FastSpring has updated the overall SpringBoard UI to create a subtly refined new look & feel, including section icons, more prominent multi-level breadcrumbs, and re-styled rollover/select states. SpringBoard has always been user-friendly and elegantly designed; this update brings these qualities up another notch.

Improved UI for Editing Product Pricing

We are also pleased to announce that the user interface to View All Product Prices has been redesigned to resemble a spreadsheet, allowing for at-a-glance overviews and mass updating of product prices, including all international currencies. This presentation format can save time and promote consistency in your pricing definitions across your product line.

Swedish Krona Multicurrency Added

Speaking of international currencies, FastSpring’s localization capabilities continue to expand. Native prices can now be set in Swedish Krona (SEK) for both credit cards and PayPal. Other foreign currencies supported include Austrailian Dollars (AUD), Swiss Franc (CHF), Danish Krone (DKK), Euros (EUR), Pounds Sterling (GBP), Hong Kong Dollar (HKD), Japanese Yen (JPY), New Zealand Dollar (NZD), and Singapore Dollar (SGD).

Simplified HTTP Notification

HTTP notification setup and editing has been simplified for the most common types of notifications. These notifications now also support an optional test URL that can be used instead of the main URL for test mode purchases only.

In SpringBoard, notifications can be easily set up for orders, order items, and returns, as well as subscription activations, changes, deactivations and payment failures. They can be sent via email or HTTP remote server calls, and defined for all or specific products. Notifications can also be used to set up custom tracking or newsletter signups.

Improvements to Product Duplicator

When duplicating a product, in addition to copying basic product details, such as product description and prices as well as email and license information, file fulfillment actions are now also replicated.

Additional Release Highlights

In addition to the above, here are some further items of note from SpringBoard’s latest release:

• In the Reports section, picking a pre-defined report month now automatically refreshes the page with the appropriate order details. Additionally, product names were added to the export CSV for subscription products.
• For canceled subscription products, as long as the subscription has not yet been deactivated, the subscription product can be reactivated.
• Discounts may now be applied to a set number of periods for subscription products.  For example, you can now offer your customers 10% off for the first three months of their subscriptions.
• Randomly generated coupons may now be set to expire after a certain number of days.

(Originally published in ASPects, January 2012. Reprinted courtesy of the author.)

The “Adobe model” is the reason you want to be in the education channel. Adobe software, founded in 1982, started off in the education market with their software Photoshop. It became a standard with schools, and when students left school after learning Photoshop, that was a product they used in the commercial world.

Many software companies want to increase their sales by selling to the educational channel. The first thing I would do is to find out how many of my existing sales are schools or educators. I would follow up with those sales to thank them and to find out how they are using the software in their classes. I would also ask for references and leads. It cannot be done part-time, and it takes time, effort and money to invest in the channel. You need to know that state education budgets have been cut to the lowest level since the Great Depression of 1929. It can take up to 18 months for a school to adopt your software. You will find that you have a better opportunity to have your software adopted if you have both a Windows and Macintosh version. Timing is very important here. You will need to get the software into the instructors’ hands to review in the Spring before school is out for the Summer. Schools start placing orders for software in August. 30-day demos are not sufficient to be used as a review copy. The availability of lesson plans increases sales of your product. I would suggest giving a full version of your software to the decision maker and following up with the reviewer regularly, for example, every two weeks. The key here is to make sure that you follow up diligently.

It is important to know who your competitors are in the education channel. Education pricing in most cases is lower than commercial pricing. Being the new kid on the block, you need to make sure your education pricing is attractive to the education buyer. In some cases, because your pricing is already extremely competitive, you may not be able to offer a lower education price. In these cases, it may be wiser to wait until you have a new version or product so that you can raise the commercial price. You need to consider the lower education price minus a minimum 30% discount that you need to give the education reseller. Your lab license pricing should reflect a volume discount of 10 to 15% for the dealers.

Now that you have your education pricing, your next step would be putting a press release together. You need to create awareness of your product without spending your total budget on advertising. Here are some of the education magazines you want to include:

• American Educator
• Current Issues In Education
• Education Magazine
• Media And Methods
• Technology In Learning
• THE Journal

You need to take 100% responsibility for the sales of your software. Creating a demand for the product is important so that education resellers will want to sell your software. The most important thing that a dealer has that you do not have, is an ongoing relationship with education customers. They can introduce your software to decision-makers at the district and state level.

