challenges will be discussed on Thursday, June 18th on a webinar hosted by my colleague Casey Potenzone (VP US Sales) and our partner Ken Beam (President, VAR City). The webinar is called “60 Minute Crash Course on Channel Management” and the registrations are open (and free):
http://www.avangate.com/webinar/software-channel-management-2009.php

Njoy!

Casual Drinks – networking event for software professionals

If you are going to be in the Silicon Valley area on Thursday, March 26th come join us for Casual Drinks, a networking event aimed at software professionals within the Valley. The event is hosted by Avangate (eCommerce and solutions provider for software distribution). If you are a software publisher or provide services to the space, Avangate invites you to come join us and meet your peers.

Why you should attend?

• Networking with key people from Software & eCommerce Industry
  
• Get valuable business contacts
  
• Happy Thursday: Drinks & Fun
  
• Meet the Avangate Team

The event is free and is being hosted at Don Giovanni’s restaurant on Castro Street in Mountain View. We encourage you to come join us and please feel free to invite your friends!

See you there? RSVP online.

P.S. Pictures from the previous edition.

How is the software channel coping with the crisis

Avangate is doing a survey on how the crisis is impacting the channel distribution in the software industry. If you are:

• an ISV using a partner network or
• a reseller in the software industry,

take our brief survey and become part of the study – find out how your own challenges and solutions regarding the channel compare with those of your peers. Read more here: http://blog.avangate.com/software-channel-crisis/

THANK YOU!

Casual Drinks with Avangate

We will host a free networking event here in Mountain View on November 20th. There will be 2 hours of food, drinks, business people and funny moments.

You are invited if:
* you are connected with the software industry
* you want to extend your business network
* you want to meet Avangate US team
* you want to have fun :)

Interested? Register online

We look forward to seeing you at the event!

UPDATE: The 2009 Spring Edition will be on 26th of March. More details in this post.

Internet marketing from Avangate

I was recently asked how can we help a small company to promote its products. Suddenly I realized that there are so many marketing channels available from Avangate that can boost the product exposure very effective.

I will not talk about our webmarketing services which are tremendous (but also they are not free) but I will talk about all tools that are bundled with the e-commerce platform.

PAD Promoter
Avangate is offering a very efficient service by submiting a product PAD file to certain popular websites (such as downloadpipe.com, fivesign.com, etc). And yes, it's free :)

Google Base
Avangate is submitting on a daily basis your selected products to Google Base. Thus, you will receive an incredible market exposure to millions of potential customers.

Affiliates network
Thousands of affiliates are ready to sell new products. Not being a popular product there must be other ways to convince the affiliates to put it in front of other products; you will ask how. Now is depending an everybody sales talent but I would say that in all cases an offer that cannot be refused will win; and am not referring to Godfather's movie now but to money. Giving a big discount to affiliates can convenience them to make some easy money :)

Besides these free tools, Avangate can introduce you to additional marketing channels like Bits du Jour (which will sale the product with a great discount for one day), Giveawayoftheday (which is offering the product for free but for a different SLA, aquiring thousands of new customers and generate new revenue channels on them), SoftPressRelease.com (which is offering great discounts to all Avangate customers for the PR services).

At the end but not the last will be the Account Manager assigned for each vendor account. The consultancy services are included and coming from an e-commerce expert the benefits are obvious. Just log in to your Avangate account and start your Internet marketing plan :)

P.S. New customers can also sign up for an account :)

Dell is using Avangate

This morning I performed a search on Google using "avangate" and I was surprised to see that this time a Dell company (License Technologies Group) is using our brand to promote itself.

The frequency of these kind of situations is very high lately and my question to these "competitors" is who should buy the beer for the marketing people?

Avangate is blogging!

I am happy to share with you that Avangate has finally an official blog: http://blog.avangate.com/

Accordingly to Adriana, the blog will contain articles about software business, affiliate marketing, software marketing, software events, etc. Also, the latest news about Avangate will be published (in a 2.0 manner of course). The blog authors will be from inside Avangate team and also some special guests from the software industry.

iPhone and Avangate engineers

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 :)

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?

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!

Increase software downloads

The software industry has three major points to measure the success of the products:

• number of downloads
• number of licenses sold
  

We will address today only the first point: number of software downloads. What are the key factors that can affect these downloads?

Our webmarketing team released again a great article regarding how to increase the number of the downloads for a software product. The main factors are:

1. Let users know what they are downloading. Don’t surprise them!
2. Suggest the action: Download versus Try label
3. Don't ask for user details (or do it in an elegant manner)
   
4. How to handle a potential customer if interested
5. Get proactive feedback
6. How to manage the uninstall process

The entire article can be found on the Avangate website: The 66 Route to Selling Software Online

Enjoy!

License renewal links - how to

During a meeting today we received a request to include into IPN (Instant Payment Notification) the license renewal link. The answer is very simple: the information is already there and the renewal link can be build very easy.

How the link looks like
https://secure.avangate.com/renewal/?LICENSE=license_code&COUPON=renewal_discount

Note: the COUPON parameter is optional and it is used to give a discount for the renewal order; the active discounts can be retreived by accessing the "Renewal discounts" section inside Avangate Control Panel.

