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.

FastSpring’s partners shared some quality time together in a mini-retreat last week. Pictured here from left to right are Dan Engel, CEO; Ryan Dewell, SVP Software Development; Ken White, Chief Customer Service Officer; and Jason Foodman, SVP Corporate Development.

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.

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.

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…”

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.

“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.

FastSpring’s platform, team and clientele continue to grow and to uphold standards of excellence that contribute to our mutual success. We’ve worked hard this year—and we know our clients have too, offering industry-leading products and continually innovating. So let’s take a moment to celebrate!

The title of the Inc. Magazine issue, soon to hit the stands, is “Meet America’s Hottest Entrepreneurial Superstars” (Sept. 2011).

Here’s a bit of background from Jane Berentson, Editor of Inc. Magazine:

The list debuted in 1981 as a ranking of the 100 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. The following year, it expanded to the Inc. 500 and, in 2007, we inaugurated the Inc. 5000. Through each evolution, Inc. has sought to recognize and to celebrate the creativity, dedication, and hard work that entrepreneurs put into building their companies.

The launch of subscription / recurring billing was no afterthought for FastSpring. It was a focused effort to respond to the needs of software businesses adopting a service model—to provide an all-in-one subscription management solution for companies seeking recurring income, longer-term customer relationships, and a highly intuitive, flexible platform to work within.

Subscription Features & Functionality

FastSpring offers the following key pieces of subscription e-commerce functionality:

• Easy product setup: Set up a subscription product, select its billing period, indicate the total number of times a recurring charge will occur, and save the setup.
• Logical and highly customizable notifications: Over time, recurring payments can fail. FastSpring manages the process of following up with the customer after his/her payment fails using up to four customizable steps.
• Subscription-specific APIs: Enjoy easy integration with FastSpring’s subscription-specific APIs. Full documentation with code examples is available on our public support site: support.fastspring.com.
• Detailed reporting: Keep track of your total subscribers, outstanding subscriber charges, and upcoming rebills. Drill down to the subscriber level to see individual activity. Easily export data.
• Support for on-demand (or variable usage) subscriptions: Charge on an as-needed schedule instead of a pre-defined schedule (such as monthly). On-demand subscriptions are especially useful for services which are credit-based, and have variable usage of the product/service over time.
• Support for a wide variety of billing increments: Set up products with weekly, monthly, 90-day, 12-week, 6-month, annual, 2-year and 3-year billing periods. Use proactive pre-billing reminder notifications for longer-period subscriptions as they approach renewal, prompting customers to update credit card information (such as expiration dates) as needed.
• A sophisticated testing environment: Test the whole life cycle of a subscription in SpringBoard’s UI or via our APIs. You can even simulate failures and successful future payments within the test environment.
• Plan changes, plus pro-rating: Easily switch between subscription plans and change quantities in the middle of a billing period. Use the prorating option to capture the monetary differences created by plan changes.
• Trial support, including paid trials: Give your customers the full experience of your service right away for free or at the price point of your choice, then convert them to paying customers at the end of the trial period.
• Support for one-time fees: Use SpringBoard’s powerful Product Options functionality to create product offerings that include multiple components, such as one-time fees or other “bundled” items that make up the final purchase.
• Installment payment plans for “lease to buy” software: For higher-priced software, offer customers the ability to pay over time until they fully own the product.
• Secure, branded customer pages for payment method updating or cancellations: Like your order pages, the customer pages allow for a seamless user experience, personalized and branded to the look and feel of your site.
• Support notes on a per-customer basis: Track support, communications, special requests or any other pertinent interactions with the customer over the lifetime of his/her subscription.
• Combine one-time and subscription sales: Sell subscription-based services to complement your desktop products, such as tutorials and support. Increase revenue and the life-time value (LTV) of your customers by expanding your offerings to include recurring services.

Growing Revenue Through Recurring Billing

Consider the power of a recurring revenue channel for your own business. Are there web-based services your customers may be clamoring for which fit your product portfolio? Have you considered generating extra revenue by offering access to software tutorials, webinars or premium support billed on a recurring basis? Are any of your existing desktop products likely candidates for porting to SaaS offerings? FastSpring is uniquely positioned to allow desktop software publishers to expand by offering subscription services in this manner.

As more and more software is ported to the web or built from the ground up as web applications, comprehensive and intelligent subscription e-commerce becomes increasingly crucial to business success. FastSpring offers a solution that lowers time-to-market & churn, increases revenue & customer lifetime value (LTV), while providing phenomenal support.

