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FastSpring SpringBoard™ Services & Features

 

Multiple Customer Payment Methods Accepted, Plus Manual Order Processing

Accept customer payments through Visa, Mastercard®, American Express®, Discover®, PayPal™, check, money order, and purchase order. Payments are accepted in five major currencies in addition to the US Dollar.  FastSpring enables you to charge credit cards of customers or reseller partners. Create a custom charge and use FastSpring's Order Creator to generate a unique payment URL that you can send the customer or reseller where they'll be able to fill in their order details and be charged. Some customers or resellers are reluctant to provide you with payment details such as their credit card number, but through this method they'll enter their own order details.

Dedicated Account Manager & Rapid-Response Customer Service

While FastSpring's system is incredibly easy-to-use and to self-service for those who prefer working on their own, you will be assigned a senior-level, Dedicated Account Manager who will work one-on-one with you on your store to the extent you desire. Your Account Manager can setup your store for you, answer your ongoing questions, and be your point of contact regarding any issues whatsoever. Servicing your needs is priority #1 for your Dedicated Account Manager at all times.

The quality of service provided by other commerce providers is unacceptable. With FastSpring, you and your customers will always receive a response from your Dedicated Account Manager within 12 hours or less (even on most weekends and during off hours), though often within just 1-2 hours. And your customers will get more prompt and complete responses than they're used to, which they'll truly appreciate.  » More information

Multi-Currency & Translated Order Pages

Increase international sales by enabling your customers to pay for your products in their own currency, such as Euro, Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, and Yen. Avoid customers being charged extra fees for currency conversion on their credit card statements. Let customers see your product's pricing displayed in a simple, rounded number they are used to such as 20.00 Euros instead of 19.53 Euros, as an example.

FastSpring uses IP address detection combined with web browser locale to automatically detect each customer's country, language, and currency preferences. You can set your own foreign currency prices, and for any currencies you do not specify pricing for the prices will be displayed to customers using real-time foreign exchange rates. Currently supported languages include Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish.
» View Currency / Translation Example

Branded, Fully-Customized Order Pages

Offer a seamless user experience and reduce your cart abandonment rate. Your customers will not feel as though they have left your web site when they arrive on your order page because the order page will blend in with the look-and-feel of the other pages that comprise your site.

Some commerce providers provide just a series of default visual styles which may or may not be able to be slightly customized. FastSpring supports full customization of its order pages. Additionally, the FastSpring order page design setup is designer-friendly – a web designer can create the HTML and CSS as he or she normally would locally, then upload it to FastSpring. FastSpring can usually whip up a branded order page for you within a few hours – submit a request to . There is no charge to you; this customization is included in the service.

Cross-Sell Optimization

Increase your revenue per order by cross-selling your own or a 3rd party's products anytime your customer adds one of your products to his/her cart.

Test different cross-sell products and scenarios to determine the optimal products to cross-sell with each of your products. Display cross-sell products in a variety of locations to find the optimal combination of product exposure versus order flow to maximize your order page revenue. Supported cross-sell locations include product detail page, interstitial/dedicated page, shopping cart, or after customer information has been collected.
» View Cross-Sell Optimization Diagram

Coupons, License Types & Price Testing

Customize and test product prices. Provide volume discounts for educational, corporate, and other large purchase groups. Select from standard options, including dollar value-based discounts, percentage-based discounts, and coupon codes. Set the effective start and end dates. Offer discount coupons as purchase incentives, or even zero-cost order coupon codes for special situations such as not-for-resale product giveaways, or codes for journalists, reviewers and partners. Utilize multiple types of software licenses, including site, academic, and personal licenses. Create custom pricing calculations for advanced scenarios.

Conduct price testing to determine the optimal pricing for your products. For example, you may determine that you earn 20% more revenue by charging $50.00 for a product instead of the $30.00 you had assumed was the appropriate product price. Rather than relying on past experiences or intuition, let the data tell you your optimal price points. Test various prices against one another, determine how price sensitive your customers are to a particular product, and increase your revenue.
» View Discount Coupon Creation Screenshot

Online Advertising Tracking & Google™ Analytics Support

Track your pay-per-click search engine campaigns, email marketing, banner ads, affiliate partners, and other web-based advertising.

