We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.

Do you have good quality traffic?

Among our clients we have vendors who have chosen to use the default and still have very high funnel conversion rates (more than 60% of the visitors entering the cart finish a transaction) and some with highly customized shopping carts that don’t even come close to 1% funnel conversion rate. Yes, the main factor that impacts the conversion rate is the quality of traffic.

When sending the visitor from your website or software product to the shopping cart make sure this is what he expects. Even better, let him know that he is going to be taken to a third party shopping cart on a secure environment. Maybe they would buy your product, but trying to force them to do it will most likely get them away from your website. So quality traffic means visitors that when getting to the shopping cart this is where they expect to be (they know the price, selected products, and additional options are not pre-selected).

Forcing users to the shopping cart just ain’t the right strategy. Most of them don’t return to your website but rather exit for good and you lose any chance in persuading them to engage with your website or your products.

Customized beats default

We’ve been working hard on making improvements to the default shopping cart provided by Avangate and we are continuously getting stuff rolled out in order to increase the conversion rate. Whenever we did an A/B testing between the default shopping and a customized one, the latter always won by around 2 or 3 percentage points at least. Sometimes all we did was to change the header of the cart and place the client logo and even that did much better than the default shopping cart.

Going deeper into the process got us even better results.  The fact is that customizing the cart in a way that the user feels he is still in the same website always rocked the conversion rate. We are dealing with tests on 3 clients right now on which we worked on making the cart as similar to the website as possible and we have great results on all of them. Checkout the before and after for the above cart. Which one do you think is winning?

Well done Cross Selling

Well done cross selling will most likely decrease the conversion rate of a shopping cart. Yeah, you heard me right. However, well done cross selling will increase the average order value, therefore the revenue. Checkout the following charts and see how cross selling has impacted the sales of one of our clients.

What do I mean when I say well done cross selling? Check out the following implementations for 2 other clients of ours.

We will keep you posted with future developments, but till then I would appreciate if you would let us know what your testing ideas are.

It turned out that out of 14 major eCommerce providers rated by 192 software vendors on Andy Brice’s blog, Avangate was rated highest!

The survey covered important aspects that software vendors need to keep in mind when choosing an eCommerce provider: features, ease of use, reliability, support, fraud protection, ethics, value for money.

A big thank you to all our clients (some of them listed here) that took part in the survey and we promise to do our best to be better every day:).

Although even Andy warns that the survey should not be taken as official statistical data, we can’t help but feel proud of the outcome.

Negative keywords in your AdWords keyword list are those for which your ads will not show in search queries containing them.  You can get the general information about negative keywords directly from the AdWords blog.

When you’re trying to sell software through PPC campaigns, your goal is to obtain qualified leads to your software selling business, not to get as much and as untargeted traffic as possible. And that’s when negative keywords come in. Or out, actually:).

How do you know which negative keywords are right for your campaign?

Although it’s somewhat easy to describe what your software is and does and thus come up with keywords for your AdWords campaign, the semantic mix-up generated by users around the globe always has some surprises reserved for each of your campaigns.

No matter how hard you try to associate all possible negative keywords to your campaign, there will always be room for more. That’s because beyond what your software does not do and what names it does not have, search terms used on millions of computers accessing Google every day have as limit the sky itself.

That is why enriching the negative keyword list must be an on-going activity for every effective PPC campaign out there.

Depending on the type of software you are selling, some search terms used in Google simply are not good for business because they are not targeting the people who are interested in your solutions.  I really liked the post written by Alwin Hoogerdijk about negative keywords specific to the software industry and felt I can add to it.

That’s why in this blog post I have listed more than 150 negative keywords that I believe could be used in a software selling campaign (from our experience managing PPC campaigns for our clients and for ourselves, as well as from an inspiring article on b2b negative keywords from komarketingassociates.com).

Nevertheless, don’t take it for granted – consider them as a starting point, as they are not meant to be general guidelines for each and every piece of software out there.

Here goes the negative keyword list for selling software:

Please add your suggestions to this list!

