[Note: This is another in a series of posts by vendors I've invited to write a guest post here because they have something to offer of value to microISVs. FastSpring is a relatively new entrant to the e-commerce processing industry for downloadable products. If you have a product or service that helps microISVs succeed and would like to do a guest post here, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com.]

By Dan C. Engel, CEO FastSpring

Bob was nice enough to ask me to post about FastSpring. Thanks, Bob. I thought I’d talk some about what makes FastSpring unique, the advantages of MicroISVs using FastSpring, and so on.

FastSpring was developed specifically to address the e-commerce service dissatisfactions we’ve all faced as software publishers, to offer a fresh alternative software vendors can take advantage of that would ensure software companies and individual software authors are treated how they should be – like gold. We put you, the software vendor, back in the control seat, and we work to ensure technological innovation is again a big part of software publishers e-commerce solutions.

At FastSpring, we offer a higher level of customer service. A Dedicated Account Manager is assigned to you who is an experienced software industry veteran and whose sole job is to provide customer service and ensure you are pleased at all times. Your Account Manager handles setup for you if you’d like as well. You will always receive a personal response within 24 hours, often within just 1-2 hours.

For many software publishers, we can save you a significant amount of money in transaction fees.

Ryan Dewell, who pioneered shareware e-commerce through RegNow years ago, led the building of the next-generation system in FastSpring, utilizing technologies like Java and Ajax. Gone are the days of having to use legacy systems using old technologies and hard to use interfaces. SpringBoard, the FastSpring e-commerce platform, is architected from the ground up to be extremely flexible, adaptable, and configurable. We can adapt to your changing needs quicker, and the features and configurations you desire can often be added to our platform far faster than normal due to the flexibility we’ve built into SpringBoard from day one.

Our interface is both easy and enjoyable to use. Some of our software publishers have gone so far as to comment on its beauty and elegance, which we find very flattering and quite kind of them to say. You can see our interface in action here: http://fastspring.com/movie/

We create a customized order page for each new software vendor at no charge using your site’s look and feel, and the styles are highly configurable to satisfy your particular preferences.

We help our software publishers to grow their revenue upon request by suggesting new marketing channels and partners and by offering marketing guidance. We have a lot of software marketing experience. Personally, I’ve generated many tens of millions in software revenue by marketing Picasa (now Google), GoToMyPC (now Citrix), and other software products, building them from scratch to where they are today through online revenue generation.

Our order pages are highly customizable. FastSpring’s free-form structure enables you to configure pricing and component choices as desired. Add or remove various fields, forms, radio buttons, drop-down menus, checkboxes, etc. You’re able to create the optimal order page flow. For offerings like cross-selling on the order page, you have full control to determine your own price, how items are displayed, and to retain more of the funds for yourself. As we see it, the customer is yours, not ours, so you should control and benefit most from the products you sell to your customers.

We’ve integrated with various 3rd party affiliate tracking and site analysis systems such as Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and ShareASale to help you understand better where your site visitors and paying customers are coming from, their demographics, traffic trends and more. The integrations can increase your sales through affiliates, since affiliate programs like ShareASale often include higher volume producing affiliates since they can attract many of the larger affiliates who don’t join software-specific affiliate programs, only larger, more general affiliate networks. If you use a system or tool we haven’t yet integrated, just drop us a note and we can often add your favorite within just a couple of days.

There are various of advantageous points of differentiation you’ll benefit from as well, such as our dynamic visual reporting, our network of service providers to help grow and manage your business, our testing environment which helps you avoid potential revenue loss or store display errors, various default order page/shopping cart setups to choose from, our visually appealing order page urls, the ability to survey customers as they purchase from your order page to learn more about how they heard about your products, what they use your products for, etc., and so on…

If you’d like to have us design a custom FastSpring order page for you or you’re ready to give FastSpring a try, drop me an email at dan@fastspring.com or check out our website which features a Flash movie demonstrating our e-commerce platform at: http://www.fastspring.com.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about FastSpring.

Best,

Dan
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FastSpring offers a next generation Java-based e-commerce payment & merchandising solution for software publishers which is focused on customer service, flexibility, and reasonable pricing. Visit the website at: http://www.fastspring.com