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Thread Best way to handle resellers in another country?
Fri, Mar 16 2007 3:48 PMPermanent Link

David
This week I've had two inquiries about reselling my product in other
countries.

Currently I'm in RegNow's affiliate program and it works well.  Should I add
them as resellers or is there a better way?

Any suggestions or comments on the best way to handle this?
Mon, Mar 19 2007 3:02 PMPermanent Link

Dave Harrison
David wrote:

> This week I've had two inquiries about reselling my product in other
> countries.
>
> Currently I'm in RegNow's affiliate program and it works well.  Should I add
> them as resellers or is there a better way?
>
> Any suggestions or comments on the best way to handle this?
>

David,
    I sold software through "qualified" foreign dealers that were
suppose to be reputable (my distributor had a dealer network set up).
Big waste of time IMHO. Some of these dealers sold my software and did
not report the sales back to me. Luckily my software times out and the
customer must get the registration code from me. I had people asking for
registration info and had to fight with the dealer to get them to pay
up. The dealer always claims "sorry our accounting system is antiquated
and we're 3 months behind in paying you". Half of the dealers never pay
on time, yet they get the money from the customer up front. Some of them
also tried to sell more than 1 copy of the software using the same
serial #. I ended up spending more time hunting down deadbeat dealers
than it was worth. Oh yeah, my distributer took a whopping 60% of the
sale to boot! My advice is instead of giving big discounts to dealers,
advertise instead on european newsgroups or distribute demo software on
their websites. You'll make more money and won't be wasting time trying
to police the dealers.

Dave
Tue, Mar 20 2007 5:53 AMPermanent Link

When I did this, I gave resellers a discount coupon that gave them a
percentage off the sale price. They had to buy "as though they were the
customer", but it made it easy all round.

/Matthew Jones/
Tue, Mar 20 2007 11:56 AMPermanent Link

Dave Harrison
matthew@matthewdelme-jones.delme.com (Matthew Jones) wrote:
> When I did this, I gave resellers a discount coupon that gave them a
> percentage off the sale price. They had to buy "as though they were the
> customer", but it made it easy all round.
>
> /Matthew Jones/

Matthew,
   As long as you get the money up front, then this will work. My question
though, is how do you determine the name/email of the user he sells the
software too so you know they are entitled to support? Is the dealer
obligated to give you the name/email of the person who purchased the
software (I've found dealers are usually reluctant in giving out the
names of their customers)? Or do you track each software through a user
registration key that's tied to the coupon? Otherwise some dealers may
sell the software several times.

Dave
Tue, Mar 20 2007 1:41 PMPermanent Link

As I said, they had to buy as though they were the end user. Thus I knew
who it was for (the key was linked to the email address too). It worked
for me, but it wasn't a big business and I wanted full automation.

An alternative may be to use something like Actinic catalog, which you can
set up accounts for. It doesn't do key generation though, so for automated
operation you'd have to process the emails it generates or run it's
command line download and export frequently.

/Matthew Jones/
Tue, Mar 20 2007 5:11 PMPermanent Link

Tim Young [Elevate Software]

Elevate Software, Inc.

Avatar

Email timyoung@elevatesoft.com

Dave,

<< As long as you get the money up front, then this will work. My question
though, is how do you determine the name/email of the user he sells the
software too so you know they are entitled to support? Is the dealer
obligated to give you the name/email of the person who purchased the
software (I've found dealers are usually reluctant in giving out the names
of their customers)? >>

That's how we handle things here (up-front sale with discount and give us
the customer information).  That way the distributor simply sells the
product through their local knowledge of the area that they are in, and then
literally passes the customer on to us when the sale is completed.  They
don't need to do any technical support or further follow-up unless they wish
to sell further value-added services like consulting or development support,
which they are free to do.

Unfortunately, many "catalog" type of companies want to do a "we purchase 10
copies from you and sell them at our leisure" type of arrangement along with
trying to do first-tier tech support, but we always refuse such arrangements
because they are more hassle than they are worth.  There's the issue that
you brought up of how do you really know how many copies were actually sold
when dealing with an electronic distribution method, and also the issue of
do you really want some person that doesn't even know your product very well
doing tech support and pissing off the customer because they're asking lame
questions.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Wed, Mar 21 2007 10:10 AMPermanent Link

Dan Rootham
David,

We sell software products from our website to customers in many countries,
and our website is seamlessly linked to the ShareIt software registration system:
 http://www.shareit.com/

The benefits from our point of view are these:
- monthly reporting of sales
- monthly payment
- very moderate commission rate
- contact details recorded for each customer
- allows us to translate the payment pages into all our website languages
- allows the customer a choice of many payment currencies
- handles discount codes issued on our web advertising
- handles both cheap one-off licences and expensive site-licences

Might be worth having a look at ShareIt?

Regards,
Dan

Lexicon Software Ltd, UK
Wed, Mar 21 2007 10:10 PMPermanent Link

Dave Harrison
Dan Rootham wrote:

> David,
>
> We sell software products from our website to customers in many countries,
> and our website is seamlessly linked to the ShareIt software registration system:
>   http://www.shareit.com/
>
> The benefits from our point of view are these:
> - monthly reporting of sales
> - monthly payment
> - very moderate commission rate
> - contact details recorded for each customer
> - allows us to translate the payment pages into all our website languages
> - allows the customer a choice of many payment currencies
> - handles discount codes issued on our web advertising
> - handles both cheap one-off licences and expensive site-licences
>
> Might be worth having a look at ShareIt?
>
> Regards,
> Dan
>
> Lexicon Software Ltd, UK
>

Dan,
    I've often wondered about these 3rd party payment systems. We would
have a lot of credit card fraud if it weren't for the fact we do a lot
of background checking on the customer, which sometimes includes calling
the customer's bank to validate his particulars. What happens if ShareIt
accepts a stolen card? Who gets dinged for the amount? Does Share-It eat
it because it's their mistake, or do they simply pass it on to the merchant?

Dave
Thu, Mar 22 2007 5:34 PMPermanent Link

Tim Young [Elevate Software]

Elevate Software, Inc.

Avatar

Email timyoung@elevatesoft.com

Dave,

<< I've often wondered about these 3rd party payment systems. We would have
a lot of credit card fraud if it weren't for the fact we do a lot of
background checking on the customer, which sometimes includes calling the
customer's bank to validate his particulars.  >>

Same here.  We've probably caught 25-30 fraudulent orders over the last year
that would have been accepted by our card processing service otherwise.
They're very easy to spot.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Mon, Mar 26 2007 5:33 AMPermanent Link

"Uffe Kousgaard"
"Dave Harrison" <daveh_18824@spammore.com> wrote in message
news:66A617CF-0AC7-400E-A799-54F4FD1BE71D@news.elevatesoft.com...

> Or do you track each software through a user registration key that's tied
> to the coupon? Otherwise some dealers may sell the software several times.

That's what I do. All license files (not just a serial number) contains the
customers name and I'm sure no customer want a license file with a different
customers name in it.

Regards
Uffe Kousgaard

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