Leverage Core FastSpring Features

In addition to all this, FastSpring’s subscription customers inherit the wide range of existing features that our platform, services and support offer. To note just a few that are value-adds to subscription-based businesses as well:

1. Multicurrency – the ability to accept international currency payments and display localized prices in rounded numbers for USD, the Euro, Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar and Yen
2. Localized order pages – in 18 languages that display automatically based on IP location
3. International customer tax collection and management – including support for EU VAT ID validation and exemption for B2B customers
4. PCI compliance: no need to demonstrate it yourself. All transactions are offsite and credit card profiles are stored as encrypted tokens for recurring billing.
5. Cross-sells, upsells and other revenue-enhancing features
6. Powerful discounting options
7. The ability to sign up your customers to MailChimp or Campaign Monitor email subscriber lists right at the point of sale
8. Google Analytics integration for deep metrics on user behavior/conversion on your site and on hosted order pages
9. A wide range of consulting services to help you increase your online revenue, including SEO, SEM, affiliate marketing and more
10. Many more features, all of which can be found on our features page

Find Out More

If you want to discuss FastSpring’s subscription functionality and how to grow your revenue through offerings using recurring billing, please contact us at info@fastspring.com.

We were pleased with the turnout and the response we received. Numerous people told us it made their entire trip to California worthwhile, and we have received a handful of really nice “thank you” notes already as well. In addition to building on our existing relationships with our clients, the event allowed for quite a bit of deal making. We aim to foster partnerships amongst our clients as well as through third-party distribution channel relationships; thus, we brought in a number of large software distribution channel partners for the event.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference showcases the latest innovations and the newest technologies in iOS and Mac OS X. Apple engineers guided attendees through a variety of technology tracks and labs. This year’s keynote, introduced by Steve Jobs, featured the introduction OS X Lion, the iOS 5 Beta, and the introduction of iCloud, Apple’s major new cloud-based service that stores and pushes files to all Apple devices.

We look forward to continue providing e-commerce services to cutting-edge developers working on the Mac platform, and can certainly foresee great innovations coming out of the development community as it tackles the new OS’s many new capabilities (over 250 features have been added). We are honored to work with such innovative companies, and hope to organize many more synergistic networking events (for both Mac and Windows companies) like this one in the near-term future.

» Take a look at our photo gallery of the event

Fantastical enables us to point out some key best practices in e-commerce integration with FastSpring. First of all, the elegance of the website and product branding is carried through to the order page, fully branded to mirror the site and serving to create a seamless experience for buying the product. In other words, we see great brand continuity in the checkout process, a specialty of FastSpring and a factor that consistently lowers cart abandonment.

Secondly, Fantastical makes excellent use of FastSpring’s embedded store (available for both Mac and Windows), allowing the user who has downloaded a trial to quickly and easily purchase the full product without ever leaving the application. Flexibits has done a great job in this integration, making the checkout process and licensing fluid and, again, appropriately branded (FastSpring’s embedded store, like regular order pages, supports full CSS customization).

The product itself is inspiring in its conception and implementation, deploying natural language parsing that allows the user to create events with a minimum of mouse activity. Normally with calendars, one finds oneself clicking on a date, clicking again on times, clicking in the description area and so on. Here, I can start typing something like “massage with colin at 101 state street on may 29 at 3:30″ and see the application respond by filling the event title, location, date and time—with total accuracy. Wow.

There is even a cool animation to the letterforms for the event where individual words fly into place upon typing – moving from the event entry area into the actual event. Usability is maximized and fun thrown into creating personal or business events. Who knew calendars could be this much fun? Creating an event is quick too; it doesn’t have to become a big event of its own.

Fantastical, by leveraging iCal, Entourage and Outlook, doesn’t just create yet another calendar; it provides an inspiring new interface for existing calendars with widespread adoption. It also boasts a native CalDAV implementation, meaning that syncing with MobileMe, Google Calendar and Yahoo! Calendar is built-in.

Fantastical can be found at Flexibits’ site: http://flexibits.com

Fantastical Embedded Store

As you may know, FastSpring supports multicurrency pricing, allowing customers to pay in their own currency – Euro, Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar and Yen. Prices for international customers are displayed using real-time exchange rates. Vendors can also calculate percentage increases to account for market fluctuations using a built-in currency calculator. In a recent release, we’ve added additional exchange rate providers for added accuracy and redundancy, further bullet-proofing this important feature.

