I am happy to announce a great update @Avangate: we’ve just launched network cross-selling that allows Avangate software vendors to sell each other’s products, to increase revenues and gain access to extra niches and new or larger markets.

In just a few words, network cross-selling means that all software publishers part of the Avangate network can offer other vendors’ products as cross selling options in their very own shopping cart and get a commission for the sale.

Here’s how a shopping cart would look like:

There are plenty of benefits this new feature brings:

You can offer your products to be sold by other vendors in the network:

• You practically have access to extremely targeted “affiliates” that fully understand your business and target similar markets, which means more exposure to the right audience;
• You get more sales resulting in extra revenue for you;
• You can associate your brand with other strong brands on the market.

You can sell other vendor’s products in your cart:

• You can gain extra commissions from selling other software with minimum input. The best part is that you may get paid even if the customer is abandoning the shopping cart but is purchasing the product(s) later (within 120 days);
• Your clients are happy when they get complementary software products at discounted prices.

Either way, remember that you have control over the relationships with other vendors – you choose the vendors you want to work with plus you can negotiate commissions and special network discounts on a one-to-one basis if this is what you want.

This update is part of the Avangate “Winter Release”, whose aim is to offer all software vendors selling through Avangate the means to get a higher return on their marketing efforts, without extra investments.

What else? We have various enhancements to the lead management module (meant to help vendors improve conversion rates with customized follow-up campaigns and improved reporting) and to pricing options (pricing setup is straightforward for even the most complex software licensing schemes).

Your feedback is very important and we rely on it to further improve and expand our software distribution solution, so please do comment with any thoughts or questions you may have about this update or any other features you want to use this year.

We identified via our Support center that some people were asking about an unknown “charge” in their Paypal from Avangate. It seems they received a deceitful email trying to trick them into giving away their PayPal information.

The email came from a yahoo.com address acting as the “Fraud Department” of PayPal and contained a false notification that Avangate BV charged their accounts and a link “Click HERE TO REFUND“, leading them to a forged to look like PayPal website.

Phishing Attempt PayPal / Avangate BV

The fake website has already been banned (reported for web forgery).

When you receive PayPal phishing attempt you can report it to spoof@paypal.com and also delete it from your inbox.

To make sure you are never the victim of a phishing attack, always check the URL and the security elements like HTTPS before entering login information to any website.

If you want to further prepare for coping with phishing emails, we recommend reading on the PayPal website about ways to recognize fake emails.

Please comment below if you need more details or advice on this issue.

Here we are, in the end of 2009, patiently waiting for the New Year party and thinking about 2009, about the good and the bad and the next year :). We are all proud to have been able to enrich our software selling platforms with plenty of features, basically meant to help more vendors reach more clients.

And we were very happy to be rated as top eCommerce provider by our clients, in the survey made by Andy Brice.

We are particularly happy with the progress made with the Avangate shopping cart’s conversion rates. Using advanced analytics applications such as Omniture and extensive A/B testing, we obtained control over every tiny detail of the shopping cart – and this flexibility translated into higher conversion rates.

It’s got to be the single-most asked question in the software business world. Beginning startups – both rolling in VC hay and bootstrapping – ask it. Existing software companies, as they get whacked around by a changing market (Mobile, where’d that come from?) and changing user expectations (You mean, I don’t just run in my browser?) ask it. The polite form of the question is, “How do I/we define what product to create?“. What they’re really saying is, how the hell do we invent (or re-invent) a software product that will sell like mad before we go broke like in out of business?

The traditional way to cope with this is,

1. Founder has brilliant idea,
2. Team works like slaves to bring it to market before anyone else,
3. Startup gets funded by VCs whom Founder sells idea to and lo and behold!,
4. the Software arrives at Market, to adoration and sales.

Except for the other 9 out of 10 startups whose software arrives to a vast collective yawn and are dead meat in 3 months.

When William Gibson said “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet“, he could have been talking about how Google is reinventing its search results right now and incidentally altering the likelihood your software company will be found in 2010 Q1 by prospective customers worldwide.

There are three big changes confirmed and now being rolled out:

1. Adding real time search results to your Google results,
2. personalizing those results like never before and
3. giving every Google user a sidebar of options controlling the freshness of their results.

And there’s two other changes – Page Preview in results and the Wonder Wheel (no, I didn’t make this up) – that are not confirmed, but are also getting rolled out piecemeal at least in the United States and are strong bets for next quarter worldwide.

So you’ve tried endlessly tweaking your AdWords, starting a blog and even begun Twittering this year, and you’re still on the second or worse page of Google results for the keywords that matter most. How are you going to change this for 2010? Consider creating and maintaining a microsite.

A microsite (at least for the length of this post) isn’t a brochure-like static page about your product, or a shady way to generate inbound links. In fact, it only just touches your product and does everyone in your market a valuable service. A microsite is a way to monetize for reputation/attention a chunk of all that expertise you’ve built up, in the same way your software monetizes that expertise for money.

How would you like to be able to say this?

“Just a week after launching the sites they got to the first page of Google results for the main keywords… the .NET microsite ranks #1 for .NET logging as of today“.