We get this question from time to time. Here’s how we explain the difference between a full service e-commerce solution like FastSpring and cheaper e-commerce solutions which often sit on top of systems like PayPal or your own merchant account and which are often not specialized for a specific industry…

It is really the difference between paying little to use some technology vs. paying a little more but getting a real full service partner that handles order support, much of the setup, offers merchandising features to increase sales, and can help offload e-commerce related work so you can concentrate on the things you are uniquely qualified for related to building and developing your products and marketing to generate revenue.

You have to ask yourself — in saving a few percentage points in fees, how much % of revenue growth are you foregoing? For example, if you save 5% in fees but you would otherwise have grown your business by 10%, 15%, 20%+ as a result of working with a full service provider with product merchandising capabilities for optimizing order revenue and who enables you to focus on growing your business as opposed to dealing with e-commerce infrastructure issues, choosing the cheaper option has a huge opportunity cost, and you’ve focused on the wrong % figure. In life, there are a lot of good ways to save money by selecting the deepest discount service or cheapest product, and believe me, I’m happy to grab a bargain when it’s the right type of service to go cheap on. But when it comes to your e-commerce infrastructure and the potential to grow your business, the cheapest option is generally far from the best option, as you really get what you pay for in this business.

There are a number of things you’ll be able to do with FastSpring that you can’t do with other systems. Take a look at this link to see a few of them:
View Benefits Here

Additionally, some of the many advantages of using a service like FastSpring include:
- A higher level of customer service, including a senior-level Dedicated Account Manager who always responds within 24 hours, often just within 1-2 hours
- A platform architected from the ground up to be highly flexible, adaptable, and configurable to meet your needs today and as you grow
- An extremely easy-to-use, fast & clean user interface
- Branded and customizable order pages designed for you
- Software marketing guidance provided by software marketing gurus
- The opportunity to setup cross-sells, bundles, etc. in a number of ways to optimize revenue, plus full control of order pages ensuring you retain more of the order page revenue for yourself instead of for your e-commerce provider
- A fast, reliable, and secure global file distribution network utilizing Amazon.com’s S3 bandwidth service
- Advanced CD shipment support offering a painless method to sell and profit from backup CDs, plus advanced CD or DVD shipments, including custom packaging and contents
- Dynamically-generated visual sales reports with filters to drill down into details and build custom reports
- Automatic detection of each customer’s location so your order page is localized in the appropriate currency and language for most transactions
- Integration with various 3rd party tracking and analysis systems (Google Adwords, Google Analytics, ShareASale.com, etc.) to help you better understand where your visitors and customers are coming from, their demographics, your traffic trends, and to recruit new affiliate resellers

Services like FastSpring are inclusive of key e-commerce elements like the merchant account, gateway, chargeback handling (including handling the fee on behalf of vendors), etc. With the cheaper solutions, you often need to set those parts up yourself and pay for them separately. The cost to have those elements in place is typically about 3.5% when you consider paying chargeback and other fees on top of the merchant account transactional costs, assuming you have international transactions, offer American Express, etc. The merchant account cost is in addition to the fees charged by some of these services which sit on top of your own merchant account.

Also, with your own merchant account, you need to dedicate the development time to setup and then support multiple payment methods and multiple merchant accounts (for backup protection) on an ongoing basis as those methods and accounts get updated and issues arise that require addressing. When you work with FastSpring, you don’t deal with any of these issues or costs.

There’s lots more to it, but hopefully this is enough information to start from when making this type of evaluation of different types of services.

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