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!

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!

Open source as an advantage

Nokia announced today they will be acquiring (for $410 million) the remaining 52% of Symbian they don’t own. Thus, the Symbian platform will be released under the Eclipse open source license.

The big question now is how Android will respond on this one?

In my opinion Nokia made a great move by releasing Symbian as open source: the mobile applications made for Nokia phones will explode on the market :)

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...