Summer is conference season, which means a lot of travel. We're happy that next week is the Affiliate Summit, and even happier that it's on our home turf in New York City. The Affiliate Summit East 2010 runs from August 15th to 17th and is a major event of the affiliate industry, in fact, it's huge. So if you want to escape the crowd this is your chance to meet me us in person.

So if you're making the trip please drop us a note and we'll be happy to meet up and show you our home town.

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Successfully Promoting a Daily Software Deal

We've been working with all of the big shareware e-commerce providers for some time now, both as a vendor running Iconico and as an affiliate running BitsDuJour and I had an idea a while back that I thought would be of great benefit to everyone in the industry. I originally posted this a in the ASP newsgroups (posted January 3rd 2008 if you're a member and want to find the original thread), and several e-commerce providers were interested. Unfortunately I don't have the time to champion the cause on this, but I'd thought I would repost it here, hopefully this can be picked up by the right people at the right time.

The problem as it stands right now is that there are so many propriety systems out there that handle e-commerce transactions and they are all totally different. To create a system that builds on them, or interfaces with them is so daunting and complicated, believe me, I've done it and it's not straightforward. All the purchase links are formatted differently, coupons are supported in unique and differing ways, and the list goes on. Now I'm all for innovation and I welcome that some of the old systems like RegNet and RegSoft are gradually getting dropped and that new ones like FastSpring and Avangate have sprung up, it's just frustrating to see the wheel reinvented differently every time.

One place where I think standardization is needed is in sales reporting. Simply to get your sales data requires that you log in, do a lot of copying and pasting, aggregation in Excel and you have to remember the quirks of each system as they are all different. Some systems don't even allow you to see the exact commission you've earned until your payment is created. Other systems only total up the sales. Some require you to save your emails and then parse them, praying that you didn't miss one of them. The support for adding tracking ids to purchases is spotty at best. Now this is more of a pain for affiliates than for vendors as vendors usually have one payment processor, but affiliates have to deal with all of them. I'm talking about Avangate, BMT Micro, Cleverbridge, element5/ShareIT, eSellerate, Fastspring, Kagi, OneNetwork, Plimus, RegNow, RegSoft and SWReg, and those are just the popular ones. Half of those are owned by Digital River, but the systems are still unique to themselves, difficult to use, and non-standard. It's a mess.

I think it's high time that we have some standardization across the industry, and following in the footsteps in the way PAD standardized software descriptions I propose that we create a standardized system for reporting software sales. This I think would be a good first step and something that it would be easy for the e-commerce providers to get on board with. I'm talking about an XML file format here, and it should detail exactly what was sold to when, where and who bought it, how much and all the details that you need. I propose one format for vendors with all the details, and a second slimmed down version for affiliates which protects the privacy of the purchaser but gives the affiliate the details they need.

I really don't think that this should be too hard for the e-commerce providers to create this, it's just a different reporting format, and I can only see benefits to them and too us as vendors and as affiliates. It will allow for easier processing and time savings for everyone, and the possibility of integrating e-commerce providers with a wide variety of reporting software, shipment and tracking systems, heck I can see a small industry of secondary products sprouting up around this. In a nutshell I can see this simple change saving time money, and creating more opportunities to sell. I know this is just a first step, but this alone could really help how our industry operates and bottom line create more revenue for everyone.

In the original ASP posting we actually had five e-commerce providers give an unofficial thumbs up to this; I'd love to see it be transformed into something workable.