• App2web flows enable mobile app and mobile game developers to steer users to their own external web store to complete transactions outside the “walled gardens” of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store.
• Doing so allows developers to avoid hefty commissions paid to app stores — but also to more directly own their relationship with users and gather invaluable first-party data.
• Steer Safe™ from FastSpring offers a quick, simple way to launch app2web with secure, localized checkout and the most popular global payment methods.

For over a decade, the mobile app economy was defined by the walled gardens of two tech behemoths: Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. For developers of digital-first businesses — including mobile apps and mobile games — hefty commission fees of 15% to 30% were par for the course, a necessary evil to gain access to these marketplaces and consumers who frequent them.

Today, that’s changing. A series of landmark legal rulings and shifting regulations around the world are breaking down those walls, making mobile monetization outside of app stores possible and offering developers a way around those hefty fees.

App2web flows, which steer users from within an app to your external web store to complete a purchase, are a big part of that.

Below, we cover:

• The regulatory and legal landscape — and why app2web is emerging now.
• The benefits of app2web.
• A step-by-step guide to launching app2web in the U.S.
• In-app steering with Steer Safe™ from FastSpring.
• How to leverage your App2Web first-party data.
• How to monetize with web2app in addition to app2web.
• Creating one connected commerce experience with FastSpring.
• Frequently asked questions about mobile app app2web monetization.

Prefer to watch a video presentation about app2web monetization? Our experts presented an earlier version of this content at a Business of Apps event in Oct. 2025. Watch the full video here.

FastSpring is how gaming studios and mobile app makers sell in more places around the world. For over two decades, FastSpring has been a payment provider you can use to sell apps, games, or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your app with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, VAT and sales tax compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great apps! Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The Shifting Regulatory Landscape Around App Stores and Mobile Monetization

The transition to web-based monetization is powered by a number of legal decisions that have redefined what steering looks like for mobile developers. These rulings have effectively legalized and protected the practice of guiding users to a website to find a better deal or additional options.

• Epic v. Apple (U.S.): In April 2025, rulings established that Apple cannot prevent iOS developers in the United States from including links in their apps that direct users to an external website for payments. Further decisions clarified that Apple cannot charge developers commission fees on external purchases made outside the App Store.
• Epic v. Google (U.S.): Similar steering capabilities for Android apps in the United States became available in late 2025 after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Google’s request for a stay on the deadline to open the Google Play Store to alternative options by October 22, 2025.
• Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act: This regulation, which went into effect in December 2025, unlocks steering on both iOS and Android platforms for developers in the Japanese market.

These changes mean that, for the first time, you can explicitly message users in-app about better deals or exclusive content available on your own web store without fear of account suspension.

Why Go App2Web? (Hint: It’s About More Than Fees)

While saving on marketplace commissions is a significant driver, they aren’t the only reason top-tier developers want to sell outside app stores. In a 2025 survey of mobile gaming companies, top reasons for adopting a direct-to-consumer (D2C) web store included:

• Improved access to customer data and insights.
• More control over pricing and promotions.
• Improved brand visibility and loyalty.
• The opportunity to build a direct relationship with players.

Read the results of our entire gaming industry survey here.

The Value of First-Party Data

When a user transacts through a traditional app store, the marketplace owns the relationship, often providing the developer with anonymized data only. By moving the transaction to your web store, you capture the most valuable piece of data for any business: the customer’s email address.

Having direct access to user data — including geography, platform, language, name, and purchase history — allows you to move from reactive to proactive marketing. You can implement automated onboarding flows, renewal reminders, and win-back campaigns to enhance adoption, promote loyalty, and mitigate churn.

Solving the Attribution Gap

One of the greatest challenges in mobile marketing is the attribution gap created by walled garden ecosystems. Web stores allow you to embed tracking pixels from platforms such as Meta and Google — so you can see exactly which ad campaigns drive paid conversions, rather than just app installs.

This feedback loop is essential for optimizing your ad spend, allowing you to double down on high-performing campaigns and create lookalike audiences based on your best customers.

Pricing and Bundling Flexibility

The web offers freedom and flexibility that app stores just can’t match. On your web store, you can experiment with tiered pricing, custom bundles, or loyalty rewards, with no requirement that they fit into Apple or Google’s rigid SKU structures.

For example, you might offer a “Buy Direct” bonus, such as offering a discounted subscription  or a month of free service, to incentivize the jump to your web store.

How to Launch App2Web in the US

Launching app2web monetization doesn’t require building a massive ecommerce platform. You can start with a simple, secure checkout loop that integrates with your existing back-end systems.

