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When you sell software online, an important issue in the buying decision of the clients is the consistence and appearance of the website that sells, especially the shopping cart section. This is generated by the customers’ need to feel confident in your online store before they decide to buy something and give their credit card details.

But why is the shopping cart section so important?

Give it a little thought – how many of your conversions came directly from your website and how many from other websites directly in the shopping cart? That’s what we were also thinking :) - given the fact that many purchase leads enter directly into your shopping cart, it must be integrated with the rest of the website - e.g. the buyer should be able to see a “Contact” button, a link to a “Homepage” etc.

The main goal for a customized shopping cart is, of course, getting more conversions. This can be achieved very easily if you have the right tools to do it.

Last Thursday, November 20th, Avangate hosted our first networking event for the software publishing community in Silicone Valley.  All-in-all the event was a success and proved to be a great opportunity for members of the community to meet each other and interact in a social environment.  The Tied House Brewery, in Mountain View, CA served some fine food and drink, something that, and you can trust me on this, is necessary to make any networking event a success!

Our goal was to cross organizational borders and introduce constituents from all sides of the software publishing world outside the constraints of day-to-day business.  We had people from major software publishing and technology firms such as Intuit, Symantec and Phoenix Technologies mixing with service providers such as Acutrack, TrialPay, Nalperion and Uniloc.  We even had a few new friends from Google, Yahoo! and Ernst and Young join us.

Join us for an informal gathering in Mountain View!

If you’ve met with one of the Avangate guys or gals, then you probably know that this year we worked hard. We attended lots of conferences, had presentations, booths and wrote a lot of white papers and other articles. But you should also know that we also like to play hard and relax with our friends and partners.

That’s why I’m happy to invite you at the Casual Drinks with Avangate - Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at the Tied House in Mountain View. It’s the perfect time to come meet the Avangate US team and schmooze with other people from the software business. The event will be hosted by Casey Potenzone, VP Sales, and Daniel Nicolescu, Business Development Manager.

Discovering the fan part of your partners and mingle with software people seems like having a good time to me. Or at least because it’s easier to explain what you do to people that talk the same business language like you do, it should be a relaxed, informal schmooze. Of course I also happen to know that Daniel is an excellent wine expert so it’s always nice to be around him at parties ;)

If it sounds like fun to you too, register now here.

I am writing this article for at least 75% of you, who, according to our tracking tools, are using Firefox to read this blog. The chances are that your Firefox browser is not “naked”, as dressing it up is what makes it such a great and beloved browser around the world.

The best part of it, though, is you can customize it so that it really helps you in your web marketing work. You can add features that help you increase your online social capital or features that will make browsing, web discovering and source code debugging a breeze.

Being part of a department that works with Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, Web Analytics and Usability Consulting, I consider Firefox not just a simple browser, but a customized tool that helps us get things done faster and more accurately. We really rely on it, so here goes a big Thank you to the Firefox developers, wherever you are.

Download free white paper: "Best Practices in Software Affiliate Marketing"

At any time, but especially during recession periods, a software vendor needs the most cost-effective tools that can bring him extra revenue or at least keep the sales volumes constant. He needs to have a good exposure of his brand and his product(s) on the Internet.

Affiliate marketing is one of the ways to go in the software business. The costs for doing such a campaign are low and the results can make the difference.

But how can a vendor attract affiliates that sell software?

Here are a few simple things to do in order to get the most out of an affiliate marketing campaign:

• Having an affiliate sign-up page on the vendor’s website
• Communicating through a dedicated e-mail address for affiliate matters
• Creating customized landing pages on the vendor’s website
• Sending marketing materials to the affiliates
• Being present on affiliate forums and blogs
• Keeping in touch with your affiliates

This is only the beginning. To be truly “affiliate efficient”, a software vendor must continuously monitor the activity of the affiliates and to pay them commissions according to their performance.

We’ve prepared a white paper: “Best Practices in Software Affiliate Marketing” (yes, it is free!) which will help you find out more about attracting affiliates, solving the channel problem and preventing affiliate fraud. We hope you’ll enjoy it and don’t forget to leave us some feedback on it.

Are you as “affiliate efficient” as you would like to be?

On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.

In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.

We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.

The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.