Software Industry Conference - Avangate bears

As you probably know, Avangate attended, sponsored and presented at the 19th edition of  SIC for the fourth time this year. I was there with my colleagues Casey and Adriana, proudly representing Avangate by sharing knowledge on generating more e-sales,  mastercard-class mints and the classic Avangate bears and red caps :).

I know that many of you out there wanted to attend SIC this year and because of some reasons (not only generated by the economy situation I hope!), you couldn’t, I will share some pictures with you, as well as thoughts noted down after  SIC.

ReadWriteWeb - Web technology blog

Bob Walsh’s new book, “The Web Startup Success Guide” has just been officially launched on Amazon. As promised in my previous post, here is another example of what you’ll find in his book after purchase. It’s a cool interview he made with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer at  ReadWriteWeb, who gives advice to tech startups on approaching him with newsworthy information. Hope you’ll find it useful as well, here’s the interview:

Bob: What’s the right way for startups to approach you who want you to write about them? What’s the wrong way?

I’m really excited to bring to your attention the brand new book written by our friend and collaborator, Bob Walsh.  It’s called “The Web Startup Success Guide” and its official launch date is next week, on the 22nd of July, 2009 (you can find it on Amazon). The book promises to be a great resource for startups, the must-read type and I can’t wait to get a copy:). I promise a larger review after I read the whole book, until then, just wanted to share with you a short excerpt about Avangate.

Of course, other eCommerce providers are shortly reviewed in Bob’s book, but Avangate is his “no 1″:D. So here’s the whole description of Avangate in “The Web Startup Success Guide”:

"The Web Startup Success Guide", by Bob Walsh

The first alternative to PayPal I recommend is Avangate (http://www.avangate.com), for two reasons. First, over the years I’ve met and talked with a lot of Avangate’s management and staff at all sorts of startup/microISV conferences and events they sponsor or at which they speak or participate. This is a company that well and truly likes and supports startups.

Second, and more tellingly, when people running startups and microISVs swap recommendations as to who to use for e-commerce at those various conferences or at huge public forums such as Joel on Software Business of Software (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz) or private boards such as that run by the Association of Shareware Professionals (http://www.asp-shareware.org), you find nothing but positive recommendations when it comes to Avangate.

Avangate does more than process payments. From fielding a solid affiliate program to robust sales and lead analytics, software download, and physical fulfillment and registration key delivery, this company can make a lot of your startup’s headaches go away. Of course, more service means you pay for more than bare-bones credit card processing – depending on which services you want, you’ll pay somewhere between 4.9% and 8% per sale.

During a research on shopping cart conversion rates I did the last couple of weeks, I found websites with 0,4% funnel conversion rates and others with completion rates up to 70%. I never expected to find such big discrepancies; no analysis can be made in such conditions so I started to look up  reasons for these discrepancies.

After talking to different software vendors about various issues their potential customers reported and after noticing different trends in multiple analytics data, I found the fugitive criminal guilty for many many abandons in shopping carts: Shopper Trust.

Shopper Trust Wanted. Reward Offered.

How to find it? Easy, or so they say. Check out the following clues.

1. Among Trust’s best friends there’s a guy named “Price”

Showing prices & discounts next to buy buttons

It’s important for your users to pay the “right” price for your products, but more important is to really know how much a product costs. You might say this is obvious (I for sure would have said that), but going from one website to another I found many where it was unclear how much a product costs.

It’s not mandatory to  have the price on the right or on the left of the screen. The important thing is that when the user says to himself “I wonder how much this software costs. I’d like to buy it”, he should get the answer before he gets to finish his sentence.

My 2 cents is to always have the price next to the buy button or link. This way you make sure that every time a user gets in the shopping cart he already knows the price of your product. Also, place it next to the product box, something very similar to the offline world where the user is used to always have the price next to the product he is buying.

Geno Prussakov CEO of AM Navigator LLC

I recently had the pleasure to interview Geno Prussakov, one of the most important voices in affiliate marketing, founder and CEO at AM Navigator LLC. He has been involved in affiliate marketing for over 6 years now, currently helping online businesses succeed with this marketing channel by consulting, speaking and writing on the topic.

Here’s one of the things I like – Geno’s opinion on the issue of affiliate marketing not working:

If it’s the competitors of my clients that are thinking that way, I don’t want to convince them otherwise.

And he’s right – affiliate marketing is really working for those that understood they have to be involved in this channel.

Or his tips on how to recruit quality affiliates:

There are 6 techniques that I use on a continuous basis. All of them start with a letter “S”: (1) software, (2) social media, (3) search engines, (4) second-tier affiliates, (5) summits and symposiums, and (6) symbiotic recruitment.

I better stop here with the teaser – go ahead and read what Geno has to say about motivating affiliates, the ways to recruit good affiliates and the pitfalls to avoid as an Affiliate Manager.

Lots of software vendors ask themselves this question and, unfortunately, I’ve seen cases when the conclusion they reach is that “affiliate marketing doesn’t work” or as Joel Spolsky says, in his case, it’s “ a big waste of time“.

Both for these vendors and for the ones that think their affiliate sales channel could be improved and seeing the positive feedback I got from our software publishers regarding the issue of vendor involvement to motivate affiliates, I’m starting a series of posts with a more hands-on approach. I hope you will find them useful.

Affiliates Info Page

The first thing I’m going to talk about is what you can do in order to help potential affiliates find you and join your affiliate program, thus maximizing the chances to sell more using this channel.