This is part 4 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

Nothing’s worse than opening new software and staring at a vast white screen with millions of toolbar buttons.  Now what?

1. Most users don’t care enough to find out.
   They want to solve a problem, not root around in your menus.  They don’t care about your “project” paradigm or your innovative new work flow concepts.
2. Of course you also have to satisfy your power users.
   They probably don’t want paperclips popping up every five minutes distracting them from real work.  Power users are the ones who are going to spread the word about you, tell all their friends to download your software, and Tweet and blog about how awesome you are, so you have to keep them happy too.

Help New users Succeed without Pissing off Power users

Start With a Sample

A blank screen is intimidating.  Remember, new users aren’t yet fans of your software, so a blank screen that they have to “figure out” is just a barrier that might cause them to find File/Quit, followed by Start/Programs/Uninstall.

Instead, ship your tool with a sample project already in progress.  For example, a bug tracker should have some users and projects defined and issues logged against them.  A workflow management tool could define a process that we’re all familiar with (e.g. ordering food at a restaurant).  A drawing program could start with a photo with a vector text caption added (we won’t talk about what kind of photo).  A CAD program could have a design for a perpetual motion machine.

Samples get the user interested because there’s an immediate result.  The potential user can quickly see how the tool will improve his life after he’s really using it, rather than having to first invest the time to understand it, put in data, and then figure out whether it’s useful.

Samples don’t bother power users, because samples are what you open if another project wasn’t opened.  Power users will always have an existing project or will have created a new one!

Built-In Tutorials

There’s nothing wrong with hand-holding.  A lot of people learn best by being shown how to work, step by step.

At its simplest, a tutorial can be just a “Getting Started” PDF that the user can read online or print to view side-by-side with the program.  We actually got requests for this at my company (Smart Bear) and tech support was visibly relieved when we wrote a simple 2-page document explaining how to install and configure our tool.

Show the PDF after install, and make it really obvious inside the application – inside the Help menu, inside the Start Menu program group, and if no project or file is open, perhaps you could suggest it right in the user interface.

If you want to step up the effort – and reward -, record tutorial videos.  Use software like Camtasia or GoToMeeting to record quick, under-100-second tutorials of various things like installation, starting your first project, a tour of a certain screen, or how to do a common task (Printing?  Sharing?).  Host the videos on YouTube so you don’t have to pay for bandwidth and so that you know everyone has the ability to access and play the video.

Next, offer these videos inside your product.  At the least offer links to the tutorials page in the Help menu; better is to show links to specific videos in specific dialogs and screens; best is to actually embed the video inside your product so people can watch with a single click.  This last point is especially easy with web applications but it’s possible with desktop apps too.

The final idea for tutorials takes the most effort but can also be the most effective:  Write custom code for tutorials inside your product.  Upon certain events (e.g. the dreaded blank screen or the “first time” the user accesses a certain screen), actually guide the user to the next step.  Overlay text (optionally audio) right in the dialogs with arrows to guide the user along.  Stop the user if she does something wrong and explain.

Yes, this takes non-trivial development effort, but imagine how successful your users will be at running your software!  And if they’re effective, they’re more likely to buy.

To satisfy the power users, just make a user option that turns all that stuff off for good.  In addition, it could be nice to have separate “never show this one again” settings for each tutorial screen.

Make Goal-Oriented Commands

When someone opens Word, they have a goal in mind: write a formal letter, start a book, outline a term paper, capture brainstorming session, edit a blog post.

We normally think of features in terms of what the feature does, e.g. “make text bold” or “change current view-mode to outline“, and that’s fine for requirements-definitions and feature bullet points.  But it’s not how a new user thinks.

So instead of the blank screen and a toolbar of options, how about a goal-oriented guide.  “What template would you like to start with?  Letter, outline, book, blog post, or free-form?“  Now the new user can pick something close to the desired result and immediately have things arranged properly – the correct view settings, perhaps a template file with sample text filled in, relevant toolbar commands etc.

The new user is happy because the environment makes more sense.  The power user is happy because he can jump into a new project, but can easily pick a “blank” template and skip all that nonsense.  Fine!