You can use our integration with Google Analytics to view detailed web site reports to help you understand exactly where your site visitors and paying customers are coming from, their demographics, traffic trends and more.

You can even use the e-commerce tracking capabilities of Google Analytics to gain detailed insights into your revenue, sales trends and product performance. Set up Google Analytics on your website to enable cross-domain tracking, effectively tying traffic statistics from your main website and your FastSpring store together to form a complete metrics picture.

Visual Sales Reports

Enjoy graphical reports dynamically-generated on-the-fly. View your sales trend over a period of time, your sales and returns by product, detailed sales data, sales by country, and more. Data can also be exported in CSV format for use in other programs like Excel.
»  View Reporting Screenshots Slideshow2345678

International Customer Tax Collection & Management

Avoid tax compliance issues by state or country by having 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, and more.  Support for real-time VAT ID validation and exemption for B2B customers.

Flexible Order Page Setups Including Shopping Cart Option

Many providers force you to take one direction or the other. FastSpring offers the flexibility to setup a single order page for a given product, with complete customization of options/choices available to customers. Or you may choose to use a shopping cart page,hosted on your site or on a FastSpring Store page.Choose from FastSpring's selection of BuyNow buttons here or use your own. You can view samples of different types of order pages here:

Google AdWords Expert Audit & Campaign Management

We will review your existing AdWords campaign to specify how you can increase your Google profits. Google Adwords Expert Audit is available to all FastSpring clients for no additional charge upon request, another added benefit to our full service offering. For ongoing Pay-per-click (PPC) management after the audit, the fee is 10% of the amount you spend on your search advertising or, in some instances, we will manage your PPC account on a performance-only basis and forego all fees.Current PPC clients include Microsoft, Taleo, oDesk, RazorGator, PopCap, and DemandBase. Interested vendors should email us directly to request a Google Adwords Expert Audit.  » Click to learn more

SEO Audit & Actionable Consultation

Upon request, we will provide an initial assessment of your web site, products, and the SEO opportunity available to you to identify potential for new revenue streams via organic search engine traffic. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit is available to all FastSpring clients for no additional charge.

The initial assessment targets up to 10 popular search terms Google users are searching for when they look for your product or service online. Using those keywords, our experts will recommend a course of action to help you gain more traffic and sales from organic search. Using analytics to track traffic, conversions, sales and average order value related to targeted search terms, you can estimate the potential ROI from increased rankings per keyword to assess whether or not further SEO assistance is right for your situation.  » Click to learn more

Affiliate Program Expert Audit & Campaign Management

Whether you have your own affiliate program or you use an external affiliate system such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, or countless others, we will review your program and outline how your affiliate revenue can be increased. This service, available upon request, is included as part of being a FastSpring client.

Our leading expert began his affiliate career at Commission Junction in 1999 before managing programs for a number of software companies, and is a highly respected expert in the affiliate marketing industry.  » Click to learn more

Support for Complex Product Configuration Scenarios & Surveys

FastSpring’s free-form structure enables pricing and component choices to be highly configurable. Add or remove various fields, forms, radio buttons, drop-down menus, checkboxes, and more (these options can generally be added in about five minutes). Create the optimal order page flow through refined customization. Survey customers as they complete a purchase to gain valuable insights into who your customers are, where they learned about your products, what they use your products for, etc.

• View Sample Configuration Page Slideshow
  Same as Order Page Slideshow abovePage 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7

Free, Secure Download File Hosting

FastSpring will host your downloadable files for you at no extra charge, saving you support and bandwidth expense. Enjoy the benefits of a fast, reliable, and secure global file distribution network utilizing Amazon.com's S3 bandwidth service.  Ensure your buyers have a smooth and trouble-free download experience which includes the option to manage the number of times customers can re-download.
» View Product Upload Screenshot

Reseller Partner Management

Through FastSpring's SplitPay feature, you can easily track and manage online and offline B2B/B2C resellers and various other partners. Track your partners' sales by product and view detailed sales reports. Each 3rd party partner is setup as a Payee in our system where they get a login to review their account, add their payment details, etc. Funds are distributed to each partner automatically for you based on the products your partners sell and their designated split of revenue, profit, or royalty share. Prices, discounts, and cross-sells can be partner-specific, and each partner can have its own store look and feel.

