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.

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.

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.

In short, here’s a recap of the Avangate eCommerce, reseller management and affiliate platforms’ main developments in 2009 and other “notable” milestones :):

• Both vendors and affiliates can use the special Avangate Payoneer MasterCard to get paid faster and more convenient;

• A first Russian webinar and a Chinese conference were organized for software vendors, allowing us to show off our new Chinese and Russian language skills ;).

• The Avangate software affiliate network grew in 2009 like others in a century;), welcoming power affiliates such as Download.com, Tucows.com, Software.com, Offers.com,  Brothersoft.com, Couponcode.com, Toptenreviews.com and Softonic.com. It now allows extremely flexible vendor-affiliate relationships including custom generation of discount coupons by the affiliates and so on – and it won’t slow down  its growth in 2010 either:).

• ARMS  – Avangate Reseller Management System reached version 3.0, constantly adapting to our clients’ needs – a big thank you to all for your feedback on this!

• A new European sales channel was born and is now available to all Avangate vendors: Intel^® Business Exchange Software Store – I strongly encourage you to take a look at it, if you haven’t already.

• The internationalization of Avangate moved on, counting in 2009 ordering interfaces in 13 languages. Also, more local payment methods were added: DIRECTebanking.com for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands, Carte Bleue for France and AliPay “支付宝” for China.

• Avangate services obtained the PCI DSS certification (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), basically the most important security standard for the card payment industry.

Of course, we also sponsored and attended several software business events across the globe, where we hope to meet a lot of you again in 2010.

For 2010, we intend to focus even more on increasing the conversion rates of Avangate shopping cart and to continue the optimization of client-shopping cart interaction through actions such as recovering of abandoned orders with TrialPay, email marketing and so many others.

I want to thank you all for reading this blog, for your feedback about Avangate services, for your valuable guest posts and pieces of advice expressed through comments.

To wrap it up, I would say that 2009 was a good year for selling software, at least with Avangate ;), in spite of this economic recession we’re witnessing. How was  your 2009 experience?

Happy New Year!

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.

A lot of smart people who’ve been through the above have wondered if there’s a better way to break into a market than running blind at it headfirst. And smart people like multiple startup founder/academician Steve Blank, Marc Andreessen (yes, that Marc Andreessen) and a serial startup founder by the name of Eric Ries have come up with what might be an answer – and might work for you. Apply the principles of lean manufacturing to building startups, lean startups.

The right intersection of Product with Market

The core idea, in my opinion, of lean startups is getting to the right intersection of Product with Market. That’s the detonator cap to making it possible for the company to explode into profitability. Unless you obsessively focus on getting that product/market fit first, having great programmers, tons of VC money, storied executives etc. etc. is about as useful as pounding on a brick of Semtex with a mallet: nothing happens. (Note: do not try that at home. Or anywhere else.)

Getting to product/market fit is about getting the data every step of the way of what the market will think of your productized idea. Call it product development based on market research, validation, feedback – on steriods. Your progress until you find product market fit is measured by units of validated learning about your customers, not milestones, integration tests or cases of Jolt consumed.

Here’s a quote from Eric Ries’ post for GigaOm that neatly sums it up:

As a consequence, this new startup is relentlessly metrics-driven. It tries out new ideas with a fraction of customers in order to prioritize using facts, not opinions. Its unit of progress is that of validated learning about its customers. Because this radical notion of progress is located firmly in the heads of its employees, and not in any artifacts they produce, the lean startup is employee-centric and knowledge-obsessed. It is a truly fun place to work.

This radical notion of creating software people actually, measureably want has a lot more to do with Internet’s ability to connect everyone, measure everything and do it for free than the industrial model of software development (typified by giant software projects that with predictable regularity crash and burn. )

I interviewed Eric Ries for my podcast recently – the show should be up before 2010. The thing I got most out of our talk – other than becoming a believer in Lean Startups – is that Lean Startups scale down as well as up. This is the good news microISVs and small startups have been casting about for: there is a way to find your way to the interestion of product and market.