I hope some of these ideas will inspire you to take actions that will keep potential customers in your product instead of getting discouraged.  Leave a comment if you have more ideas!

Hammers Sell Better Than Software

Back in April my friend and fellow microISV Andy Brice conducted a software vendor survey that highlighted something that doesn’t get the attention it should: while about a third of the people that visit your site download your trial version, only 1% end up buying.

Why is that? Now maybe the 92 respondents to the survey were atypical, but I don’t think so: I’ve heard that “only 1% buy” adage for years.

Here’s a related factoid Andy’s survey unearthed: the average Mac product conversion ratio is more than 4 times higher than the Windows product conversion ratio.

Now maybe Mac owners are four times richer than Windows users, or maybe because there’s four times less software to choose from. But as a Windows developer who switched two years ago, I haven’t noticed four times more money in my bank account or not found a decent range of software to accessorize my MacBook Pro with. In fact, I’ve noticed – and so has my spouse – I’m much more likely to buy a Mac app I trial than I was likely to buy as a Windows guy.

Try 100 and Buy One?

Something else to think about regarding that abysmal 1% visit to sale ratio: it’s way out of whack compared to other things we buy like books and clothes (low end price range) and consumer electronics (business software). Ever try on 100 shirts and buy only one? Me neither.

The more I pondered the above, the more I realized that there had to be something else, something uniquely broken, in the process of buying software to cause such a huge failure rate. I think what’s broken is that unlike nearly everything else we buy, we don’t know how to use an application until we learn at least the basics of that application- or the vendor teaches us. And that’s where most software vendors, especially Windows desktop software vendors, drop the ball.

A good, well-made hammer costs more than most consumer software applications. Imagine yourself in a hardware store where you pick up a hammer. You know immediately how to use it: you don’t have to read the manual or guess what it can do – you know.

There’s two things going on here – intellectually you know how to use a hammer (even if you don’t know the subtle technique differences between using a claw framing hammer as opposed to a brick layer’s hammer). Secondly, you feel emotionally empowered – you know you can hammer in a nail in three whacks where before all you could do is rip open a finger trying to push it in – and that’s a positive feeling

Knowledge and Empowerment Sell.

Now compare that with how you reacted to the last app you downloaded a trial version of. Do you remember the frustration of an empty screen? Of not knowing what you could do, or where to start? I don’t – the Mac product I last added had a quick, professional screencast that showed me exactly how to use it. And the product before that had a really good screenshot that told me enough of how to use the product in one glance than many of the 50-page manuals I read in years past when I bought Windows software. Call it the Steve Jobs effect, but Mac vendors go out of their way to make their software easy to adopt and start using – and it pays off.

There’s a gap, a chasm, a divide that separates the nearly a third of site visitors who download trial versions from the measly 1% who actually buy, and it’s your responsibility as a software vendor to bridge that gap. Interestingly enough, there was one respondent to Andy’s survey who had a whopping 13.94% sales:visits ratio – and I’ll bet that vendor has engineered an excellent “out of the box” customer experience for their product.

Here’s three techniques software vendors have employed to get me across the threshold and in turn have gotten my money:

• A really good screencast. A professionally made short screencast helps the viewer understand what you are selling and what they will get for their money. And note the professionally part of that – I recently had a professional screencaster create the first screencast for StartupToDo.com, the training/productivity community for startups and microISVs I’m launching soon. I could have spent a year at the job and it would never have been as compelling, comprehensible and well made as the 3 minute video Ian created.
• A really good screenshot. Like I said, this one screenshot sold me on this task management application. This technique of magnifying the few key points you want to stand out is a really good technique and something anybody can do: just follow this, this or this tutorial.
• Sample data. How did MoneyWell beat out a company at least a thousand times bigger for my 50 bucks? The trial version came with a sample data file that let me get a feel for the app in seconds, and that I could play with to my heart’s content without screwing up my real financial data. It made a huge difference in how I felt about the idea of not just changing software vendors but changing my mental model of how personal financial software worked.

