Insights into e-commerce, marketing, & software, plus FastSpring news.

FastSpring has representatives attending both the 2011 International CES (January 6th-9th) as well as the upcoming Affiliate Summit West 2011 (January 9th-11th). If you are a client or prospect of FastSpring and will be in Las Vegas, NV for either of these shows, please contact us, we would love to meet with you in person and discuss the FastSpring service.

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 120,000 attendees from over 130 countries are expected to attend CES, the launchpad for new technology.

With more than 2,500 exhibitors showcasing more than 20,000 new products, CES is the most exciting four days of the year for the consumer electronics industry. The show includes exhibitions, a diverse selection of conference tracks, and keynote speakers including Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, Audi’s Rupert Stadler, Samsung’s Boo-Keun Yoon and Ford’s Alan Mulally. For more information, visit www.cesweb.org.

The Affiliate Summit West is a three day conference running in parallel with CES, and includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. For more information, visit www.affiliatesummit.com.

It’s been a busy time throughout the Fall and heading into the holiday season at FastSpring. FastSpring stores continue to thrive, and benefit from a number of improvements in the SpringBoard platform that are worth noting. Let’s relate a few of these that appeared in the last two releases. Many of these upgrades are direct responses to client input and show the nice flow between development and customer service in place at FastSpring.

Using advanced style options is also easier now. Store style options such as hiding a coupon, decorating links as buttons, displaying product prices before titles, separating first and last names into separate fields and showing volume pricing information on detail pages are now available as simple checkboxes. In addition, you can also select to use small or large payment method icons.

We’ve improved language selection for English users in non-English countries by adding an option to the country/language drop-down menu to enable selection of English regardless of the default language of the detected country.

Our Google Analytics support, already set up to track e-commerce and cross-domain traffic, now includes additional advanced configuration options, including an “exclude taxes” option, which can be useful in advanced e-commerce analytics reporting and is now the default setting.

For shopping cart order page setups, we’ve configured the Continue Shopping links to reflect the most recent HTTP referrer, returning the buyers to the page they most recently came from on your website rather than the original order-start page.

To help set up a new product that is based on an existing product, we’ve added functionality that quickly duplicates key product settings. This can be a nice time-saver and help prevent human error in adding new products to your store.

As you may know, FastSpring supports Split Pay, a feature that allows sales to be split between partners or resellers, etc. SpringBoard now supports split rules on a per-product or line item basis, allowing vendors to split revenue from a single product sale to multiple parties.

Logging in to SpringBoard has gotten easier too – we’ve improved support for native web browser password managers on the login page. This update can be a nice time saver as well if you log in and out of SpringBoard often.

Our download file support has been extended to include EPUB, FLC and M4V, effectively allowing better support for file hosting and customer download of e-books, animations and movies.

On the fulfillment front, we’ve added shipping option customization for Acutrack. You can choose a one ounce or two ounce mailer, a DVD case, or select custom packaging. Acutrack hosts a FastSpring vendor page with easy signup sequence and rapid setup of your authentication information, which can then be input into SpringBoard. If you’re considering shipping backup CDs or DVDs, selling movies or other physically-fulfilled products, it’s now easier than ever.

On the scripting front, SpringBoard now offers full support of JavaScript, adding to our PHP support, for use in scripting license generators and custom pricing calculators.

You can always see our release notes directly within SpringBoard by clicking on the Support tab. There is much more under way and in progress within the SpringBoard platform, so stay tuned!

In these accelerating days of web design and development approaches, marked both by new technologies and a renaissance of graphic design and typography, the existing design of a company’s website can slowly but surely become a bit tired. What once was fresh becomes tinged with staleness. This is not necessarily bad news, as it pushes companies to rethink and rework their public presence on the web, to come up with redesigns or refreshes that take advantage of innovation and work to ensure success in business goals.

FastSpring recently re-launched its company website (originally designed in 2007), taking the route of the refresh rather than the total redesign. We wanted something less boxy, a site that would feel fresh again, without breaking or abandoning some fundamentals such as ease of use and information-rich content.

Two of the phrases that capture the impetus of new approaches to web design are “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation.” These are complementary approaches, each term the flipside of the other. Progressive enhancement is achieved by taking advantage of increased support in modern browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari, for wider subsets of the CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 specs – rounded corners on boxes, drop shadows on both text and boxes, time-specified fades on elements such as links, and so on. The days of constructing both navigation and rounded corners on various elements through elaborate graphical and markup acrobatics are thankfully drawing to a close, just as table-based layout has widely become a piece of history. Progressive enhancement can be seen as a second wave of the web-standards movement.

Graceful degradation involves the recognition of the reality that such enhancements, when used, need to appear acceptably in less-aware browsers (yes, we are talking mostly about IE here) that do not yet support these programmatic ways of displaying style innovations. The goal is to achieve an “always acceptable” user experience, whatever the state of browser support for CSS happens to be. With this comes a renewed willingness to accept that designs will look different within different browsers. Content must remain usable and readable for all, even those surfing with JavaScript and images turned off. Content is still king, not least for SEO and accessibility reasons, but can be styled to accommodate innovation. One of the best books that explains this mental model is Dan Cederholm’s recent Handcrafted CSS.

One of the driving forces for the resurgence of JavaScript, and in particular cross-browser JavaScript frameworks with wide adoption such as jQuery, is the need for cross-browser, cross-platform behavior (as opposed to display) enhancement. With the advent of mobile browsing, and in particular the need to support the user experience on iPhones and iPads, JavaScript-based animation is gaining sophistication. We have used jQuery to create both simple things like cyclical image displays with fades and for more complex animations such as appears on the top of our home page, achieving some of the effects that could once only be approached via Flash.