Step 1: Add In-App Buy Buttons

Place clear calls to action (CTA) buy buttons in appropriate places within your app or game — such as your paywall, your in-game store, or a settings menu — that link to your checkout experience or web store.

In the U.S., you can use explicit messaging such as “Buy direct and save” to guide users.

Step 2: Pass Dynamic URL Variables

To ensure the transition is seamless, your app needs to pass data over to your web store. When a user taps the Buy button, use dynamic URL variables to pass their User ID, product tokens, and authentication details to the back-end system.

This allows your web store to recognize the user instantly without requiring them to log in again and adding unnecessary friction to the checkout process. It helps you track who that person is, what they’re doing, and their entitlements.

Then you can use that data to leverage segmentation, for example, or to offer promotions or discounts as related to that user.

Step 3: Localized Web Checkout

With web checkout, you can control the design, data collection, and payment methods you accept. It doesn’t have to be complicated — it can be as simple as your logo, the product they’re purchasing, and the payment methods offered.

It’s crucial to offer localized payment methods that are familiar to your users in different jurisdictions. For example, U.S. users are familiar with mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which offer quick, seamless checkout for them. In Brazil, users may prefer Pix, while in India, UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is more popular.

Beyond payment methods, your web checkout may also need to be translated into other languages and prices converted into the user’s currency.

Step 4: Communicate With Back-End Systems to Allow In-App Entitlements

Once the purchase is complete, your commerce platform sends a signal — typically via a webhook or API — to your back-end.

Your internal systems then update the user’s account and unlock the digital product or subscription. At the same time, a deep link redirects the user back to your app, where the purchase is reflected in near real-time — as few as 10-15 seconds.

In-App Steering With Steer Safe™ From FastSpring

In addition to circumventing app store fees and collecting user data, another key goal of the flow is driving value for your users. That means creating a smooth, secure loop where the user finishes their checkout on the web, your systems automatically sync, and the app reflects the purchase in near real-time.

If all of that sounds a bit complicated to pull off, FastSpring can help. Our approach to app2web steering — called Steer Safe™ — makes it simple for you to steer users from in-app experiences to secure, localized checkout, and back to your app, all in a matter of seconds. It’s a much faster and easier way to deploy app2web as soon as possible.

It’s back-end agnostic — meaning it works with whatever back-end system you’re using — and is available for both iOS and Android mobile apps.

Learn more about Steer Safe™ from FastSpring.

Leveraging Your App2Web First-Party Data

When you’re just operating in app stores, it can be very challenging to identify who your users are, collect their email addresses, and create a conversation with them. By using the app2web flow, you unlock a lot of that data.

Once you’ve established that direct line to your customers through your web store, you can transform your growth strategy from generic to highly personalized.

Ad Targeting and Retargeting

With a web store, you’re no longer flying blind. By connecting your first-party data to your ad platforms, you can:

• Identify high-value campaigns: Know which creative assets and which audiences are driving the most revenue.
• Automate targeting: Ad platforms like Google and Meta can automatically use this data — along with their own algorithms — to better target your ads to the users most likely to convert.
• Effective retargeting: Show ads specifically to users who visited your web store but didn’t complete a purchase.
• Build “lookalike” audiences: Upload your list of converted web buyers to find new users with similar characteristics.

Email Marketing

Your email list is your most direct channel for retention, and — as we mentioned above — email addresses are the most valuable piece of data you can collect via app2web.

When you connect this and other first-party data to your email marketing platform, you can easily tailor and target your email campaigns.

• Personalized onboarding: Send tutorials and tips based on the specific product or bundle they purchased.
• Automated renewals: Remind subscription users of upcoming renewals with a link to manage their account on the web.
• Win-back and re-engagement flows: If a user hasn’t logged in for 30 days, trigger an email offer with a web-exclusive discount to bring them back.
• Segmentation: Segment users to deliver the right message, to the right people, at exactly the right time.

Monetizing With Web2App In Addition to App2Web

Whether you’re in a region where app2web isn’t allowed, or you simply want to improve revenue and user acquisition, web2app is a valuable addition to your toolbox.

This flow creates a funnel through which you can drive user acquisition, and helps avoid fees on the app store. To do this, you’ll need a few parts: social ads or organic posts, a website landing page, and a checkout.

Instead of using the app store as your primary user acquisition channel, you can leverage paid social platforms like Meta, TikTok, or Google Search to send traffic directly to your website. Instead of being reliant solely on the app store listing, you can take ownership of the entire user journey.