I would submit to you that focusing on how to get your prospective customers immediately comfortable with your software, helping them through those first few minutes of uncertainty, doubt and confusion, helping them in essence to imagine themselves using your software will definitely improve your startup’s or microISV’s overall conversion rate. Now imagine how you would feel if your visit to sale ratio went from the 1% to something like 14% percent.

Photo credit: blue out

This is part 3 of a 5-part series: How to convert more software trials to purchases.

What do you do with customer’s email addresses during their trial?

• If the answer is “nothing“, then you’re wasting data.
• If the answer is “follow up with ‘account management‘ stuff and ‘do you need anything‘ questions“, then you’re bothering most users.  Even at best, you’re not thrilling anyone.

You should be using it for a special, 3-emails-only “Tips Newsletter“. There are several goals of the newsletter.

Inform the User about Features

Inform the user about features you know are difficult to discover but are widely loved by your existing customers.

How do you identify these features? A good place to start is to complete this sentence: “Did you know … ?” Another is to find out from existing customers (e.g. your forums, or see what they Twitter about, or make a poll, or call your 10 best customers and ask them).

Remember, most users don’t spend hours pouring over all your toolbar buttons and configuration options. Some creature-features are too trivial for the main bullet-points on your home page, but often the little things are the reason people get excited about your software.

In a perfect world you would reconfigure your product to make these features apparent at the right times, but that’s not realistic and might not even be cost-effective. Writing two paragraphs about it and grabbing a compelling screen shot is a lot easier! And it might even be more effective at communicating the excitement and value to the user.

Remind the User to Continue the Trial

Those sales “can I help you” emails do serve one important purpose: They remind a user to take up an abandoned trial. In many cases it will take a few nudges before the user spends enough time in your tool to consider purchasing.

The difference is in the delivery. A really short email isn’t too bad; a long email about “the company, our commitment to customer service, blah blah blah” is certainly not what anyone wants to read through.

The Tips Newsletter leads with something valuable to the user: A tip that really does help the user’s life. That’s completely different than an email that pretends to be helpful but is really a self-serving sales-ping.

Once you’ve delivered something valuable, you have permission to push things like a sales rep’s name, phone number, and email address. In fact, you can put that in a right-side banner, and it’s appropriate to have the newsletter’s “From” (or at least “Reply-To”) address be the sales department. You could even have a section below the pure-content section about “meet your service rep” or “meet our team” or “meet the CEO“. Heck, you can even paste that boring “I’m here if you have questions” email after the content – just start by providing content!

Get the User Deeply Engaged, Buy or No-buy

Let’s take that one step further. You not only want a sale, you want a subscriber to your blog. You want a Twitter follower. You want a new power-user on your forums. You want someone blasting 10 ideas to your UserVoice page. You want someone who tells your sales rep about the other department on the third floor who also needs this stuff, and here’s the email address of the woman who can make that happen.

What I’m describing are “cheerleader” users. These are the folks who sell your software for you, both internally at their company and externally on the Internet. Most of these users purchase your software; some (believe it or not) don’t!

Well here’s some breaking news – boring sales follow-up emails don’t get that to happen, and silent trials with no communication don’t either. Okay, it sometimes happens by accident, but you’re not helping.

What starts those relationships is an initial show of honest engagement by your company. That means transmitting truly useful help, above and beyond common expectations. Typically this comes from over-and-above human interactions like a killer demo, fantastic tech support, or a sales rep that goes to bat for the customer.

That’s great, but it is possible to do some of this in an automated fashion, so of course you should! A newsletter that really does help the user can start that relationship. Heck, besides product tips, why not give other tips that help the users even if they don’t purchase?

For example, at Smart Bear one of our more popular white papers explains how to build a software checklist. It’s full of practical advice and isn’t the usual drivel. You might think it’s a ploy to sell more of our code review software, but actually our software doesn’t support checklists! Yes, we should remedy that, but in the meantime it’s clear that we really are trying to help folks build checklists, period. And that’s endearing.