Selling to dealers does not mean that you are in the education channel. Dealers will not create sales for your software unassisted. Most salespeople selling your product will not understand it. You need to give them materials that will help them sell your software. I suggest a one-page info sheet that provides an overview of your software and a chart comparing your product with your competitors. Creating an ongoing relationship with the salesperson will help you increase your sales. It has helped me open up doors that I would be unable to do without their help. You want them to know that you are always available to answer any questions that their customers may have.
Here are the names of education resellers in the United States and Canada:

• Studica
• Learning Services
• Genesis Technology
• Software House International
• SoftChoice
• Software Express
• PC University Distributor
• Teachware
• Digital River Education Services
• Advanced Academic

The key is growing your user base; a growing market share creates demand on its own. You will need a reason to go back to your user base with new products and upgrades. Commitment is the key. You may not see results for up to a year. You need to realize that this is an investment for your future growth. You will profit enormously in the long-term even if you break even on your initial sales in the channel.

David Raimondo has been selling to education channel for over 20 years representing software companies in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Reach him at David [at] raimondobusinesservices.com or www.raimondobusinessservices.com

FastSpring has implemented some noteworthy changes to improve the speed of loading your store order pages for your end customers. To improve performance, the product images / box shots displayed during the customer order process are now served from dedicated servers. With improvements in store caching and an average reduction of 30% for order page file sizes, the display of product detail pages during the customer order process is now 15-20% faster.

Mobile Styles for iPhone & Android

We’re pleased to announce brand new default style templates for iPhone and Android that enable you to serve highly optimized styles to these devices. These mobile styles take advantage of SpringBoard’s user agent detection and implement best practices in responsive web design. They increase legibility of your store order pages, ease of customer input into form fields, and general usability on these popular devices. For more detailed information about adding mobile styles to your store, please see our support article Mobile Styles for iPhone and Android.

Increased Style Templates Functionality

Style template functionality has been upgraded as well. Style templates, which are used to match the look and feel of your website, now support multiple CSS files and they maintain the order of CSS files as listed in the xhtml file’s head section. The templates also now support JavaScript in the head section, which allows FastSpring to replicate more JavaScript-based dynamic elements from your website, including drop-down navigation menus. We also now support the media attribute for CSS, which allows your FastSpring store to display differently depending on the customer’s viewing platform (e.g. screen, projection, handheld target devices).

Additional Tracking Capabilities

Multiple Google Analytics and Google AdWords tracking definitions are now allowed for stores. This feature allows you to track more than one Google AdWords account through the payment process and to have more than one trackable domain leading to the same FastSpring store. For example, clients can now track metrics and conversions for marketing efforts on supplementary domains, such as new marketing microsites, which can provide valuable ROI data.

Multiple Improvements to Language Translations

FastSpring’s localization capabilities continue to expand. In addition to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Serbian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English, order pages are now automatically translated to Greek. For subscription products, email notifications sent to customers regarding failed payment follow-up steps can now be translated into multiple languages, using SpringBoard’s “Phrases” templating system.

New Maintenance User Role

FastSpring has added a new SpringBoard user role, called the “Store Maintainer.” This account user type has access to all functionality in SpringBoard for a single store except for reporting and accounting. This new role allows you to grant access to employees or developers to allow them to make technical changes to the setup of your store (such as updating products), while preventing them from seeing information relating to sales that you might want to keep private.

More Options with Third-Party License Generators

With the newest development release, FastSpring now supports GameShield, a popular game licensing and DRM solution. Other license generators we support out-of-the-box are AquaticPrime, CocoaFob and Software Passport. We have also added two static fields to the AquaticPrime license generator, for a total of three fields that can be used to send additional information to generate an AquaticPrime license.

Lorrie Thomas Ross, author of the McGraw Hill 36-Hour Course to Online Marketing book, web marketing agency CEO, and FastSpring friend, teaches any web businessperson (experienced and inexperienced) the foundational pieces that make online marketing meaningful, effective and lucrative.

The video takes a look at the basis of any online marketing effort – a business’s web site – and reviews how the different components of the site can support the business’s goals. Then the learning branches off from the site itself, engaging topics from SEO and SEM to social media, online PR, and content marketing.

Short video chapters include best practice execution on topics such as:

• Components of Online Marketing
• Building an Online Marketing Foundation
• Successful websites for online marketing
• Optimizing a website for online marketing
• Content Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Marketing
• Blogging Success Steps
• Online Advertising
• Email Marketing

The only constant with online marketing is change. Slow is the same as stop when it comes to moving on the web, so we hope you enjoy this recommendation for a speedy online marketing education to help brand, build and boost your business.