Software Marketing & Distribution

FastSpring brings a wealth of experience in software marketing to its clients. Its founding team has generated over $40 million in product revenue through software marketing, having run Internet marketing for highly-successful software companies and products, including Google™, Picasa™, GoToMyPC^®, Morpheus, and NextUp. FastSpring clients are regularly provided valuable suggestions for trying new revenue-producing software distribution channels. FastSpring’s experience covers all forms of software marketing, from web-based ads to radio, direct mail, and TV-based software promotion, and the members of its team are more than happy to provide guidance to clients when they ask.

Unlike some other commerce providers, FastSpring does not, however, want to lure clients by leading them to believe that using FastSpring will result in overnight marketing fortunes. Simply, some of our marketing channel recommendations and partners will prove to be solid revenue producers for some FastSpring clients, while less so for others. FastSpring believes in under-promising and over-delivering. Some commerce providers have built a reputation for over-promising to initially lure clients, only to under-deliver on actual product, service, and marketing results. We have been those clients ourselves in the past, and it has led to a very different perspective across the board at FastSpring.

Instant Web-Based Fulfillment

Instead of your customers having to rely on an email coming into their inbox after they purchase, they'll be provided with the product info (downloadable file, license code, etc.) instantly after they complete their purchase, right on the post-purchase confirmation page. In this era of spam and email filter problems, you can't afford to require your customers to rely solely on email-based fulfillment. By providing this instant gratification to your customers, you will increase customer satisfaction while cutting down on support volume.

Customers will no longer need to check their email program; they will remain on your site after purchasing, potentially exploring an additional purchase. Eliminate emails from upset or angry customers who need to start using your product instantly but who can't afford to wait for a few minutes as they wonder whether they will in fact receive an email. No more customers who complain they never received an email from you for one reason or another and are quite dissatisfied because they haven’t been able to use the product they paid for. You will reap the benefits of the improved level of customer satisfaction. In addition, you can customize the content your customers will see on the order confirmation page in case you want to communicate something specific after they complete their initial purchase.

Intuitive, Fast & Clean User Interface

Enjoy the fast-loading SpringBoard user interface. Instead of the one or two words that might appear in a toolbar or menu in a typical UI, the FastSpring interface is task-based in the sense that you see tasks that you want to complete and those tasks are phrased using natural language. As you step into tasks, new tasks are revealed contextually, like the layers of an onion. At any point in time, you can always return to a previous layer. You can see our interface in action through our product tour here.

Mail-In Rebate Promotions

Increase your profits significantly by offering a mail-in rebate to your customers to lower your product price, in order to increase the number of units you sell without sacrificing revenue per order and/or instead of giving out coupons in your promotions. Rebate checks in 2008 totaled over $6 billion; it’s a hugely successful and popular merchandising tool. This is the first online-based rebate service of its kind, and it is not available through any other e-commerce service!  Rebates have proven to boost sales and profits in the offline world, but to date they were difficult or impossible to implement online because the online customer base is truly global and the logistics were too much of an obstacle…until now!

While some rebate companies try to disqualify consumers, hold consumers’ money for a long time for no other reason than the float, or send the consumer something other than what you promise them, we take the exact opposite approach and make the experience fast and easy for the consumer so that they are kept fully satisfied at all times. Since the rebate form is simple and the payment is done quickly and efficiently, it’s a positive experience for both you and your customer.  » Click to learn more

Multiple Product Delivery Options

FastSpring provides support for list-based registration code selection, PHP registration code generators, the ability to access a remote server and retrieve a customer’s registration information, as well as secure/time-limited file downloads. You can fully customize the html (view html email sample) or plain text email message sent to customers after they purchase, and optionally include delivery information on the web receipt.

FastSpring supports Software Passport and other code generation products, including AquaticPrime, a 3rd party license generation framework using RSA encryption. Additionally, FastSpring supports dynamic file-based licenses; using a MIME 1.0 format, file-based licenses may be created (XML, JPG, etc.). Generated license files are downloadable for a limited time period from a secure URL. 
» View Fulfillment Actions Screenshot

Real-Time, Appropriate Purchase Fraud Protection

FastSpring protects your store against fraud by automatically analyzing each new order prior to each transaction occurring, seeking inconsistencies and patterns worthy of further analysis. Unlike at some other commerce providers, at FastSpring fraud checks are real-time which means you avoid upsetting customers and losing sales because there are no automated phone calls to your customers' homes to verify purchases and no lengthy delays due to manual fraud checks, which often place a portion of your orders on hold, leading to incomplete orders.  Some FastSpring clients have reported sales increases of 10-20% after switching to FastSpring just as a result of FastSpring processing a larger percentage of their prospective orders. And to protect against security compromises, FastSpring never stores your customers' credit card numbers. We are PCI compliant, so you can rest easy knowing our systems are regularly audited for store and site security for added protection.