Useful in this quest for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is the ability to serve alternate content to IE via conditional comments.
In this manner, a site can, in a few lines of code, target IE and provide it with both alternate CSS and alternate content, if needed. We have made use of this best practice in our refresh as well. Text content can be updated at the page level, and the CSS takes care of the rest, to lessen the maintenance headaches. The IE experience will be more boxy, less refined, but not broken. In general, it also serves to educate users to try other browsers and see what they may have been missing.

On our roadmap is a complete redesign of our demo movie to highlight the current state of the SpringBoard interface and its many new features, as well as to use codecs that play nicely with mobile devices. We will also be adjusting the look and feel of our blog to reflect the site refresh. In addition, we are keeping abreast of the advent of HTML 5, the next major revision of the HTML standard, which incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have to date been dependent on 3rd-party browser plug-ins. A good (short, informative and fun) early reference in this regard is Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers.

With the complexity of calls to multiple files – due to factors such as tracking includes, jQuery and its associated plug-ins, multiple scripts, and page-loading protocols – it is important in refreshes and redesigns to optimize pages and sites in a systematic, iterative manner. Luckily, today we possess web services such as Pingdom and in-browser plug-ins such as Firebug and PageSpeed that can aid performance and optimization.

It is not enough to assume everyone has broadband and pages can afford to be bloated. Performance optimization has even become a sub-industry of its own, much like SEO and SEM. Good sources for general guidelines and tools are available widely on the web. One useful starting place is Google’s “Web Performance Best Practices,” which focuses on five factors: optimizing caching, minimizing round-trip times, minimizing request overhead, minimizing payload size and optimizing browser rendering.

So we hope you enjoy our new site. It is certainly a moving target, and our optimization and video-enhancement efforts will bear more fruit as we progress, learn more, and incorporate our learning into design and coding practices.

The Pacific Coast Business Times, a leading publication on entrepreneurial activities and business news along California’s Central Coast, recently published a list of the area’s fastest-growing companies. FastSpring was ranked #2, showing 1,165% revenue growth between 2007 and 2009. Other Central Coast companies features on the list include InTouch Health, Lynda.com, and Patagonia.

Entitled “Where e-commerce software just clicked,” the article featuring FastSpring sums up the company’s success succinctly in the opening paragraph: “It found a niche, solved the problem and took care of its customers.” The article goes into detail about FastSpring’s near-fanatical focus on providing superior, round-the-clock customer service, as well as the word-of-mouth marketing that has helped spur FastSpring’s growth. The article also touches on new features, such as the in-app store, explaining how when a trial period runs out or users wish to upgrade, they can do so immediately from within the applications themselves without having to open a web browser, which can result in an increase of +5% in customer conversion.

As per usual, there has been much activity on the development end of FastSpring over the past 6 weeks. We’d like to highlight some features that have emerged from this activity.

As you may know, FastSpring runs an agile, iterative development shop and regularly releases new builds containing features that have reached maturity. Our release cycles also enable us to respond rapidly to client requests.  Release notes for builds are always available to our clients within the SpringBoard interface, but let’s highlight a few here too in case you missed them or are considering selling through FastSpring. This list is by no means exhaustive.

In July, FastSpring added Turkish and Traditional Chinese translations to the set of languages that are currently supported on our order pages. We now support the following languages:  Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

We also added support for ACH – international direct deposit – for Germany, adding to our existing support for ACH within the US, Mexico, Canada and the UK.

Other features include an increased product description length, allowing vendors to describe their product in up to 32K characters; display of full request/response headers for remote license generation; and the addition of RAR support for hosted files (allowing greater file sizes than the ZIP format).

Other improvements from the June release include Amazon Cloudfront hosting to improve page-loading performance for common order page images in the US, Europe and Asia; the ability to search for an order by coupon code; and better compatibility and performance for PHP scripts used in advanced license and pricing setups.

Recently, Acutrack was integrated as a CD shipping fulfillment option – commonly used for backup CDs, which can be easily upsold on order pages within our system. Acutrack is a third party provider of on-demand CD duplication services. The integration enables real-time notification of Acutrack shipments as a part of order fulfillment. Acutrack joins SwiftCD as a FastSpring CD/DVD fulfillment partner.

FastSpring just learned that it has been named the 41st fastest-growing private company in the US by Inc. Magazine. We would like, first and foremost, to thank our valued clients for what is without a doubt our mutual success.

A little history from Inc.com:

In 1982, Inc. introduced the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. Since then, this prestigious list of the nation’s most successful private companies has become the hallmark of entrepreneurial success and the place where future household names first make their mark. Oracle, Patagonia, E*Trade, American Apparel, Zipcar and numerous other well-known brands have been honored by the Inc. 500|5000. In 2007, the Inc. 500 list expanded to the Inc. 500|5000, giving readers a deeper, richer understanding of the entrepreneurial landscape and capturing a broader spectrum of success.

Today, the list is a distinguished editorial award, a celebration of innovation, a network of entrepreneurial leaders, and an effective public relations showcase. The Inc. 500|5000 ranks companies by overall revenue growth over a three-year period. All 5,000 honoree companies are individually profiled on Inc.com. The top 500 are featured in the September issue of Inc. magazine, the leading entrepreneurial advocate for 30 years running. Inc. also ranks the fastest-growing companies by industry, metro area, revenue, and number of employees, and we also highlight women- and minority- run companies.

The title of the Inc. Magazine issue, soon to hit the stands, is “Meet America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies…and the Superstar Entrepreneurs Who Run Them” (Sept. 2010). Official release date is August 25, 2010.