Today’s Tough Requirements

eCommerce is quickly becoming the mainstream – regardless of the type of goods or services you are selling.  For digital goods and software in particular, eCommerce is quickly becoming mission critical. Today’s consumers and businesses alike require a faster, more convenient way to access and purchase digital goods anytime, anyplace, on any device.  Agile commerce will soon be considered a “must” rather than a “nice to have.”

This means that software and digital goods vendors face the challenge of managing downloads and subscription-based access, advanced licensing requirements, product security/ DRM, plus managing the customer experience across the product lifecycle, channels and devices. The rapid rise of subscription-based products and SaaS only serves to amplify this need (SaaS sales are forecasted to reach around $48BN in 2014 from $17BN in 2010).

To leverage the opportunities, as well as to stay relevant in the face of increasing competition, eCommerce professionals are also looking to expand to new markets and geographies, embrace new revenue and licensing models, multiply their sales efforts through affiliates and other channels, optimize online campaigns and buying processes … and the list goes on.  Just to expand to new geographies alone brings its own set of challenges: local payment methods, ordering interface languages, shopper support (local numbers, languages), billing currencies, taxation, etc. All of these require business intelligence, expertise, industry insights and additional services to support internal teams.

How Are You Benchmarking Your eCommerce Efforts?

Is your in-house solution or ecommerce provider offering the needed flexibility and broad palette of capabilities?  Want to try something new or simply to benchmark your current eCommerce platform?  Do you need flexibility in terms of adopting new business models or ways to get to market, including questions like being the merchant of record, service provider, or both?

Evaluating solutions when you have multifaceted requirements is a daunting task. Not to worry, help is at hand.  Forrester Research Inc. recently released their report, “Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011”, highlighting providers that are changing the game in terms of how digital goods are taken to market, bought and used.

Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011

The Forrester report takes a look at the key solutions available today and lays out simple steps for selecting the digital commerce provider that is right for you

The report recommends:

• Focus on the unique needs of your vertical
• Identify future-state business models
• Beware of the pitfalls of outsourcing operations functions
• Consider niche solutions where appropriate
• Focus on building a digital relationship with your customers
• Use Forrester’s scenario-based technology evaluation process (STEP) to ensure your business and customer goals are met

Core to their recommendation is that software and other digital goods vendors look at their long-term digital commerce strategy, and select eCommerce vendors that have the flexibility and scalability to meet their rapidly evolving needs in this dynamic digital goods marketplace.

Get Your Complimentary Report Now

Avangate is offering the “Market Overview: Digital Commerce Solutions 2011”report complimentary to software, SaaS and digital goods vendors.  You can download the report here and feel free to comment below on what you see as key elements of an ecommerce solution that can take you forward in 2012 and beyond.


2011 – A year of tremendous expansion in how we serve our Software and SaaS customers

When I end a year, I like to take a moment to step back and appreciate what we accomplished.  2011 has been an incredibly exciting year for Avangate.

We launched our new SkyCommerce Suite, expanded our overall service with close to 1.000 new features and enhancements, delivered new marketing and optimization services, and extended our global presence with new team members and offices, including our new North American headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.  All of this with the aim of helping our customers sell more software through any channel and any model.

It is not too surprising that the software market continues to grow as software plays an increasingly important role in our world (see Andresseen’s view on how “Software is Eating the World“).  More interestingly is the massive shift in how software is being distributed and sold.   The market size of ESD and SaaS will grow from $45Bln to over $120Bln by 2014.  The 3TS Cisco Growth Fund recognized this opportunity with a $6 million investment in Avangate in March of this year, accelerating our growth and strengthening our global presence.

We’ve been honored to serve this market – we participated in, sponsored or organized over fourteen events this year to network, share ideas, and help our customers grow their businesses.  We now have over 2,000 clients, from some of the largest vendors of consumer software titles, such as Bitdefender and Kaspersky, to SaaS vendors including Terapeak and TeamLab.

In addition, our affiliate network has grown to over 27,000 software members – Majorgeeks, Siliconaction.com.br and TopTenServices.net are three power affiliates that joined in 2011.  I’m incredibly proud of the Avangate team for continuing to deliver a mature platform with the scale and flexibility to serve shareware, mid-market, and enterprise software and SaaS companies.  What’s more, we are honored to be recognized in Forrester’s recent report on Solutions For Digital Commerce.