When a user clicks on an ad, they land on a high-converting page you’ve designed without the distractions — or limitations — of the app store pages. This also allows you to implement other features like robust A/B testing, pixel tracking, and retargeting strategies that contribute to additional access to user data.

Then at checkout, you gain the benefit of bypassing the standard 15%-30% platform commissions and can offer features on your site that decrease customer churn, such as saved payment methods and account management. You can also offer flexible pricing, bundle products, or discounts that wouldn’t be otherwise feasible if you were paying the cut to the app store.

Once the transaction is finished, you’ll send your user to an app store page link to download and log in, where their purchase is already waiting for them.

Ultimately, this strategy transforms your app from a discovery-dependent product into a conversion-focused powerhouse, where you’re able to control user acquisition from channels outside of the app marketplaces while still keeping the flows that already work for you.

Other Web2App Tips

Funnels aren’t the only way you can improve user acquisition on your website with web2app. Below are a few more tips for how you can use it to improve website conversions and user acquisition:

Incentivizing the Web Visit

To encourage users to leave the app and visit your site, offer additional value that isn’t available in the mobile app interface:

• Additional free assets: Templates, PDFs, exclusive in-app themes, or resource libraries.
• Industry content: Educational content, industry insights, and tutorials.
• Site-exclusive events: Webinars, livestreams, Q&As, or site-exclusive challenges.
• Community: Forums, community showcases, leaderboards, etc.
• Loyalty rewards: Badges or loyalty currency for in-app purchases.
• Reports and tracking: Exportable data summaries and personalized dashboards.

How to Launch Web2App Store Flows

1. Create a product page with the products available to purchase for your customers. If you only offer a single product, this can be a single, simple page. For more extensive product catalogs, a full web store may work better.
2. Integrate the checkout experience into your product page as a simple pop-up checkout, for example, or a more customizable embedded checkout. A shopping cart feature may be worthwhile if you offer many products or add-ons.
3. Process user payments on your web store using Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other popular, preferred, and localized payment methods, depending on the jurisdictions where your users live.
4. Communicate with back-end systems via webhooks and APIs to allow in-app entitlements — confirm purchases, deliver subscriptions, unlock content, etc. — and send users back to the app as quickly as possible following a purchase.

When done well, checkout should feel like a part of a more holistic experience that users have with your brand. Ensuring the process is seamless and quick — and that the design is consistent across your app, web store, and checkout flow — will help guide users through the payment process and mitigate any drop-off or abandonment.

One Connected Commerce Experience With FastSpring

App2web isn’t a standalone channel or strategy. Think of it more like an additive layer to your existing app and web strategy.

Together, app2web and web2app flows unlock new revenue and richer first-party data. It’s not just about billing, but about developing a direct relationship with your users.

The question is no longer whether you should launch direct monetization on your website, but how quickly you can get it live to start owning your customer relationships. With FastSpring, it’s easier than ever to connect app2web and web2app flows to your app, helping you convert more, everywhere.

FastSpring is how gaming studios and mobile app makers sell in more places around the world. For over two decades, FastSpring has been a payment provider you can use to sell apps, games, or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your app with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, VAT and sales tax compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great apps! Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions About App2Web Monetization for Mobile Developers

What Is App2Web and How Does It Benefit Mobile Developers?

App2web flows enable mobile app and mobile game developers to steer users to their own external web shop to complete transactions outside the walled gardens of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store.

Benefits for developers include:

• Improved access to customer data and insights.
• More control over pricing and promotions.
• Improved brand visibility and loyalty.
• The opportunity to build a direct relationship with players.

Can I Steer iOS and Android Users to My Web Store?

As of this writing, direct and explicit steering is allowed for users in the U.S. and Japan.

For users outside these jurisdictions, developers can deploy web2app flows: Instead of linking directly to a payment page, you can steer users to non-payment pages — i.e., pages that provide some non-transactional value.

It’s less direct, but this strategy works as a one-two punch: you bring them to the web for content, and once they have an account, you can market the store to them directly.

Ready to try FastSpring? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Beyond the App Store: A Guide to App2Web Mobile Monetization appeared first on FastSpring.

If you haven’t seen this prompt on your screen, you may have been living under a rock for the past two years. For everyone else, this is the instantly recognizable greeting from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

It goes without saying that AI is more than just hype or a passing phase. In fact, it has permanently altered the way we work, shop, write, research, and even think. The global AI market is projected to swell from over $638 billion in 2024 to $3.68 trillion by 2034, and with 71% of organizations now using generative AI, global expansion isn’t just an opportunity — it’s a necessity.

