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eSellerate Releases Subscription-Based Licensing Options

Posted in eSellerate on the August 28th, 2007

For software publishers wanting to provide their customers with alternatives to paying a lump sum for products and services, eSellerate now offers a full-featured subscriptions model. This major new, end-to-end addition to the eSellerate suite of technologies is designed to complement and work seamlessly with our existing sales options, including Custom Layouts, Embedded Web Stores, Product Activation and Native Currency Pricing.

Some advantages of using eSellerate’s new subscription-based licensing include:

• It is an emerging business model and a competitive offering for licensing and purchasing.
• It can be an advantage over competitors that offer one-time payments only.
• It provides end users with another option to pay for a product, so they have a better chance of finding an option that fits their needs.
• It provides a potential increase in closed sales and revenue to the publisher, as people may more easily afford a fraction of the cost (such as monthly payments for a year) rather than the entire amount at once.
• It better supports selling certain types of products, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, or non-software deliverables such as access to web sites or a newsletter.
• Publishers could possibly charge more - resulting in more revenue and a higher margin — for the option to pay over time. For example, the choices might be to buy now for $100 or pay $10 per month for $12 months, in which case the subscription nets the publisher $20 more after a year.
• It provides great potential for selling higher priced products that otherwise might not fit the budgets of end users. An example is a customer buying a three-month subscription for software to be used during a specific project.

Business rules

You can set up your subscriptions with durations of 1-12 months and billing frequencies of annual, semiannual, quarterly, every other month, or monthly. You also set the renewal policy, which can be automatic so that the subscription automatically renews at the end of the set duration unless the customer cancels, or manual so that the customer must take action to renew. Another option is adding your own text to accompany the subscription terms and conditions that your online stores will display for the subscription.

By default, eSellerate sends renewal reminders to the customer seven days before expiration, and expiration notices seven days after expiration. If you choose, additional copies of these notifications can be sent 30 days before, 15 days before, and 15 days after expiration. All e-mail notifications have been reviewed to ensure:

• Compliance with applicable laws
• Adherence to best practices
• High deliverability

Customer support

Customers manage their subscriptions through the eSellerate After-Purchase Services web site, where they can update their billing information, cancel active subscriptions, and renew subscriptions that have a manual renewal policy.