2012 – Prediction, Cloudy with a Chance of Significant Growth

The cloud is not a new concept, but we see this trend accelerating to dominate future initiatives (8 out of 10 new software start-ups are SaaS). The software market will only continue to be driven and disrupted by the rise of the cloud.

What does this boil down to? I particularly liked a blog post by Louis Columbus talking about “stripping away the hype by asking how these technologies [analytics, big data and cloud computing] contribute to excellent customer experiences and greater customer engagement.  Those are the real catalysts of market growth and the greatest disruptive forces at work in enterprise software today.”

While there are many predictions for 2012 (many articles are mentioning growth for next year which is good news – here’s one example about the antivirus sub-vertical; and also check out this Boxing Day treat by Ray Wang), let us spotlight one that is specifically apt for software companies: the transition from systems of transaction to systems of engagements and experience.

Software: engagement across the lifecycle

We feel this is important and has many implications for a software company. As many ISVs transition from perpetual to pay-as-you-go models such as freemium, rental, or subscription, they need to also experiment with new partners and affiliates and manage sales worldwide through any channel, online and offline.  The challenge is to do this while providing a flexible and frictionless customer experience across the software lifecycle. We have focused on this in 2011 with our integrated SkyCommerce solution and are continuing this focus into 2012.

Software companies need to have the platform to effectively engage and create the right experiences for their customers and need to be able to do it in a way that complements, and not alienates, the resellers which still make up over 50% of software sales today.

Likewise, software resellers and distributors need to be able to take advantage of these industry shifts, continue to increasingly migrate their businesses online and focus on emerging trends, such as aggregating cloud services.

Meet with us

Stay tuned for new and exciting things we’ve planned for 2012. To start with, meet the team at the first industry event we’re attending next year: Affiliate Summit West, January 8-10, Las Vegas, USA.

Happy 2012 and best wishes from all of us here at Avangate!

P.S. Your point of view for 2012?

We would love to hear what you think are some of the key trends that will drive your sales in 2012. We will continue to build upon these issues into the New Year on this blog and look forward to continuing the conversation!

Indirect sales channels have always been attractive to companies seeking to augment their sales force, increase market share, remain competitive, and keep in-house employees focused on product development. The traditional downside was loss of insight into customers, fractured pipelines, missed opportunities, diluted branding, and market share cannibalism.

Contemporary technologies and best practices now allow companies to manage not only their partner relationships but partner operations as well, supporting them with proven go-to-market strategies that increase lead-to-win ratios. Will this technology remove the limitations on successful partner relationships? If so, how quickly will each side be willing to adopt?

To find answers to these questions and see how your experiences in partner relationship management and adoption of best practices and technologies compare with those of your peers, read on.

Avangate has partnered with Aberdeen Group, who is conducting a study on “Partner Relationship Management: Channeling Better Sales Results”.  This study will provide recommendations for channel sales managers and partners to work together to achieve higher top-line revenue and greater market share.

To thank you for taking 15-20 minutes to answer this survey, Aberdeen will provide you with a complimentary copy of the final report, which is expected to be available after February 29th, 2012. Here is the link to the survey: www.aberdeen.com/survey/0403-Avangate/

Do not worry, individual responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate.

Both 2010 and 2011 have been called Year of Conversion Rate Optimization. And there certainly isn’t any mistake in that, given the burst of both knowledge and tools out there on the topic. And the best part of it is that most online businesses now have access to all they need to increase their sales, newsletter subscribers, followers etc. (and no more excuses if they don’t).

When it comes to selling software online, conversion rate is probably the metric with the highest impact on sales. So, to get you started I want to share with you  a list of 5 tools that I have tested both with the Avangate team, as well as during my recent period as software vendor.

Landing Page Platform: Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page platform that makes creating, publishing and optimizing of landing pages really easy. It’s a great tool for marketing departments as they can roll out landing page after landing page without help from the IT department.

