Insights into e-commerce, marketing, & software, plus FastSpring news.

Bank Transfers Now Supported as Customer Payment Method

FastSpring has been working hard this season to enable your customers to pay using even more payment methods than previously existed. Now, in addition to major credit cards, PayPal, check, money order, and purchase orders, your FastSpring store can also accept bank transfers, which is the most common form of cashless consumer payments in most countries within the EU and Asia-Pacific.

Bank transfers offer many benefits for FastSpring clients. They can broaden your customer base, appealing to those customers who do not have a credit card, or who do not want to use a card to complete a payment via the Web or mail. Since there is no possibility of payment reversals or payment chargebacks, you can feel secure that once a customer has paid, the funds are truly yours.

Note: The bank transfer payment method is available for one-time purchases, but not for subscription-based products/services relying on recurring billing. For more information, you can refer to the support article on bank transfers.

New Localization Settings Add Flexible Behaviors for Selling Globally

Now you can customize which information in your store changes based on each customer’s automatically detected location. If a customer selects a different country than the auto-detected one, you can choose from the following three options to occur:

• The language and the currency will both change accordingly
• The language will change accordingly, but the currency will not change
• The language will not change, but the currency will change accordingly

Additionally, the information used during the checkout process for subscriptions is now translated for the top visitor languages. Previously, this content was only translated for all non-subscription based purchases.

Supported Download Formats Greatly Expanded

Some common file extensions that we now support for file downloads, by category, are:

Text Files: .doc, .docx, .txt
Data Files: .epub, .ppt, .xml
Audio Files: .mid, .mp3, .ra, .wav, .wma
Video Files: .avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .swf, .wmv
Image Files: .ai, .eps, .ps, .max, .gif, jpg, .png, .psd
Page Layout Files: .pdf, .qxd, .rels
Spreadsheet and Database Files: .accdb, .db, .mdb, .swl, .xls, .xlsx
Executable Files: .app, .cgi, .exe, .vb
Compressed Files: .7z, .pkg, .rar, .sit, .zip
Disk Image Files: .dmg, .iso, .vcd

Increased Efficiency Via Reusable Downloads & License Generators

Now downloadable files and license generators are re-usable across multiple products. If you have multiple products using the same downloadable file (or license generator), instead of uploading a separate copy of the same file for each product, you can choose from an existing file (or license generator) you have already uploaded. This will reduce the effort and time needed to set up components of your store.

Update Referrers Post-Purchase Within UI

With any digital purchase, but especially with subscription orders, you can pass on a custom identifier per order or subscription. This custom referrer gets passed via a parameter ?referrer=XYZ in the URL. On occasion, there are issues which cause the referrer to be incorrect. Now it is possible to update the referrer after a purchase has been made and those issues have been resolved.

Additional Improvements

A few more updates to SpringBoard:

SpringBoard has simplified. With our most recent release, the FastSpring team has simplified many of the menus within SpringBoard and given clients greater access to making changes to their own stores. For example, in our Store Settings menu, the available payment methods and each of their settings are now located in a single location. FastSpring clients can log in at any time and choose to enable or disable the following payment methods: PayPal, Bank Transfer, Check or Money Order, and Purchase Orders.

Other improvements include:

• Self-signed and unsupported root certificates are now allowed for SSL via the “trust://” protocol. Prefix this protocol on URLs for use in notification and licenses
• Order Creator UI now validates the phone number field according to the same validation as the store if a physical address is entered
• The phone number validation message in the store now reports the correct number of digits depending on the country
• Updates to Dutch translation
• The email address to receive low license count notifications is now customizable

These primarily technical additions have also gone live with SpringBoard’s new release:

• Product display names have been added to the “View All Product Prices” UI. Products have two possible names – a name and a display name. Some clients use one, some clients use both. The Products & Pages UI already displays both names if used. Now the “View All Product Prices” UI does as well. The reason both names need to be displayed is because some clients use the name as an internal SKU.
• New functions have been added to the JavaScript license environment for DSA signing and base64.
• An “Original Reference” column has been added to Order and Order Item CSVs to allow association of returns to original orders. Previously it wasn’t possible to tell which order a return went with in the CSV export. The new Original Reference column now contains the ID of the order associated with a return.
• Support has been added for custom style messages in offer titles / displays. Messages are a technique for performing custom translations in the store. Many areas support messages and offers now do as well.
• The productPath attribute has been added to the order item and subscription template variables. The productPath attribute allows the store URL of a product to be retrieved in templates.  Templates are used throughout SpringBoard for email, web delivery, notifications, and tracking.
• The coupon code attribute has been added to the order item template variable. This addition allows the coupon of an order item / line item to be retrieved in templates.

