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.  FastSpring assigns a Dedicated Account Manager to you who provides hands-on help with anything you need which can be quite helpful.  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.

* Get support for delivery issues specific to software products including delivery of download links, customized emails, generation of registration codes, and other items.

* 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) and California’s state sales taxes.

* Save time, hassle, and avoid losing revenue by using a service like FastSpring to minimize the volume of fraudulent sales.  FastSpring’s fraud prevention is tailored to software sales and is highly effective.

* 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 a dozen 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, 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™, JCB, 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.

* 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.

* Utilize valuable 3rd party marketing tools like Google Analytics for site traffic analysis, online ad campaign tracking, and affiliate programs for growing affiliate marketing revenues.

* Increase revenue by offering your customers the option to receive your product in physical format for an additional customer charge via an on-demand CD/DVD physical fulfillment network.

* 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.

This is a sampling of some of the many benefits to outsourcing e-commerce to a full service e-commerce payment solution like FastSpring.

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