Want an Example of How to Do this Perfectly?

Take a test-drive of one of TechSmith’s products.  They are masters of the quality tips newsletter.

• Tips means you’re actually helping, not just asking “how can I help“.
• Tips means you’re educating about their pain, not just selling a tool.
• Tips means you’re pointing out cool features they didn’t find but which you know sells your software.
• Tips means you’ve earned permission to give your Rep’s contact info and remind them to try and buy.  And to send them to your blog for more of the same.

Give, and you shall receive.

This is a guest post by Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software, the makers of the peer code review tool Code Collaborator.  Jason blogs regularly about startups and marketing.

This is the second part of a series of blog posts about making the affiliate sales channel bring revenue to software vendors. In the first post I focused on the importance of the affiliates information page and how it helps you recruit affiliates. In this post, I will talk about another important component of the affiliate sales channel optimization process: PAD Files.

PAD Files – what are they good for?

Short for Portable Application Description, PAD files are special XML format files that contain information about a software product, from software vendor contact data to product description and price.

The main plus point of PAD files as a standard in the software industry is they offer a more simple way for webmasters to automate product listings, without having to manually edit every minor change the software vendor makes to the product price or description. This works best especially when dealing with download portals which aggregate lots of software titles.

Here’s a big list with the software download portals that accept software submission by PAD files – you can see there are big names involved there, like Download.com, Softpedia, Softonic, Brothersoft or Tucows. So, here are the benefits PAD files have to offer from the software vendor – affiliates relationship point of view:

• they offer a more convenient way for affiliates to list a vendor’s products by including all the product details in a single standard file and by offering the possibility to automate product listings. This way, affiliates can focus on promoting your products rather than checking if anything has changed in the description or price of the product.
• they are an important source of content for affiliate websites, having product descriptions, product images, multi language details and other elements that are important for a successful pre-sales campaign.
• if any trial versions are available, they can boost a software product’s download count, thus increasing the exposure of that product.
• since trial downloads are tracked in many affiliate networks, affiliates will be credited with the sales they refer through trial downloads from their websites.

How does it work?

It’s very simple:

1. the software author creates / edits the PAD file with product information: description, contact information, license type, supported platforms, price etc.
2. the webmaster of the affiliate website (download portal or any kind of website) uses the URL of the PAD file (whether published on the vendor’s website or submitted) and parses the XML format file to get the information he wants to display.
3. every time the software vendor edits something in the PAD file, the information will usually be automatically updated on all the affiliates’ websites using the URL of the PAD file as a source for displaying the product information.

How to create / edit a PAD file?

This is the more hands-on part of this post. We’ve seen what the advantages of using PAD files are – now let’s get busy. In order to be able to create a PAD file, you have to download a PAD file editor – they’re available free on the Internet. I recommend the latest version of the PADGen tool, available on the ASP Shareware website. After you install it on your computer, just follow the next steps:

1. Run the PADGen application; you will get the “Company Info” section. Fill in the Company Information fields – see example below.

You can save this information in a separate file, so you won’t have to fill it over and over for every software product. Just use the “Company” toolbar from the PADGen window.

2. Fill in the Program Information and Descriptions. Enter the program name, version, release date, type, category and other options on the “Program Info” screen. Then, in the “Descriptions” section, you can enter multiple descriptions (sorted by length) in multiple languages (English is default).
3. Set the Web Information and enter the text of the Distribution / End User Agreements. In the “Web Info” screen, enter the URLs for the product information page, order page etc. In the “Permissions” tab, enter the text of the Distribution and End User License Agreements.



4. Enter the Affiliates information – this is one of the most important part of the PAD file for your affiliates, because they can easily sign up in your affiliate program. It also contains a link to your affiliates information page. You can usually get the information required here in your Control Panel. If not, you should contact your account manager. Be sure the “Include this Extension into PAD File” option is checked! If you use another PAD editor, the Affiliates extension might not be available – you need do download that extension.
5. Verify, generate and sign PAD File according to the options set in the “Build Options” tab of PADGen. Should any errors occur, you will be notified by the application. If you use another PAD editor, be sure it has a validation tool included; if not, you can use the PAD Validator tool on the Avangate website.