Here’s a few good resources to actually learn what Lean Startups are all about.

• A good fast intro: Eric Ries Lean Startup talk at MIT — videos!
• The blog, Lessons Learned, by Eric Reis, is all obout Lean Startups.
• Steve Blank, serial entreprenural turned high-end university professor has a blog you should dig into and a book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany that’s on my Amazon Wish List and should be on yours.
• Before Marc Andreessen gutted his fantastically useful blog when he and Ben Horowitz launched this summer the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, he wrote two years ago, The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters (hint: product/market fit). You can still read all of Marc blog, thanks to the Internet Archive (be patient while it loads – I think they use old 5.25 diskettes for storage.)
• Want something more moving? Check out what’s on the [You]Tube: What’s a ‘Lean Startup?’, The Lean Startup Seedcamp 2009 Edition #leanstartup #scw09, O’Reilly Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, Step by Step.
• Another take on this all can be found at Sean Ellis’ Startup Marketing Blog.
• If you want to see Lean Startups being doing in the wild, check out the great new startup blogger Ash Maurya, and his post, The First Thing That Matters: Product/Market Fit.
• Want to get a little more Social? Check out the Lean Startup Circle Google Group and of course the Twitter hashtag #leanstartup.
• Show #48: Eric Ries and the Lean Startup, on the Startup Success Podcast. [iTunes link]

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.

In the screenshot above with “Latest” turned on, you’re seeing realtime results for a search appearing from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Indenti.ca. as they’re posted.

Humans physiologically are programmed to pay more attention to things that move – and your prospective customers can’t help having their attention dragged from your carefully SEO crafted result up to whatever someone just said on Twitter about your software.

Does anyone not search for the latest when it comes to software, or at least software that’s not resting on its laurels from years ago? Nope.

If your product is in this situation, you’d better hope prospective customers don’t use “Latest”; of course, as soon as they go “Any Time” or the other options, they can turn on Page Preview. Again, Google is helping its users get to the good stuff faster: A page preview is worth a thousand marketing words when it comes to your customers making that key click/no click decision.

If you’ve gotten the new Google Options enabled, try looking up your own product. Google Page Preview rewrites home page design rules. When I first Googled my startup last week, only a confusing fragment of my Hook showed. One quick redesign, and now my whole “Be Successful Faster” headline shows – a good thing.

Here’s more upsetting news: search results are customized by default now, which means the days of “standardized” search results are ending soon: prospective customers – by default – see results made more relevant to them based on their recent search history, location, and web history.

Here’s how Google puts it:

“When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history. If you’re curious, you can see what a search for [X] looks like without these improvements.”

More relevant for them may mean more difficult for you as Google’s search results differentiate and in effect, splinter your market. So it’s a good thing Google will probably be making available to you as on option the Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel is simply the best way to locate related keywords for Google searches I’ve seen.

For example, I just got an email about a brand new photo editor, Citrify. Four clicks later in the Google Wonder Wheel and I can see a whole range of competitive keywords for this brand new microISV. Nice!

Google’s new search options touch on everything from your social media strategy to product update road map to your next web site redesign. The bottom line of all these changes in how Google serves its customers is you need to have a good long think about how you are going to  serve your customers in 2010. Or you might not have as many.

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“.

That’s Dennis Gurock of Gurock Software explaining in this post just what results he got by creating 2 microsites. Here’s Dennis’ .NET Logging site:

It’s simple, useful to the people who could be interested in his software, informative rather than marketing. In fact, it only lightly mentions his product SmartInspect. What’s more, it’s not aimed at experts, it’s aimed at the much larger number of non-experts, beginners, newbies out there who’ll appreciate a “take them by the hand and show them the ropes” approach to this developer topic. And by definition, newbies always outnumber experts in whatever problem domain your product or service addresses.