How to get the necessary information
Along with the IPN communication, Avangate is sending the license information, including the "license code" which is used in the renewal link. The variable is called "IPN_LICENSE_REF"

Note: Please make sure that this variable is activated to be included in the IPN; to verify it, go to Avangate Control Panel > Account Settings > IPN settings

Shorties for 9 months

After a long period, I decided to revive my notes.

Personal news
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* I got married :)
* I have a Twitter account

Avangate news
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Avangate has an office in Silicon Valley
* Avangate Control Panel has reached the 3rd version
* Download Insurance Service (DIS) has been launched in February
* Referrer report - now the website sources can be measured
* Auto apply discount - set the promotions to start for Christmas and go to holiday
* New order process available: checkout page with shopping cart functionalities
* A/B testing scenarios
* GBP, YEN, AUD and CAD available as billing currencies
* Sales Source Report - track the sales sources
* Backup CD in DVD box
* Product upgrade - upgrade options for customers
* Avangate CodeBox - manage & protect software licenses by using AntiFraud, Uniloc and License management modules
* more to come...

Measure the performance of your eCommerce provider

During the globalization process, almost any software vendor outsourced the ordering process for his software products; thus, the electronic software distribution (or ESD) become a very tough niche for all companies which are providing this kind of services.

Outsourcing the entire ordering process will cut the operational costs bringing specific services such as multi-language, multi-currency, 24x7 support, etc. I will not dwell on outsourcing benefits here but on how to measure the performance of your e-commerce partner. In order words, what is the performance ratio of your ordering system and how to measure it?

A very basic method is to compare the number of visitor you have with the number of completed orders but this is a very primitive method.

A most suitable method is to create a script which will handle any redirect from your website (e.g.: mywebsite.com/buyredir.php?product=ABC&vendor=Avangate). At the end of the week the consolidated reports will show the number of redirected users vs number of completed orders.

Using such measuring system, you can see at any time how your ordering system performance is affected by the prices, website design or your e-commerce platform, helping you to take the best decisions for your business.

Notes:

• a "user" means an unique session redirected to the e-commerce provider
• in case that you are using more than one e-commerce provider, for the same session the shopper must be redirected to the same ordering system
  

Enjoy :)

P.S. Having more that one e-commerce provider can confuse your customers but we will talk about this in further discussions.

Order interface - layout control by using CSS

Two weeks ago, we released a new order interface with a fresh HTML code supporting CSS for each element. Thus, every Avangate vendor can control the look and feel of his order interface.


Some examples:

• Internet Caffe Software (by Antamedia) -Avangate default template
• PixExpose - commercial license (by Cream Software)
• ConvertXToDVD (by VSO Software)
  

How to use the new features?
Simply download the default CSS stylesheet, modify it and upload it into your Avangate Control Panel account :)

Related links

• Avangate eCommerce platform
  
• Learn CSS
• CSS Working Group Blog
  

Czech language for Avangate order interface

Avangate released the Czech language for order interface. Customers from Czech Republic are automatically detected and the interface will display the Czech language and Czech koruna as prices currency.

The feedback from shoppers has been very positive and the sales are going up.

My recommendation for all Avangate vendors is to update their templates for the order interface to support the Czech language; also, all multi-language descriptions must be extended to support the Czech language:

• product descriptions;
• electronic delivery instructions;
• interface templates;
• order additional fields;
• etc.

The final goal is to increase the orders from Czech Republic, of course :)

Quick guide: Instant Payment Notification

Avangate has a very "sexy" feature called IPN (Instant Payment Notification). For every approved order, the software vendor can receive to a specific URL an automated confirmation containing all order information (order details, products sold, customer data, etc).

What can you do by using IPN:

• add order information to internal database
• add license to an internal application
• create specific tasks (custom emails, specific alerts, etc)
• etc (read: "use your imagination")
  

Every time when a colleague of mine or a software vendor asks me if it's possible to implement a specific action when a order occurs, I am getting a smiling face and I am giving the same answer: "Of course, you can do everything you want by powering the IPN feature" :)

P.S. I am writing this post to send a quick link to all related feature questions.

Avangate promotes e-commerce services in USA

Avangate attended Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. The overall feeling is that the conference is a "place to be" for any software business company. The audience is from Microsoft integrators/developers area and the first objective for everyone is to make a good business.

Avangate made a star from the myAvangate platform (Reseller Management System) by promoting the most powerful sales concept these days: combining the online sales channel with classical distribution channels.


SIC 2007
Avangate had also a good presence at SIC 2007 (also by sponsoring the conference). The conference is also a "place to be" for every software business or service provider for this area.


In my opinion the conference is still in the beginning stage. The majority of the people are from the US but the international presence seems to grow from year to year.

The conference is a great opportunity to build new partnerships, to discover new business concepts and to promote your products or services of course.



Adriana had a very good presentation about "Web metrics". The audience learned how to "read" the business behind the numbers showed by any website tracking system, how to calculate and interpret the bounce rates and conversion rates, etc.