You’re all done! Repeat the steps above for each of your software products. See here more facts and details about creating PAD files.

I have a PAD file. Now what?

First of all, make sure the URL to the PAD file is available on your website, inside the affiliates info page.

Secondly, to get some results, start submitting the PAD files to download websites – you can use our PAD Promoter, it’s free. Or, if you want to save time, you can use professional software submission services.

Don’t forget – whether you’re a software author or the webmaster of a download site, you can find more resources on PAD files on the special section of the ASP-Shareware.org website.

There is still one post from this series to come. Subscribe to the Avangate blog by email or RSS.

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.

The conference is not big in terms of number of attendees but is an important show for people that are actively involved with the industry. These are some of the reasons on my list to attend SIC (next year it will be in Dallas):

• Meet the major industry players
• Benefit from great business opportunities
• Educational – be informed about the latest industry trends and best practices
• Networking – share experiences

Avangate had three presentations this year. Please feel free to download them:

• “How to use Social Media Marketing“- by Adriana Iordan
• “How to monitor and protect your Reputation online“- by Adriana Iordan
• “Best Cure for 2009: New revenue streams” – by Casey Potenzone

Hot topics of the fair (from my perspective at least):

1. Additional revenue streams
   • backup media revenues and best practices were successfully presented by Raj Barman from Acutrack
   • increase channels profitability (affiliates and resellers) – use the most efficient tools and marketing incentives to support the sales
   • increase the conversion rates of your trials
2. Additional marketing channels
   • Advertising solutions were presented by Bob Gibson from Softonic, also one of our strategic partners
   • it’s time to sell globally – localize the products, stores and customer support
3. Finally, but not the least, the Avangate cookies made the visits to our hospitality suite to be very … sweet – at least they worked for our friends from Softonic that paid us at least 5 visits a day ;)

Enjoy the pictures and please feel free to ask any questions you might have and I’ll be happy to answer them.

P.S.  Let’s stay connected and share some other ideas in the future: follow me on Twitter and check out my LinkedIn Profile.

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?

Marshall: Sending an email to tips@readwriteweb.com at any time is appropriate. Sending your company’s blog or news release RSS feed is the best way to keep us in the loop. Otherwise, we like to get an e-mail three or four days before a news event. Send us info about what you’re doing, login access to see it, and contact info to reach out with any questions.

If we can get the full picture without a briefing (we’re pretty good at looking at startups), then that’s great. We don’t appreciate it when a company expects an hour of our time to ramble on the phone in order for us to find out what they are doing.

Bob: Do you prefer hearing from startup founders or PR people working for startups?

Marshall: People working for them, especially not salespeople. Talking to engineers is ideal. If we must talk to a CEO or salesperson, though, we’ll live.

Bob: How many startups do you hear about in a week? How do you decide what to write about?

Marshall: It’s hard to say, probably about 200. We’re looking for a news hook and an innovation hook. We’re much more interested in the tech of tech than in the business of tech.

Bob: What mistakes do startups make approaching news bloggers and for that matter regular trade/general reporters?

Marshall: Don’t send us an e-mail with a link to our competitors’ coverage of you—that drives us nuts. Also, tell us honestly what you are doing, quickly, and if we say no – accept that and come back later with something better suited for us.

Bob: Any advice for startup founders?

Marshall: Please give me really interesting stories about innovation so I can make us both look great. Try not to neglect your families, too. That’s just a bad thing to do.

Bob: What question should I ask that I haven’t?

Marshall: Q: Do you think this is a wildly disruptive time in technology that we’re living through? A: Yes I do, it’s very exciting. The possibilities are mindblowing, and the ISV community is really at the forefront of it. Keep up the great work out there!

I recommend also reading the success story of Balsamiq startup, influenced by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Share your stories and links about your startup pitching editors experience.

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.

Stay tuned for more sneak previews until the launch date and of course please do share your opinion about it once you’ve read it:).