To kick off the new year, FastSpring will have representatives in Las Vegas attending both the the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which runs January 10th-13th, and Affiliate Summit West 2012 (January 8th-10th). If you are a client or prospect of FastSpring and will be attending either of these shows, please contact us; we will be available to meet with you in person.

The International CES is produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the consumer technology industry. CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products. More than 140,000 attendees from over 140 countries are expected to attend CES, the premiere launchpad for new technology.

With thousands of exhibitors showcasing new products, CES is the biggest event of the year for the consumer electronics industry. The show includes exhibitions, a diverse selection of conference tracks. Keynote speakers this year include YouTube’s Robert Kynci, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Qualcomm CEO Paul E. Jacobs, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, as well as a special “Power Panel” featuring the CEOs of Xerox, Verizon and Ford. For more information, visit www.cesweb.org.

Affiliate Summit West is a three day conference scheduled just prior to CES. It was founded in 2003 for the purpose of providing educational sessions on the latest industry issues and fostering a productive networking environment for affiliate marketers. This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, agencies and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. Last year, the Summit grew to close to 5,000 attendees. For more information, visit www.affiliatesummit.com.

FastSpring is pleased to announce the launch of a comprehensive new demo movie showcasing the many features of our solution and starring (though not limited to) our platform SpringBoard, which has grown and matured over the years while adhering to its original ideals of intuitive use and depth of functionality.

We believe that this movie, in its modular design that allows users to easily skip to sections that most interest them, offers viewers a greatly expanded treatment of FastSpring’s many features and services. It also presents insights into the diverse ways that the platform can be leveraged to increase conversion rates and revenue.

For those new to FastSpring, it’s a great starting point for understanding the depth and breadth of our solution. It also may hold some surprises for existing FastSpring clients, who are likely to discover a thing or two about topics like notifications, condition-based offers and styles, multiple currencies, combining one-time and recurring product/service sales, our embedded store SDKs, and so on.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie may be worth some multiple of that. Our aim in this movie was to produce a presentation of substance rather than a quick overview. We go into the nuts and bolts of SpringBoard in action, presenting product setup, fulfillment options, cross-selling in various locations throughout the order flow, order page customization, discounts offers and much more. We show too in detail how our full-service subscription/recurring billing functionality and in-app purchasing work. Well beyond an abstract feature list, the movie shows you how to easily use and leverage a mature e-commerce platform.

SpringBoard has grown in large part due to customer-driven needs. FastSpring as a whole has always been a customer-centric e-commerce solution. The expansion of our solution has not led to a rigid, monolithic one-size-fits-all technology, but to a platform based on flexible options and re-usability. It lets you jump right in and launch a store quickly and efficiently — without the hassles normally associated with selling globally — then allows you to dive deeper to refine and customize. We also continue to hold true to our unwavering commitment to providing the “best customer service in the industry” and spend some time in the movie quoting a few of our many client testimonials.

So without further ado, we present our new FastSpring Demo Movie.

We are pleased to announce that Deloitte & Touche  has recognized FastSpring as the #1  fastest-growing technology company in the greater Los Angeles area (view PDF) and 13th out of 500 of the fastest-growing companies nationwide, via its annual Technology Fast 500 awards. FastSpring’s growth rate from 2006 to 2010 exceeded other well-known technology companies such as LinkedIn and First Solar.

Greater Los Angeles

North America (US & Canada)

At the Los Angeles awards ceremony, Deloitte introduced FastSpring with these words: “Their innovative engine is designed to assure ease of use, battling customer service and cost issues that have plagued other e-commerce software companies. Ladies and gentlemen, with a growth rate of 17,468% and the #13 company on this year’s national Fast 500 list… let’s congratulate FastSpring.”

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 provides a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies—both public and private—in North America (U.S. and Canada). Technology Fast 500 award winners for 2011 were selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth during the period from 2006 to 2010.

