Below are some of the benefits to outsourcing to a full service e-commerce payment solution like FastSpring vs. utilizing a basic payment service like PayPal or setting up your own merchant account.
- Focus on developing your products and marketing your business rather than investing your company’s time, money, and resources into building and maintaining a commerce platform, a platform that will need to be constantly updated and improved as your business grows and your needs change. To get a better sense for the features you would need to build out on your own, review the list of features that FastSpring displays on its web site and you’ll have a better idea of the software development and administrative work, both upfront and ongoing, that is involved in building out your own solution on top of a basic payment service or by setting up your own merchant account. Avoid having to do any custom coding.
- Eliminate chargeback fees (typically $15-$40 per occurrence) and chargeback management. Let your e-commerce service handle them for you.
- Avoid the order-related customer service work, let your e-commerce provider handle this on your behalf. Enjoy the benefits of having a Dedicated Account Manager handling your initial setup and helping you with any issues that arise on an ongoing basis, always responding to your quickly. You can expect to get a response from your Dedicated Account Manager within 12 hours or less, even on most weekends. Gain access to a support staff trained for software product and software delivery issues as opposed to customer service representatives who are not trained specifically for handling software vendor issues. Expertise covers areas such as delivery of download links, customized emails, generation of registration codes, etc.
- Avoid complex tax compliance issues by state or country by having a full service solution like FastSpring handle tax collection, compliance, and payment on your behalf, including management of the European Union’s Value-Added Tax (VAT), California and New York state sales taxes.
- Increase revenue by reducing your fraud rate. Save time and avoid hassle by using FastSpring to minimize the volume of fraudulent sales. FastSpring aggregates order data and does real-time anti-fraud analysis of each new order prior to each transaction occurring, eliminating fraud to a far larger degree than a merchant can do on its own.
- Increase international sales by displaying your order page text in each customer’s native language, displaying prices in localized currencies, and settling your transactions in the appropriate currency for each customer. FastSpring supports 18 popular languages and currencies supported include Euros, Pounds, USD, AUD, CAD, and Yen.
- Utilize multiple merchant accounts for payment processing. No need to obtain your own merchant account, which typically costs 3.5-4%+ of every transaction (card processors routinely advertise rates of about 2%, but check your statements and you’ll see it’s far more because of the surcharges applied to your international transactions which is often an extra 1%, higher rates charged on reward card transactions, corporate purchasing and debit card transactions, and higher priced American Express processing costs, fees for items such as chargebacks, etc.). Many full service e-commerce firms utilize multiple merchant accounts for backup security and the merchant account cost is included in the price of the service. Avoid working to obtain different accounts for different payment methods you want to support, doing technical development to setup and support those payment methods and to support multiple merchant accounts on an ongoing basis (the methods and accounts require periodic servicing due to updates and issues that arise), avoid paying monthly fees to merchant providers, turning over personal financial records, being personally liable for certain bank account funds, etc.
- Accept customer payments through as many methods as possible to maximize sales, including Visa, MasterCard®, Discover®, American Express®, PayPal™, check, and money order. Corporate, educational, and other types of customers who purchase large quantities often require payment to be accepted via purchase order, a method FastSpring supports as well. Increase your revenue by accepting these large-sized orders.
- Gain access to a marketing distribution network and online marketing guidance offered by software marketing gurus.
- Increase revenue through utilization of cross-sells and upsells on order pages which typically increases your average revenue per order by 15-45%.
- Utilize order pages branded with your site’s look to reduce cart abandonment, including shopping cart option.
- Increase revenue through sub-product listings (i.e. drop down menus for add-ons) and data collection throughout fully customizable order pages.
- Ensure your customers’ transactions occur on secure servers on a PCI compliant system that avoids storing customer credit card numbers so that you avoid that serious liability.
- Increase sales with FastSpring’s advanced subscription management and recurring billing support.
- Utilize valuable 3rd party marketing tools like Google Analytics for site traffic analysis, Google Adwords online ad campaign tracking, and affiliate programs such as ShareASale, Commission Junction, etc. for growing affiliate marketing revenues.
- Increase revenue by offering your customers Extended Download Protection or the option to receive your product in physical format for an additional customer charge via an on-demand CD/DVD physical fulfillment network.
- Facilitate communications with your customers through our seamless integration with 3rd party email marketing campaign management providers.
- Optimize your AdWords campaigns with our Google AdWords Expert Audit and Campaign Management.
- Benefit from our SEO Expert Assessment and Consultation.
- Boost your revenue with our Affiliate Program Expert Audit & Campaign Management.
- Benefit from our Online Marketing Expert Audit, Strategy, and Campaign Management.
- Manage third party revenue sharing with our reseller partner management system.
- Convert more traffic into paying customers by testing between and choosing from a selection of different order page and product layouts and offerings.
- Increase revenue by utilizing product discounts, coupons, bundles, volume licenses and other pricing adjustments.
Benefits Specific to Software Publishers
In addition to those listed above, there are numerous unique attributes to software sales and delivery that make it quite advantageous to use a service like FastSpring. Some of those advantages include:
- Launch quickly with FastSpring’s quick setup of the sales process, since our sales process has been designed specifically for software. In many cases, it may take less than an hour to have a fully working sales and delivery process in place.
- Utilize FastSpring’s software delivery expertise with instant web based fulfillment, delivery of download links, customized emails, generation of registration codes, and other items specific to software product sales.
- Benefit from our support staff trained for software product delivery issues.
- Increase software sales with our In-app purchasing via embedded web store SDK for both Mac and Windows products.
- Leverage our software specific marketing services, such as affiliate programs with a large number of existing software affiliates.
- Benefit from our fraud prevention tailored to software sales, leading to lower software fraud rates.
- Increase revenue through access to FastSpring’s software partners, software marketing expertise, and guidance on increasing software sales.
This is a sampling of some of the many benefits to outsourcing e-commerce to a full service e-commerce payment solution like FastSpring. For a complete list of FastSpring’s features and services, please visit: http://www.fastspring.com/features.php