Here’s a sample clip from the video:

FastSpring has been working hard this season to enable your customers to pay using even more payment methods than previously existed. Now, in addition to major credit cards, PayPal, check, money order, and purchase orders, your FastSpring store can also accept bank transfers, which is the most common form of cashless consumer payments in most countries within the EU and Asia-Pacific.

Bank transfers offer many benefits for FastSpring clients. They can broaden your customer base, appealing to those customers who do not have a credit card, or who do not want to use a card to complete a payment via the Web or mail. Since there is no possibility of payment reversals or payment chargebacks, you can feel secure that once a customer has paid, the funds are truly yours.

Note: The bank transfer payment method is available for one-time purchases, but not for subscription-based products/services relying on recurring billing. For more information, you can refer to the support article on bank transfers.

New Localization Settings Add Flexible Behaviors for Selling Globally

Now you can customize which information in your store changes based on each customer’s automatically detected location. If a customer selects a different country than the auto-detected one, you can choose from the following three options to occur:

• The language and the currency will both change accordingly
• The language will change accordingly, but the currency will not change
• The language will not change, but the currency will change accordingly

Additionally, the information used during the checkout process for subscriptions is now translated for the top visitor languages. Previously, this content was only translated for all non-subscription based purchases.

Supported Download Formats Greatly Expanded

Some common file extensions that we now support for file downloads, by category, are:

Text Files: .doc, .docx, .txt
Data Files: .epub, .ppt, .xml
Audio Files: .mid, .mp3, .ra, .wav, .wma
Video Files: .avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .swf, .wmv
Image Files: .ai, .eps, .ps, .max, .gif, jpg, .png, .psd
Page Layout Files: .pdf, .qxd, .rels
Spreadsheet and Database Files: .accdb, .db, .mdb, .swl, .xls, .xlsx
Executable Files: .app, .cgi, .exe, .vb
Compressed Files: .7z, .pkg, .rar, .sit, .zip
Disk Image Files: .dmg, .iso, .vcd

Increased Efficiency Via Reusable Downloads & License Generators

Now downloadable files and license generators are re-usable across multiple products. If you have multiple products using the same downloadable file (or license generator), instead of uploading a separate copy of the same file for each product, you can choose from an existing file (or license generator) you have already uploaded. This will reduce the effort and time needed to set up components of your store.

Update Referrers Post-Purchase Within UI

With any digital purchase, but especially with subscription orders, you can pass on a custom identifier per order or subscription. This custom referrer gets passed via a parameter ?referrer=XYZ in the URL. On occasion, there are issues which cause the referrer to be incorrect. Now it is possible to update the referrer after a purchase has been made and those issues have been resolved.

Additional Improvements

A few more updates to SpringBoard:

SpringBoard has simplified. With our most recent release, the FastSpring team has simplified many of the menus within SpringBoard and given clients greater access to making changes to their own stores. For example, in our Store Settings menu, the available payment methods and each of their settings are now located in a single location. FastSpring clients can log in at any time and choose to enable or disable the following payment methods: PayPal, Bank Transfer, Check or Money Order, and Purchase Orders.

Other improvements include:

• Self-signed and unsupported root certificates are now allowed for SSL via the “trust://” protocol. Prefix this protocol on URLs for use in notification and licenses
• Order Creator UI now validates the phone number field according to the same validation as the store if a physical address is entered
• The phone number validation message in the store now reports the correct number of digits depending on the country
• Updates to Dutch translation
• The email address to receive low license count notifications is now customizable

These primarily technical additions have also gone live with SpringBoard’s new release:

• Product display names have been added to the “View All Product Prices” UI. Products have two possible names – a name and a display name. Some clients use one, some clients use both. The Products & Pages UI already displays both names if used. Now the “View All Product Prices” UI does as well. The reason both names need to be displayed is because some clients use the name as an internal SKU.
• New functions have been added to the JavaScript license environment for DSA signing and base64.
• An “Original Reference” column has been added to Order and Order Item CSVs to allow association of returns to original orders. Previously it wasn’t possible to tell which order a return went with in the CSV export. The new Original Reference column now contains the ID of the order associated with a return.
• Support has been added for custom style messages in offer titles / displays. Messages are a technique for performing custom translations in the store. Many areas support messages and offers now do as well.
• The productPath attribute has been added to the order item and subscription template variables. The productPath attribute allows the store URL of a product to be retrieved in templates.  Templates are used throughout SpringBoard for email, web delivery, notifications, and tracking.
• The coupon code attribute has been added to the order item template variable. This addition allows the coupon of an order item / line item to be retrieved in templates.

