As for the service to use, one important factor for me is file hosting. Avantgate might well come on top, but the few hundred megabyte hosting just won’t cut it when one is selling tutorials in video form and when people prefer downloads.

I’m looking at Fastpsring now, though still considering.

Regards,
Niko

I read many reviews about it and i decided to try it.
After 2 weeks, i was amazed: i had 60% more orders than the previous period of time.

In February, the sales were 300 % more and in mid March i have 50% more than the previous month.

It is really incredible. The most important factor were:
- the multiple payment choices
- the very well made checkout page as well as the cross selling.
- the IPN they provide helped me to integrated with my website license manager

It isn’t an ad for them, it is the truth.
I am truly happy with them.

Thanks for stopping by.

The issue we face is that we’d have to custom build a billing solution for

1. our hosting services (which work on their own billing system)
2. Foliovision.com
3. a module to interact with Freshbooks (not sure if it’s possible (I think Freshbooks only works with their list of payment providers) as we let people pay their invoices directly from the invoice.

So we’d be stuck fighting a crappy API in three different places. Frankly we have a lot of interesting commercial and open source work to do instead of fiddling with payment gateways while Rome burns. We’re thinking about changing our hosting billing mechanism from the built-in automation in H-Sphere and migrating our control panel back to cPanel which is a lot easier for the clients to use. H-Sphere doesn’t cooperate with Avantgate (or much else either). At that point, I’d like to build for Freshbooks. Apparently there is a payment API we can tap into on our own. At that point, we could sell directly ourselves via the website and for custom larger invoices run it through Freshbooks but with payment inside our own solution.

Thanks for the good question!

PS. WP E-Commerce is a horrible solution – the code is messy, buggy, fragmented and you have to pay for it byte by byte. Dan the project leader has been caught out several times bad mouthing the competition via sock puppets. Not a project in which we want to take part. When we code a Shopping Cart we do so on Market Theme You can see an example at LuxuryFurnitureRental.ca.

I have never tried google checkout, but I was hoping it would rank high as I’m a big fan of their other products.

It seems that I’ll have to check out Avangate soon.

I’m left with a puzzling question though. You do web development, and use freshbooks… and WordPress. What kind of analysis and approach did you consider when you said it wouldn’t be worth rolling your own solution?

I’m working on 2 checkout sites for two different parties and I was pretty sure that a combo like wp-e-commerce/shopping cart, wordpress, & freshbooks would be awesome and very inexpensive. Perhaps I am too optimistic.

To make you review even more accurate, I have just one comment: Radu Georgescu is not actually the CEO of Avangate, but President & Chairman of the Board.

[This looks like comment spam to me and not a genuine testimonial: PayPro Global looks pretty shaky at first glance.]

You’re right: with the two tier system, FastSpring and Avangate are quite close. With the small difference in price, it’s really more a question of customer service. Hopefully both FastSpring and Avangate are good in this aspect. We need more merchant friendly and competent payment providers!

To tell you the truth, both Dan Engel and Radu Georgescu worry me a bit as CEO’s as they have a history of working as serial entrepreneurs. I.e. build and sell. One or either of them could end up selling their clients out to Digital River like Steve Lee. But I suppose one has to take the approach that restaurants run well for a number of years and some then go bad. A payment provider is a medium term relationship and reasonably easily ended in case policies change.

I will look into those transfer costs and payout system. I definitely need to move away from Paypal, but those 9% and even 6% fees really bother me. I think Plimus is doing a better job here getting in well under 5% (4.5%) on larger transactions.

Any fee higher than 3% on gross is more like tax than a transaction cost. Such fees take a huge amount out of profit. We’re running businesses here, not casinos.

They’re 8.9% _OR_ 5.9% + $0.95 per transaction. That changes your calculation considerably.

Ken White
Chief Customer Service Officer
FastSpring
Email: ken@fastspring.com

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