As Deloitte writes on their site, “Each year companies innovate, overcome obstacles and systematically defy the odds. The Technology Fast 500 program recognizes these efforts in its annual ranking…”

FastSpring’s latest platform release includes some exciting developments for vendors selling globally. We have added five new currencies to our existing support for Euro, Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar and Yen. The new currencies now supported are Swiss Franc (CHF), Danish Krone (DKK), Hong Kong Dollar (HKD), New Zealand Dollar (NZD) and Singapore Dollar (SGD).

When you set multi-currency pricing for products in FastSpring’s SpringBoard platform, each currency can be added to the product’s pricing options. As always, setting up foreign currency pricing is easy using our real-time currency calculator—also updated to show the new supported currencies.

We’ve added localization of order pages in Korean, so FastSpring now supports 19 foreign languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

We’ve added support for payments using JCB®, a popular credit card developed in Japan and now issued in 20 different countries and territories worldwide, including the US, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, Singapore, Australia, England and Germany.

UPDATE In addition, PayPal is now supported as a subscription payment method. This important addition increases sales conversion by offering a popular alternative method of payment to your recurring billing customers, some of whom are more likely to complete their purchase if PayPal is an option. It serves as well to reduce churn, as PayPal accounts are often tied to bank accounts that don’t encounter issues with card expiration, an advantage over recurring credit card payments.

As you may know, FastSpring order pages appear in the language and currency of the customer, based on IP detection, providing a seamless purchasing experience for customers around the world. Supported currencies can be set in rounded numbers within SpringBoard to provide further ease of use and to help maximize international sales.

JCB® is a registered trademark of JCB & Co., Ltd.

Right on the heels of the Inc. 500 award, FastSpring learned that it has been ranked #1 in the Pacific Coast Business Times annual listing of fastest-growing companies on California’s Central Coast. The article, “Where sales grow by leaps and bounds,” by Marlize van Romburgh, appears in the August 26 – Sept. 1, 2011 edition of the publication.

“FastSpring’s sales jumped 1,351 percent in three years, the kind of growth usually seen only in very young startups. Yet its executives say that kind of explosive growth may be far from over.”

As Tim Dir is quoted, “We’ve done all of this through a bad economy.”

The article touches on some key points: bootstrapping by four founders and rapid profitability; the focus on hyper-responsive customer service; the team’s software background as a differentiator in its match with its customers; the launch of the new subscription e-commerce service this year; and the overall growth in e-commerce:

“It’s a growing market. E-commerce sales are outpacing the overall U.S. retail market, according to recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Total e-commerce sales in the U.S. were $47.5 billion in the second quarter, up 3 percent over the first quarter and 17.6 percent year-over-year. In contrast, overall retail sales in the U.S. were up 1.2 percent from the first quarter and 8.1 percent year-over-year.”

Last year, the Pacific Coast Business Times ranked FastSpring the #2 fastest-growing company on the Central Coast. Inc. Magazine recently ranked FastSpring #53 in its 2011 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in the US after a #41 ranking for the prior year.

Quick License Manager, a product of Soraco Technologies, provides a hands-off solution to licensing and protecting your software application. With this integration, FastSpring expands its support of multiple licensing options for software vendors.

Quick License Manager is a software protection tool that allows you to protect your software application with secure license keys.

How does the integration work?

When a customer places an order via FastSpring, the order information filled by the customer during the ordering process is automatically and securely sent to Quick License Manager. Quick License Manager generates a license key and sends it back to FastSpring. The order information along with customer data and license information are automatically stored in the Quick License Manager database. FastSpring then sends a confirmation email to the customer with the license key generated by Quick License manager.

As a vendor, this integration provides an optimal, unified approach to selling your software online. All the relevant information collected during the ordering process is readily available in Quick License Manager. Management of the customer information and license keys can be easily performed using the Quick License Manager Console. For more details about Quick License Manager, visit Soraco’s web site at http://www.soraco.co

FastSpring donated $2,000 today to the World Food Programme (WFP) for humanitarian relief to Japan to aid in recovery efforts following the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11th.

The World Food Programme is the United Nations’ frontline agency mandated to combat global hunger, which afflicts one out of every seven people on earth. In emergencies, WFP is on the frontline, delivering food to save the lives of victims of war, civil conflict and natural disasters.

As WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran states: “It is a spirit, a resiliency in the face of challenge, which we have come to know and admire from Japan. Japan is one of the world’s most generous nations and has always stood with WFP when tragedy occurs and, today, WFP stands with Japan.”

FastSpring has representatives attending both the 2011 International CES (January 6th-9th) as well as the upcoming Affiliate Summit West 2011 (January 9th-11th). If you are a client or prospect of FastSpring and will be in Las Vegas, NV for either of these shows, please contact us, we would love to meet with you in person and discuss the FastSpring service.

The International CES is produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the consumer technology industry. CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products. More than 120,000 attendees from over 130 countries are expected to attend CES, the launchpad for new technology.

With more than 2,500 exhibitors showcasing more than 20,000 new products, CES is the most exciting four days of the year for the consumer electronics industry. The show includes exhibitions, a diverse selection of conference tracks, and keynote speakers including Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, Audi’s Rupert Stadler, Samsung’s Boo-Keun Yoon and Ford’s Alan Mulally. For more information, visit www.cesweb.org.

The Affiliate Summit West is a three day conference running in parallel with CES, and includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. For more information, visit www.affiliatesummit.com.

It’s been a busy time throughout the Fall and heading into the holiday season at FastSpring. FastSpring stores continue to thrive, and benefit from a number of improvements in the SpringBoard platform that are worth noting. Let’s relate a few of these that appeared in the last two releases. Many of these upgrades are direct responses to client input and show the nice flow between development and customer service in place at FastSpring.

Using advanced style options is also easier now. Store style options such as hiding a coupon, decorating links as buttons, displaying product prices before titles, separating first and last names into separate fields and showing volume pricing information on detail pages are now available as simple checkboxes. In addition, you can also select to use small or large payment method icons.

We’ve improved language selection for English users in non-English countries by adding an option to the country/language drop-down menu to enable selection of English regardless of the default language of the detected country.

Our Google Analytics support, already set up to track e-commerce and cross-domain traffic, now includes additional advanced configuration options, including an “exclude taxes” option, which can be useful in advanced e-commerce analytics reporting and is now the default setting.

For shopping cart order page setups, we’ve configured the Continue Shopping links to reflect the most recent HTTP referrer, returning the buyers to the page they most recently came from on your website rather than the original order-start page.

To help set up a new product that is based on an existing product, we’ve added functionality that quickly duplicates key product settings. This can be a nice time-saver and help prevent human error in adding new products to your store.

As you may know, FastSpring supports Split Pay, a feature that allows sales to be split between partners or resellers, etc. SpringBoard now supports split rules on a per-product or line item basis, allowing vendors to split revenue from a single product sale to multiple parties.

Logging in to SpringBoard has gotten easier too – we’ve improved support for native web browser password managers on the login page. This update can be a nice time saver as well if you log in and out of SpringBoard often.

Our download file support has been extended to include EPUB, FLC and M4V, effectively allowing better support for file hosting and customer download of e-books, animations and movies.

On the fulfillment front, we’ve added shipping option customization for Acutrack. You can choose a one ounce or two ounce mailer, a DVD case, or select custom packaging. Acutrack hosts a FastSpring vendor page with easy signup sequence and rapid setup of your authentication information, which can then be input into SpringBoard. If you’re considering shipping backup CDs or DVDs, selling movies or other physically-fulfilled products, it’s now easier than ever.

On the scripting front, SpringBoard now offers full support of JavaScript, adding to our PHP support, for use in scripting license generators and custom pricing calculators.

You can always see our release notes directly within SpringBoard by clicking on the Support tab. There is much more under way and in progress within the SpringBoard platform, so stay tuned!

In these accelerating days of web design and development approaches, marked both by new technologies and a renaissance of graphic design and typography, the existing design of a company’s website can slowly but surely become a bit tired. What once was fresh becomes tinged with staleness. This is not necessarily bad news, as it pushes companies to rethink and rework their public presence on the web, to come up with redesigns or refreshes that take advantage of innovation and work to ensure success in business goals.

FastSpring recently re-launched its company website (originally designed in 2007), taking the route of the refresh rather than the total redesign. We wanted something less boxy, a site that would feel fresh again, without breaking or abandoning some fundamentals such as ease of use and information-rich content.

