If you’ve ever had a shot at building an ecommerce site you’ll know that it’s a task mired in complexity, detail, frustration, and endless “gotchas”. If you don’t get frustrated trying to get shipping working, you’ll be pulling out your hair when you try to figure out international taxation and ensure PCI compliance.
A few years ago I had a shot at building a small ecomm site once and it is, indeed, a minefield which prematurely aged me (have you seen my gray hair? Ecommerce did that). So I was intrigued by a recent pitch I got for a new platform to manage online subscription payments called SaaSy from FastSpring, a company that provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for ecommerce.
FastSpring’s eponymous service provides a comprehensive platform for online business that includes pretty much every ecommerce feature you might need including multiple customer payment methods accepted, subscription support and manual order processing, multi-currency and translated order pages, branded, fully-customized order pages, cross-sell and add-on optimization, coupons, license types and price/split testing, online advertising tracking and Google Analytics support, international customer tax collection and management, in-app purchasing via and embedded web store SDK, social media referral program, email marketing campaign management and … it’s a huge list and one that makes building an online commerce presence really simple.
What I love about FastSpring is that they get it, they “grok” that their prospects want to know what the service does and what it will cost them; there’s no futzing about trying to get some sales rep to give you a “quote” or death by a constellation of separately priced options … nope, FastSpring makes it simple: “Pricing is 5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order, whichever you prefer. For certain low-priced product orders there is a minimum per order fee that may be applicable. We will handle all sales taxes on your behalf, including the collection and payment of VAT for certain EU transactions.” Awesome.
Impressively, FastSpring is in the top 50 of the Inc. 500 and is the No.1 e-commerce service for Mac software publishers. Even more impressively, the founders bootstrapped the company for $30,000 in 2005, became profitable in 2006, and have since grown the annual revenue to over $45 million with no venture capital funding!
FastSpring’s new sister company, SaaSy, is a variant of the FastSpring platform designed for running subscription-based businesses. The company is so confident of its competitiveness in this niche that it has a table comparing its features to that of the competition.
A key market differentiator for FastSpring and Saasy is their attitude towards customer service. The company told me that they have an average response time of under two hours, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year and their CSRs are actually technical (they claim they only hire people who sleep with their laptops).
When I next have to do an ecommerce project, I already know that FastSpring and Sassy will be on my short list. And maybe, just maybe, my hair won’t turn much grayer.