Flexible Client Payment Options

You have the option to be paid by FastSpring through check, direct deposit, PayPal™, wire (for payments outside the U.S.), or the FastSpring PrePaid MasterCard via Payoneer. Receive your payment every two weeks.

Chargeback & Partial Refund Management

Save money on chargeback fees. As part of the FastSpring service, we fight chargebacks on your behalf and if we lose, we pay the chargeback fee for you (provided you have a normal chargeback rate), which is often as high as a $40.00 fee per chargeback. Issue full or partial refunds to customers at will.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Digital Rights Management enables you to securely offer your products on a free trial or sale basis while protecting your intellectual property, avoiding pirated sales and maximizing your revenue. Through its partners, FastSpring offers you the choice of using the 3rd party DRM solution you prefer.  You will protect your products and code against software cracking, piracy, and reverse engineering. Control user activations, define how frequently a serial number/activation code can be used, and configure the features you'd like to enable/disable during free trials.

Find out how much you can increase your trial-to-sale conversion rate by testing different trial setups (i.e. 15-day, 30-day, feature usage-based trial expiration). You may be able to increase your revenue by 10-30% or more simply by finding a more optimal trial expiration scenario, but you need to test the difference to know the revenue impact. At FastSpring, we don't lock you in – if you have a DRM solution you particularly like, let us know via email and we can usually support its implementation. An added DRM fee may apply.

Software Backup CD & Extended Download Support

Control whether or not you offer your customers CD or file backup services. Earn more revenue per order through the flexibility of setting your own retail price for both options. Test the optimal price point. Retain a substantial portion of the revenue earned by offering complementary services.

Like other providers, FastSpring offers a painless method to sell and profit from backup CDs. But for those clients who wish to have more advanced CD or DVD shipments, including custom packaging and contents, FastSpring offers tight integration with its CD partner to automatically trigger shipment of your customized CD products.

Visually-Appealing, Search Engine-Friendly Order Page URLs

Instead of your order page url containing numerous difficult-to-remember and visually-unfriendly characters (i.e. ?, =,.cgi, .jsp., 1234), your FastSpring order page url will be simple, user-friendly and search engine optimized: http://sites.fastspring.com/[company name]/product/[product name]

Paste your url into emails, newsletters, and in other locations. Make it easy for your customers to view, click, and forward your order page, as well as for search engines to index, which can result in increased site traffic.

Multi-Store Management, Plus Usage Tracking & Unique Logins

Run multiple web stores within a single account, each with a completely different look and feel.  Take advantage of this feature to focus on niche areas of your product range, increasing your conversions by targeting a more tightly defined audience with specific products of interest.  And no matter how large or small your company, usage tracking and multiple logins provides accountability for actions occurring in the FastSpring UI. For example, if someone disables a product or issues a refund, FastSpring automatically tracks who made the change and when.

Pre-Launch Testing Environment

Gain full control over the "status" of items that comprise your store. Safely test product order forms, new pricing, and offers before customers see them live, avoiding potential revenue loss or store display errors and optimizing the page setup. FastSpring's testing environment enables you to gradually work on the setup of various items, to preview as you go, and to revisit previously created setups.

RegNow® and RegSoft® are registered trademarks of Digital River, Inc. | Google™, Google AdWords™ and Picasa™ are registered trademarks of Google, Inc. | Yahoo™ is a registered trademark of Yahoo!, Inc. | Amazon Web Services™ is a registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. | GoToMyPC® is a registered trademark of Citrix Online. | PayPal™ is a registered trademark of eBay Company. | American Express® is a registered trademark of American Express Company. | Mastercard® is a registered trademark of MasterCard. | Discover® is a registered trademark of Discover Bank. | Rebate Delivery™ is a registered trademark of Rebate Delivery, LLC.

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