Two of the phrases that capture the impetus of new approaches to web design are “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation.” These are complementary approaches, each term the flipside of the other. Progressive enhancement is achieved by taking advantage of increased support in modern browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari, for wider subsets of the CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 specs – rounded corners on boxes, drop shadows on both text and boxes, time-specified fades on elements such as links, and so on. The days of constructing both navigation and rounded corners on various elements through elaborate graphical and markup acrobatics are thankfully drawing to a close, just as table-based layout has widely become a piece of history. Progressive enhancement can be seen as a second wave of the web-standards movement.

Graceful degradation involves the recognition of the reality that such enhancements, when used, need to appear acceptably in less-aware browsers (yes, we are talking mostly about IE here) that do not yet support these programmatic ways of displaying style innovations. The goal is to achieve an “always acceptable” user experience, whatever the state of browser support for CSS happens to be. With this comes a renewed willingness to accept that designs will look different within different browsers. Content must remain usable and readable for all, even those surfing with JavaScript and images turned off. Content is still king, not least for SEO and accessibility reasons, but can be styled to accommodate innovation. One of the best books that explains this mental model is Dan Cederholm’s recent Handcrafted CSS.

One of the driving forces for the resurgence of JavaScript, and in particular cross-browser JavaScript frameworks with wide adoption such as jQuery, is the need for cross-browser, cross-platform behavior (as opposed to display) enhancement. With the advent of mobile browsing, and in particular the need to support the user experience on iPhones and iPads, JavaScript-based animation is gaining sophistication. We have used jQuery to create both simple things like cyclical image displays with fades and for more complex animations such as appears on the top of our home page, achieving some of the effects that could once only be approached via Flash.

Useful in this quest for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is the ability to serve alternate content to IE via conditional comments.
In this manner, a site can, in a few lines of code, target IE and provide it with both alternate CSS and alternate content, if needed. We have made use of this best practice in our refresh as well. Text content can be updated at the page level, and the CSS takes care of the rest, to lessen the maintenance headaches. The IE experience will be more boxy, less refined, but not broken. In general, it also serves to educate users to try other browsers and see what they may have been missing.

On our roadmap is a complete redesign of our demo movie to highlight the current state of the SpringBoard interface and its many new features, as well as to use codecs that play nicely with mobile devices. We will also be adjusting the look and feel of our blog to reflect the site refresh. In addition, we are keeping abreast of the advent of HTML 5, the next major revision of the HTML standard, which incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have to date been dependent on 3rd-party browser plug-ins. A good (short, informative and fun) early reference in this regard is Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers.

With the complexity of calls to multiple files – due to factors such as tracking includes, jQuery and its associated plug-ins, multiple scripts, and page-loading protocols – it is important in refreshes and redesigns to optimize pages and sites in a systematic, iterative manner. Luckily, today we possess web services such as Pingdom and in-browser plug-ins such as Firebug and PageSpeed that can aid performance and optimization.

It is not enough to assume everyone has broadband and pages can afford to be bloated. Performance optimization has even become a sub-industry of its own, much like SEO and SEM. Good sources for general guidelines and tools are available widely on the web. One useful starting place is Google’s “Web Performance Best Practices,” which focuses on five factors: optimizing caching, minimizing round-trip times, minimizing request overhead, minimizing payload size and optimizing browser rendering.

So we hope you enjoy our new site. It is certainly a moving target, and our optimization and video-enhancement efforts will bear more fruit as we progress, learn more, and incorporate our learning into design and coding practices.

The Pacific Coast Business Times, a leading publication on entrepreneurial activities and business news along California’s Central Coast, recently published a list of the area’s fastest-growing companies. FastSpring was ranked #2, showing 1,165% revenue growth between 2007 and 2009. Other Central Coast companies features on the list include InTouch Health, Lynda.com, and Patagonia.

Entitled “Where e-commerce software just clicked,” the article featuring FastSpring sums up the company’s success succinctly in the opening paragraph: “It found a niche, solved the problem and took care of its customers.” The article goes into detail about FastSpring’s near-fanatical focus on providing superior, round-the-clock customer service, as well as the word-of-mouth marketing that has helped spur FastSpring’s growth. The article also touches on new features, such as the in-app store, explaining how when a trial period runs out or users wish to upgrade, they can do so immediately from within the applications themselves without having to open a web browser, which can result in an increase of +5% in customer conversion.