Here’s some of the finer points of building a successful microsite, reverse-engineered from .NET Logging:

1. The key term you want to dominate must be in the URL.
   This is the magic bullet of Google pagerank. If you’re planned microsite can’t get the same strength URL as Dennis did for the term “.NET logging” as http://www.dotnetlogging.com/, pick another topic.
2. SEO matters.
   Just doing the simple SEO things you already should know about makes a big difference when building a microsite. Not sure what those are nowadays? Get your hands on a copy of Dharmesh Shah’s “Inbound Marketing” that’s now a bestseller.
3. Context your product, do not market it.
   Since this microsite touches on an area your product deals with, include it amoung the other solutions out there, but don’t market it. Marketing kills credibility within the context of a microsite. Don’t. Do. It.
4. Your supported opinion, personal experience and professional judgment are what’s on offer here.
   Include as appropriate your (supported with at least one reason) opinion, personal experience and professional judgment. This is not about being ‘objective’, it’s about offering your point of view on information you’ve researched and collected as a way of giving back to your market/community.
5. Put some effort into it, and update it regularly.
   People can tell whether you just threw together something or you’ve taken the time to do it right. Do it right – or outsource the basic research to someone competent and then add your experience in. Also, put in place a procedure/layout so you can update your microsite easily on an ongoing basis.
   For example, a well-thought out submission form works well. You want to do this for two very good reasons: people are going to start sending you feedback/resources to include and you will find it far easier to deal with these prospective customers well by having a process in place. Second, Google is changing how people will use it in 2010 to find your software: recent updates will matter much more. (see this post for details.)

If you want a checklist to work from as you build your microsite, here’s one you can have for free that I created for my startup. If you want to amend it, just get a free Checkvist account and copy it to your account.

Finally, I asked Dennis now that it’s over six months, Has it been worth the effort?

“Yes, definitely. It actually took us only 1-2 days to create both our microsites, but we have been benefiting from the sites ever since (mainly due to great search engine rankings and from people linking to the sites). We have been receiving a steady amount of visitors that click through the microsites to our main product site”.

Hint: It’s not being nagged about how many days they have left in their trial every time they run your program.

It seems logical to nag the user.  Remind her that the trial is “time-limited, so act now!” like a fast-food commercial.  Remind her that she’s using your software for free, and doesn’t she feel guilty about that?

Sales people say “Pressure until they pay“, which for software trials means you should ask for money or at least guilt the user into paying. But you and I don’t like used-car sales techniques, and neither do your potential customers.

But the fact is that just saying “act now” doesn’t get people to buy software, and it can actually be a deterrent.

The reason is that besides being nagged, the user has to already be thrilled with the software.  It has to be making a real impact in her life. She has to feel a void if she uninstalls it.  And nagging doesn’t get you any of these things.

To see how your nagging might be misplaced, consider a new trial user who just installed your application. She runs it for the first time, and the first thing she sees is a modal dialog box saying “You only have 15 days left“.

“So what“, she thinks, “I don’t even know what this is yet“.

Then she has to make a choice between “Enter License Code” and “Continue with Trial”.

“Just let me see what this is“,  she thinks. “I just installed it, how the hell would I have a license code?”

Or worse, you have a count-down timer so she can’t even run the application until she stares at this useless, annoying dialog box for what seems like an eternity.  Maybe she should open a new browser and check out one of your competitors.
Or she starts the application and half the features are disabled because it’s a trial.  So she can’t even decide whether she likes it!

Want to nag?  Fine, but do it after the user has a chance to get hooked!

Here’s a bunch of ways to nag in a more sensible manner:

1. Nag on startup, but only after the 5th time the application has been started.
2. Allow all features, but watermark all results.
3. Nag exactly when the user has been successful at doing something useful, not during a meaningless even like starting up or shutting down. Examples:

• Nag on “Save”
• Nag after an “Export”
• Nag after 30 minutes of active use
• Nag after 3 different features have been used

Think about how to please customers, and bother them after they’re happy.  They will not give you a credit card on your home page before they try it.  They won’t buy during the installer.  They won’t be impressed with your splash screen.

