On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.
In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.
We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.
The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.
We also talked about the market status – both the European and Asian markets were considered as good options for the present and future. I have emphasized that it’s far easier to sell to current customers and that’s why Avangate comes with the most easy to use and complete tools to manage different licensing models: product upgrades, renewals, and even the new ways to sell software – give the software for free and get paid by third party advertisers – something that we are offering through our partnership with TrialPay.
People were also interested to know what’s actually behind the eCommerce fees and behind the buy buttons – a lot of technology, technical and support teams, antifraud and legal. I’ve got the feeling that they would really like to see how our offices look like and meet people behind an eCommerce provider.
Further we have discussed about what are the most interesting products to sell right now. As usual, security and multimedia products were in the top of the list but we have also talked about mobile/PDA software and iPhone applications.
When talking about pricing strategies, the conclusion was that it’s really hard to state some generic truths about local pricing, decreasing or increasing the product prices depending on the market status. We have mostly advised software vendors to do A/B testing and see what price works best for them, depending on the product, target and market status.
It was a good session and I received good feedback on the novelties I have introduced.