Landing pages often prove decisive when it comes to optimize conversion rates and sales. Different segments of your traffic have different expectations or needs from your website. Greeting each segment of traffic with a specific landing page for their needs can only help that segment of traffic reach the goal faster and in greater numbers. In other words: give a user what he is looking for and he will take it.

Besides the product, the Unbounce blog is a great resource for starting with landing page optimization.

Remote User Testing: Verify

Verify is a great set of remote user testing tools to help you determine how well a design will perform, before publishing it on your website. The tools will make it easy for you to decide what to keep in a design and what to take out or what to change in order to make sure the design will actually increase conversions on your website.

When developing consumer driven products, feedback is crucial. Getting feedback before launching a new page or feature can prove to be a gold mine by not wasting developing resources on things you don’t know if will work or not.

Email Marketing: PadiAct

(Disclaimer: I am co-founder of the company)

PadiAct is a neat tool that helps you optimize your email subscription rate. When it comes to increase the number of your email subscribers, there aren’t many methods out there. One method is to ask users to give their email address when they download your software. Jason Cohen shared some tips on how to ask for user information before the trial starts in his 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases. But this method can also be seen as blackmailing: you give me your email address, I give you a trial – definitely not permission marketing.

This tool allows you to define a segment of traffic whom to ask, in a friendly manner, to subscribe to your newsletter.  Here is an example you could start with: all new visitors that have already downloaded your product. You accomplish 2 things by using targeting to increase subscription lists:

• you don’t interrupt users already within a conversion funnel (downloads, sales);
• you collect good quality email addresses from users that didn’t convert so you get a second chance with them.

A/B Testing: Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool. These days you can’t really talk about increasing conversion rates and sales without talking about A/B and multivariate testing. There are many tools out there to help put in place a testing strategy, but Visual Website Optimizer makes it so much easier. No IT departments or programming skills needed to get started.

Another cool thing about Visual Website Optimizer is their blog with tons of great info and case studies on A/B testing. Now there’s no excuse for not testing.

For shopping cart testing, you can of course use the A/B testing module from Avangate platform. If you never made a test – share with us your ideas about increasing your shopping cart conversion rates and the most creative ones may be tested in your Avangate account.

User Feedback: KISSinsights

KISSinsights gives your customers a way to tell you what they need. It’s an user feedback platform, really easy to integrate on any website. The best thing about it is that it’s contextual. You can ask your users on your pricing page if there is anything they don’t understand about the pricing or you can ask them on your blog if there is anything else they would like you to write about.

What we love most about KISSinsights it’s that it is not intrusive. After starting collecting feedback with it, most users get the “Aha” moment which usually leads to ideas of better optimizing the website, therefore increasing conversion rate and in the end, sales.

See it in action on this blog and on our website. While you are at it, let us know what topics you would like us to cover more. :)

How will you increase conversion rate in 2011?

In the end it all comes up to provide better experiences to your online visitors in directing them towards the conversion point. What are you plans for improving your conversion rate in 2011?

Shanghai, here we come! And it should be both business and pleasure, since this is one of the most fascinating cities in China.

Alexandra, Adriana, Florentina and Andy will welcome all of you software professionals at the conference. If you want to meet software experts, develop new business partnerships or just schmooze with key people from software & eCommerce industry, then don’t plan anything on Saturday, December 4th and join us in the beautiful Everbright International Hotel.

We’re going to talk about selling software in Europe and the US and see what the trends are for 2011. Also, speaking of international sales, there will also be an interactive panel where DVDFab and WinXDVD will share their best practices on this subject.

On top of this, you will learn how to optimize your conversion rate via practical tips from our experts.

And if you don’t know the Avangate platform and what it can do – don’t worry. We’ll have a live solution demo over there.

So, we’re looking forward to meeting and chatting to you there! See you in Shanghai!

Like every beginning of November since 2006, you have the chance to meet us at the ESWC (European Software conference). This time, on the 6th and 7th of Nov (this weekend!), in wonderful Vienna.

Avangate is the Premiere Sponsor as we have been every year and we are proud to take part in the event, meet so many people passionate about software and exchange ideas.
As we did at ISDEF, we want to celebrate (again) our 5th anniversary. So prepare for toasting because on Saturday evening at the Epsilon Awards Ceremony the drinks are on us. ;)