FastSpring’s partners shared some quality time together in a mini-retreat last week. Pictured here from left to right are Dan Engel, CEO; Ryan Dewell, SVP Software Development; Ken White, Chief Customer Service Officer; and Jason Foodman, SVP Corporate Development.

The International CES is produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the consumer technology industry. CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronics products. More than 140,000 attendees from over 140 countries are expected to attend CES, the premiere launchpad for new technology.

With thousands of exhibitors showcasing new products, CES is the biggest event of the year for the consumer electronics industry. The show includes exhibitions, a diverse selection of conference tracks. Keynote speakers this year include YouTube’s Robert Kynci, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Qualcomm CEO Paul E. Jacobs, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, as well as a special “Power Panel” featuring the CEOs of Xerox, Verizon and Ford. For more information, visit www.cesweb.org.

Affiliate Summit West is a three day conference scheduled just prior to CES. It was founded in 2003 for the purpose of providing educational sessions on the latest industry issues and fostering a productive networking environment for affiliate marketers. This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, agencies and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. Last year, the Summit grew to close to 5,000 attendees. For more information, visit www.affiliatesummit.com.

We believe that this movie, in its modular design that allows users to easily skip to sections that most interest them, offers viewers a greatly expanded treatment of FastSpring’s many features and services. It also presents insights into the diverse ways that the platform can be leveraged to increase conversion rates and revenue.

For those new to FastSpring, it’s a great starting point for understanding the depth and breadth of our solution. It also may hold some surprises for existing FastSpring clients, who are likely to discover a thing or two about topics like notifications, condition-based offers and styles, multiple currencies, combining one-time and recurring product/service sales, our embedded store SDKs, and so on.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie may be worth some multiple of that. Our aim in this movie was to produce a presentation of substance rather than a quick overview. We go into the nuts and bolts of SpringBoard in action, presenting product setup, fulfillment options, cross-selling in various locations throughout the order flow, order page customization, discounts offers and much more. We show too in detail how our full-service subscription/recurring billing functionality and in-app purchasing work. Well beyond an abstract feature list, the movie shows you how to easily use and leverage a mature e-commerce platform.

SpringBoard has grown in large part due to customer-driven needs. FastSpring as a whole has always been a customer-centric e-commerce solution. The expansion of our solution has not led to a rigid, monolithic one-size-fits-all technology, but to a platform based on flexible options and re-usability. It lets you jump right in and launch a store quickly and efficiently — without the hassles normally associated with selling globally — then allows you to dive deeper to refine and customize. We also continue to hold true to our unwavering commitment to providing the “best customer service in the industry” and spend some time in the movie quoting a few of our many client testimonials.

So without further ado, we present our new FastSpring Demo Movie.

Greater Los Angeles

North America (US & Canada)

At the Los Angeles awards ceremony, Deloitte introduced FastSpring with these words: “Their innovative engine is designed to assure ease of use, battling customer service and cost issues that have plagued other e-commerce software companies. Ladies and gentlemen, with a growth rate of 17,468% and the #13 company on this year’s national Fast 500 list… let’s congratulate FastSpring.”

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 provides a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies—both public and private—in North America (U.S. and Canada). Technology Fast 500 award winners for 2011 were selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth during the period from 2006 to 2010.

As Deloitte writes on their site, “Each year companies innovate, overcome obstacles and systematically defy the odds. The Technology Fast 500 program recognizes these efforts in its annual ranking…”

When you set multi-currency pricing for products in FastSpring’s SpringBoard platform, each currency can be added to the product’s pricing options. As always, setting up foreign currency pricing is easy using our real-time currency calculator—also updated to show the new supported currencies.

We’ve added localization of order pages in Korean, so FastSpring now supports 19 foreign languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

We’ve added support for payments using JCB®, a popular credit card developed in Japan and now issued in 20 different countries and territories worldwide, including the US, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, Singapore, Australia, England and Germany.

UPDATE In addition, PayPal is now supported as a subscription payment method. This important addition increases sales conversion by offering a popular alternative method of payment to your recurring billing customers, some of whom are more likely to complete their purchase if PayPal is an option. It serves as well to reduce churn, as PayPal accounts are often tied to bank accounts that don’t encounter issues with card expiration, an advantage over recurring credit card payments.

As you may know, FastSpring order pages appear in the language and currency of the customer, based on IP detection, providing a seamless purchasing experience for customers around the world. Supported currencies can be set in rounded numbers within SpringBoard to provide further ease of use and to help maximize international sales.

JCB® is a registered trademark of JCB & Co., Ltd.