For vendors selling e-books through FastSpring, we’ve added built-in support for PDF license stamping, a feature which helps e-book sellers in the vital area of digital rights management. This feature adds to FastSpring’s existing support for e-book DRM via a third-party integration, which includes the ability to disable printing and copying, password protection and more, as you’ll see on our DRM section of the features page.

Additional enhancements from recent releases include:

• Better iPad support, specifically for editable text areas
• The ability to validate coupons against email addresses (for example, coupons can be valid only for addresses ending in .edu)
• Support for the display of order contents in PayPal’s new order summary widget
• The addition of vendors’ main website url for their stores on the printable invoice/receipt
• For backup CDs, customization of the default CD and digital file backup offer phrases

We’ve also added support for custom favicons (.ico files) for individual stores, which increases FastSpring’s already high level of brand consistency in the checkout process.

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

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.”

Jason is a highly-accomplished software entrepreneur, having founded numerous software and e-commerce firms including SwiftCD®, Trexar Technologies (Sold to Allume, then called “Aladdin Systems,” now Smith Micro), MacRadio , Rebate Delivery, and others. Jason has been in the software and e-commerce industries for over 20 years, and has been an early investor and advisor to various tech start-ups, including NextUp, RegSoft®, PetDoc, and BroadTexter.

As Founder and CEO of SwiftCD between 1999-2008, Jason introduced the notion of Backup CDs to the mainstream software industry before selling the company. He built SwiftCD into the largest Backup CD service in the software industry with over 2,500 software clients.

Jason has filed numerous patents, published various articles on software e-commerce, and has been featured in numerous publications, including Fortune, Entrepreneur Magazine and Newsweek. He received a BS in Computer Science from Appalachian State as well as an MS in Computer Science from the University Of North Carolina. In his free time, Jason is an avid boater and 50-ton Master Coast Guard Captain.

“For developers, however, there are quite a few cons to the Mac App Store, when compared to selling on our own. To rattle off a few of these, there appear to be no trials, no paid upgrades, no access to customer information, no coupons, and no ability to ship updates outside of the store. As well, the list of allowable software is quite narrow and the fees (Apple’s 30%) are much higher than developers currently pay to payment processors.”
– Paul Kafasis, RogueAmoeba

The feedback we’ve received about MAS so far is that most developers view it in a similar light to their view of Apple®’s retail store channel: as a new distribution channel that complements their web store and any other existing distribution channels. Most Mac software firms plan to  keep their own web stores open for business indefinitely (rather than giving the reigns over entirely to Apple and closing their own stores). As one developer pointed out on the Macintosh Software Business forum, ”In the scheme of things, the additional work to setup and maintain an online store through a provider like FastSpring is negligible.”

Here is a collection of feedback we’ve seen and heard from Mac publishers and bloggers about why most Mac® software publishers will keep their web stores running as always:

• The 30% owed to Apple. Software publishers want to keep that 20%+ of their revenue going into sales, marketing, and as profits, as opposed to paying it to Apple.
• Product prices will be driven significantly lower than existing web store prices for the same products, especially based on how things have gone on the iPhone® store (i.e. $2.99 apps).  I can charge a price much more commensurate with value for my app via my web store.
• I’d like to do what I can to get high on Apple’s rankings, but I won’t be able to compete with my $19.95 product against all the $1.99 apps that will surely be appearing soon and will in time take over a lot of the most popular app rankings.  99%+ of apps, including so many great ones, will never get high on or stay high on the top rankings, so it’s not a wise business move to have a strategy dependent on being right at the top drive your overall company’s direction.  When the iPhone store launched, I was in the top 30 for a long time, but by 9 months, I was about 125 and dropping and my ranking never got high again thanks to the endless new apps that  launched since the early days.  The same thing will happen on the MAS, those at the top will be bumped far down the list as all the new and cheap apps get introduced.  In fact, on my iPhone the top apps are almost all now games and freeware, leaving out most high quality software products from the top of the charts altogether.
• Most apps will get lost in the shuffle among thousands of other apps, same as on the iPhone. The MAS will not be a primary revenue source, but a new channel to complement existing channels.
• Two key end user benefits of the Mac App Store are easier purchasing and easier licensing, but one doesn’t have to rely on Apple to address those issues. Having to go out to the Web to purchase is an added step customers shouldn’t have to take. In-app purchase is the solution there, and that’s an option offered by independent e-commerce services. Regarding easier licensing, serial numbers are just awful dealing with for everyone. In-app purchase helps here as well, by automatically entering them.
• If Apple continuously fails to update software containing critical security patches to the App Store in a timely fashion, users might be wiser getting their software via a more conventional route – such as (in the case of Opera) a direct download from the vendor’s own website.
• No discounts will be available for large volume, bundle, or educational purchases.
• There is no way to measure ad campaigns. This restriction can throw off metrics, budgeting and calculation of ROI on PPC and other online/offline campaigns.
• The MAS does not provide real-time sales reports.
• Developers are not granted access to user information. Practically, they are stripped of the crucial relationship with customers, which goes beyond one-time purchase. Specifically, they are unable to retain or monetize existing trial users and to provide ongoing communications to customers through mailings, coupons and newsletters.  Don’t give up your relationship with your Mac software customers!
• There are obvious downsides to getting listed alongside competitors and further downsides to being listed alongside $.99+ apps. The MAS puts your products up against countless others, so when a user searches for an app in a particular category they will be comparing it against many similar apps at potentially widely-varying price-points. This is clearly not the case  when a user visits your own website dedicated to your products alone.
• The MAS does not allow full-featured, time-limited free trials. Offering a free trial is particularly critical for apps that cost $10+ since users will most likely want to try your product before they spend the money. Apple itself is encouraging developers to send their users to the software publishers’ own website to download trial versions, and that’s where you can get users to go through your embedded store in-app or your web store, avoiding paying Apple’s 30%.
• The MAS’ terms and conditions do not allow developers to charge for upgrades. This constraint effectively cuts out recurring revenue from committed customers who tend to follow upgrade paths. In addition, bug fixes or incremental version updates take time to appear in the store, which can be frustrating and cause security issues.
• The MAS does not support cross-selling and thereby further cuts down the average order size by cutting off up-selling revenue potential. For many software publishers, cross-sells, up-sells, and cart add-ons make up 35% or more of their average revenue per order.
• There is no recurring billing/subscription support.
• Some Mac developers need to be able to sell to some corporate customers who want to buy using volume licensing, a purchase order method, or have a hard time buying through the MAS.
• Some applications get rejected by Apple due to their highly restrictive requirements. Some key popular and industry-leading Mac apps won’t be available for sale anytime in the near future due to the new requirements. Also, some developers want to be able to introduce features that Apple would not allow.
• Many Mac-focused developers are already weary of Apple’s growing ‘Gated Community’ hold on its ecosystem. The MAS expands the gated community, enclosing an ever-wider portion of this traditionally thriving ecosystem. This trend, while purporting to serve developers, can be seen long-term to actually do them a disservice.
• Selling independently provides protection against MAS policy decisions that could affect a developer’s apps.
• There is no support for older versions, creating a poor customer experience for some customers.  Existing customers may feel left out in the cold, as Apple doesn’t provide a way for users of software registered outside the Mac App Store to integrate with that ecosystem. This means that if your customers already own your product, they’ll need to repurchase it if they want to use future major versions.

Additional benefits of selling outside of the MAS include:

• No app approval process and no API restrictions
• Lower commission rates than Apple
• Bi-weekly or weekly payment options
• Sales of multiple licenses to a single user with multiple computers
• Direct control of customer relationship
• Control over the entire software merchandising order flow process and end-user experience, including pricing, cross-sells, up-sells, discounts, coupons, etc.
• Ability to convert trial and demo users into full users

“The lesson I’m drawing from this: the MAS is just another sales channel and having an app there does not relieve you of your obligations to market it properly… I realize that a few apps have caught fire in the MAS, and congratulations to those developers! For them the App Store is a home run and I am happy for their success. But for most of us, I suspect, the App Store will not prove a game-changer.”

– Kevin Walser, Code By Kevin [in Macintosh Software Business forum]

For further reading, you can check out these articles:

“The Mac App Store isn’t for today’s Mac developers”
http://www.marco.org/1432156914

“Mac App Store ‘disruptive,’ say experts”
http://www.macworld.com/article/155090/2010/10/mac_app_store.html

“Quick Thoughts on the Mac App Store”
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2010/10/20/quick-thoughts-on-the-mac-app-store/

“The Mac App Store: The devil will be in the details”
http://www.macworld.com/article/155120/2010/10/mac_app_store_devil_in_the_de tails.html

“Developers have hopes, questions for Mac App Store”
http://www.macworld.com/article/155061/2010/10/developers_mac_app_store.html

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.

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!

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.

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.