The Intel® Business Exchange Software Store in Europe has just been launched, bringing a new sales channel for selling software to European countries – with localized sites for the UK, Germany,  and France (official launch to follow by the end of the month). Good news.

We are, of course, proud to boast that Avangate provides the hosting, billing and process execution of the new market place… that the Avangate eCommerce platform is the core engine of the European Intel® Business Exchange… More good news.

Focused on SMBs
Yes, indeed, Intel ® BX is focused on SMBs – providing an advantage for this market. Why was there a need for this? Because SMBs often struggle to find technology products, services and support that fit their particular budgets and needs. The Intel ® BX Software Store helps them quickly and efficiently find the software solution they need to help implement business solutions. That’s why the store features extensive product details and facilitates customer ratings and reviews.

click on the image to see all photos from the event on Flickr

Two or three weeks ago spring returned to northern California and despite everything going on in the world, spirits are starting to soar.  Taking our lead from nature we hosted the second edition of “Casual Drinks“, Avangate’s networking event focused on software publishers and their partners.

We elected to host the spring edition of “Casual Drinks” at local Mountain View restaurant Don Giovanni, and from the start were quite pleased with the decision.  Don Giovanni has a tradition of hosting events for local software companies, as you can see by the logos on the wall, and with the success of “Casual Drinks” Avangate has taken its place next to these giants!  Inviting our friends and colleagues to see our new permanent position on the wall was quite a proud moment.

Avangate Oval Table

Last night I woke up at around 3 o’clock and I couldn’t go back to sleep. When I cannot sleep I usually think of work. What I have to do the next day, what I left pending the day before and so on.

Last night though I was thinking of our oval table (I’ll explain what that is), picturing a constant flux of people coming at the table, sitting down with a problem and leaving with a solution and a maybe a to do list.

In our office we have loads of meeting rooms: a biggish training room and various other meeting rooms, with/ without projectors/ conference phones/ even a couple of cozy ones for up to four people only.

TrialPay Lead Follow-up integrated into Avangate platform

Everybody is complaining about low software sales since this crisis situation got on the front page. It’s easy to figure out why. The million dollar question now is how a software vendor can increase software sales or at least keep income on the survival level.

I believe the answer implies a bit of creativity on your side and openness to experimenting. The client is more and more difficult to convince into buying your software and that is why I propose to try out the TrialPay incentive, which is the big “GET IT FOR FREE” button.

For those of you who don’t know already, TrialPay gives you the possibility of offering your software product for free to your customer and in return receiving a certain amount of money (usually less than your list price, but more than the minimum you are willing to receive) by being a referrer for another brand inside the TrialPay network. And that of course, is way better than no sales.

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.

I recently did a research on what software vendors are doing in order to sell through affiliates. I looked on over 400 websites that sell software. After putting all the data together, the first thing that stands out is that most of the vendors haven’t implemented the minimum requirements in order to affiliate efficiently.

Most surely they would like to sell more through affiliates, but this isn’t going to “just” happen. Either they don’t have as many affiliates as they would like or they don’t help their current ones sell more.

Here are the key findings of my personal research:

• most of the vendors (55%) have an affiliate sign up page;
• just a couple of them (5%) are using a special email for affiliate matters;
• very few software vendors (5.5%) help their affiliates with marketing materials (e.g. banners, other web graphics);
• more than half of all software vendors don’t have any PAD files or they don’t update them with the affiliate section.

Vendors must understand they have to help their affiliates sell more through simple, yet effective ways. After all, it’s the vendors’ interest to get more revenue from affiliates, isn’t it?