So get them successful before you nag.

Wait until it solves their problem or they are thrilled with how it works and they see the potential for themselves.  Then the “hard sell” is the way to close the deal.

This is part 5 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

I bet you do. It’s a multi-billion dollar market (packaged software accounted for US$4.7 billion in 2008) that has seen positive growth even through the recession. Admittedly, there is a software piracy issue that shadows the country, still it’s a huge market and provides sales opportunities, especially in the B2B area.

A good enough reason for Avangate to partner with AliPay, China’s leading online payment service and part of giant Alibaba Group, so Avangate vendors can accept Alipay for China domestic payments in Chinese Renminbi (RMB or CNY).

How will this help software vendors?

Chinese customers can now purchase software from Avangate vendors and pay online in RMB with their Alipay account directly. Easy peezy.

Some convincing figures for Alipay?

• 200-million-plus customer base
• daily transaction volume exceeding RMB700 million (EUR69 million)
• an average of 4 million transactions (a day!)

So now you can have a more focused market approach and position your company better to serve the growing software market in China. [FYI, Avangate already provides a localized ordering system and customer support area in Chinese].

The Avangate-Alipay partnership will be officially launched in China at the Avangate Global Software Selling Conference, on December 5th, 2009 at The Park Plaza Beijing Science Park. You can still register if you want to come along.

If until now China was just a very big country or a very fast developing market, now it’s getting personal:  I’m going there and join for a couple of days the Avangate Chinese sales team. Well, I should say we are going there, as 3 geeks and one lady are going to play a very serious and challenging role of the host at the event :) We are going to try to make it fun.

What is this event all about?

For a start I am looking forward to meeting some of our clients I’ve been working closely with on web analytics implementations or a/b testing.  Talking about testing, this is going to be the main focus on my presentation: Effective and tested ways to increase conversion rates. I will also try to make things interesting and hold a workshop just after the presentation, analyzing a website from the audience… depends on who will volunteer. Nothing staged there.

Other presentations at the event will be about global software market status and online channel opportunities.  IObit, VSO Software and other software developers will share what works and what doesn’t on selling software from their own experience. To be honest, I am really looking forward to this one, especially for real live insights from software authors who have done it well.

Secondly, I am eager to meet as many of the software vendors that will join the presentations. Alexandra, my super-colleague who some of you already met and who is “guilty” for making this event come true, told me there are only just a few more seats available, so it looks like it will be a long but very pleasant day.

Last but not least, I am really interested in getting to feel (even if only for a little bit) the Chinese culture. This year I set foot for the first time on Asian land.  Siberia was nice but I guess it can’t get more Asian than China. Chinese customs, food, music, architecture and lifestyle, here I come. :)

北京见 (See you in Beijing! :) )

The point is that Black Friday (Nov. 27th) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 30th) are definitely useful dates to keep in mind.

Why?

Simple – in 2008, the Black Friday weekend brought along an 18% increase on the total spending in the US compared to the year before, which, given the context of the economic downturn, was a more than good figure. Other reports show a 15% increase in Cyber Monday online sales, with only 1% increase in Black Friday sales compared to the previous year. Either way, sales went up.

According to internetretailer.com, consumers are increasingly using Internet search engines to seek out Black Friday and Cyber Monday […], perhaps conditioned by increasing use of the terms by retailers. Searches on Google for “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday”, as well as related phrases such as “Black Friday laptop deals”, […] have increased 40% this year over last year, says Google Inc.

The thing to keep in mind is: focus your marketing efforts in getting most out of this holiday season by using a very appealing marketing tool to the end users: the discount coupon. Searches for coupon and coupon-related offers are also up more than 20% year over year (Source: internetretailer.com).

Software vendors can make discount coupons available directly to buyers, or via their Affiliate Network. In the Avangate platform, Affiliates can also generate their own discount coupons, so there are many ways to get these tools out there and sell more.