E-commerce alternative to Regnow.com (or any digital river company)

code_wiz

Hi, I have been using Regnow.com as my e-commerce payment collector agent (online sales). Their recent reporting system software upgrade has caused chaos on everything - including payments being late, wire transfers messed up, bad / invalid reporting of information in control panel etc, and they don't seem to be fixing it in spite of requesting for fixes. I am thinking of moving away from using regnow.com or any "digital river" company for that matter, and i was looking for any good suggestions. If any of you have used any e-commerce company, please recommend if they have been good. US based ones preferred, since they take the responsibility to collect and remit VAT, so i don't have to. (I am UK based software company). Thanks.

Chris Losinger

my former DigitalRiver subsidiary (RegSoft) abruptly closed up shop a couple of months ago. after trying a few other D.R.-related sites, i gave up and just went with PayPal. PayPal's order fulfillment backend is pretty powerful, and much more flexible than any of the D.R. sites i looked at - if a bit bewildering at first. but with a few hours of work, i was able to hook it to the PHP scripts running on my site to handle the software license creation and delivery. now all my license creation is 100% automated.

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code_wiz

Thanks Chris. I will evaluate that option, but how do they handle VAT? Do they collect VAT and remit to the respective governments or do they remit the VAT to you and you do the remittance to various governments and account (more paper work here!)

Chris Losinger

not sure about that. i know they have some options related to VAT, but since the US doesn't have a VAT, i've never used them.

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Dan Neely

How do they handle in-state sales tax? I'd assume most of the implementation would be the same.

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Anna Jayne Metcalfe

Fastspring[^] has a very good reputation. If you want to avoid the DR empire and are looking for a US based merchant it's the obvious choice. Disclaimer: we're with Share-It, so haven't used them ourselves. They really do have an excellent reputation though.

Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"

code_wiz

Thanks Anna, fastspring does look interesting, and i did apply for an account straight-away, but i have not received any account email or greeting email etc. as yet, apart from the standard machine generated one ;) that says they have received my application from the web. Maybe i will have to wait for a week or so before i they will write to me. Thanks for the pointer though. Help appreciated.

Anna Jayne Metcalfe

Anytime. FastSpring's CEO used to hang around on the Business of Software Forum[^] when I frequented it, so having a poke around there is a good idea. You can also get some good feedback and networking at http://businessofsoftware.ning.com/[^]. Finally, if you're selling a product there are a couple of conferences for ISVs you really should know about: Business of Software[^] (Boston - 24-26th October) and the European Software Conference[^] (London - 19-20th November). FWIW I'm speaking at the latter this November on "Software "Quality for ISVs".

Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"