So, what can high-growth AI companies do to break into these markets effectively while remaining compliant with local, rapidly changing legislation?

Luckily, FastSpring has the answer.

These companies need a strategy to navigate the complex global tax, payments, and compliance landscape. As your SaaS, API, or token-based service becomes accessible worldwide, your team is suddenly liable for a tangled web of complex regulations.

This is where most AI startups get stuck. They are forced to divert precious engineering resources to build and maintain a global billing and tax compliance machine. For this reason, they often deploy a basic Stripe implementation; however, time and again, companies realize that Stripe costs more and doesn’t account for all the challenges and complexity that come with a global sales strategy.

Instead, partnering with a full-stack merchant of record (MoR) such as FastSpring removes the operational burden of payments, taxes, and subscriptions, so you can focus on enhancing your product and increasing market share.

Global Compliance Is Not One Size Fits All

While your team is focused on training models rules, a different set of rules is coming for your company as you expand globally: tax and regulatory compliance. And for AI companies, this challenge is even more acute than it is for traditional SaaS.

Take global sales tax for example. This is the most immediate and costly challenge. If you sell digital services to a customer in the European Union, you are required to collect VAT at the buyer’s local rate (which, at the time of writing, varies from 17% to 27%) and then file those collected taxes with the correct authorities.

The shift away from simple compliance isn’t unique to the EU. In the United States, the rules are even more fragmented. Sales tax rules for digital services vary by state. Some states, such as Colorado, even allow individual counties and cities to set their own tax rates, resulting in thousands of potential tax jurisdictions. Each one requires a separate filing.

Failing to manage this tax complexity not only risks fines but also compromises your ability to operate.

Beyond taxes, your checkout itself becomes a barrier:

• Localized Payments: Credit cards are not king everywhere. In the Netherlands, customers prefer iDEAL. In Brazil, it’s PIX. Failing to offer these payment methods risks a high cart abandonment rate.
• Localized Currencies: 76% of shoppers prefer sites that display pricing in their home currency. Failing to do so kills conversion.
• Data Governance: You will be responsible for processing payment data securely in accordance with regional requirements, such as PCI compliance.

Why AI Is Different

In the payments world, AI is increasingly being treated as a high-risk category. The AI industry, especially B2C tools, is far more prone to high chargeback rates. A user might dispute a charge because they “didn’t like” the quality of the generated text or art, claiming it wasn’t what they were promised.

This means AI companies don’t just need a payment solution — they need a sophisticated partner with intelligent models to manage this new and specific type of risk. 

When an AI company partners with a trusted merchant of record such as FastSpring, it gains a crucial advantage. FastSpring maintains dedicated, advanced risk models that actively prevent unwarranted chargebacks. More importantly, partnering with an established MoR provides immediate payment credibility with banks and acquirers.

This credibility translates directly to better approval rates.

The reason is twofold: First, you gain a known, respected partner advocating on your behalf; second, the millions of successful transactions flowing through FastSpring’s trusted network signal to banks that they are processing on behalf of a reliable entity. Ultimately, higher approval rates mean less lost revenue and more profit in your pocket.

How FastSpring Solves for AI Scaling

At FastSpring, we know that seamless compliance and checkout transactions drive conversion and revenue. As your merchant of record, FastSpring becomes the legal seller of your product. The moment a customer clicks “Buy,” they are purchasing from us.

Our goal is simple: to give you the compliance and payment infrastructure that generates meaningful revenue so that you can focus on your code.

• Comprehensive Product and Entitlement Management: FastSpring provides robust in-app tools to manage your entire product catalog, including subscriptions, coupons, and promotional offers. We go further by integrating directly with your backend systems; this ensures that your internal usage monitoring doesn’t just track costs — it actively informs subscription status, controlling product access and feature availability automatically.
• Complete, Offloaded Tax and Compliance: You don’t need to register for VAT in Spain, calculate sales tax in rural Colorado, or remit payments to the Japanese government. FastSpring does all that. We are responsible for calculating, collecting, and filing all global sales taxes and VAT.
• Global Payment Localization: Our platform comes pre-integrated with international payment methods and major currencies. We automatically detect the user’s location and offer them the currencies and payment types they trust, including iDEAL, Pix, UPI, Kakao Pay, and more.
• Intelligent Fraud Prevention and Risk Management: Because FastSpring processes billions of dollars in secure traffic, our reputation with banks can help drive higher authorization rates. Our intelligent fraud models are tuned to identify and block bad actors, reducing your chargebacks and mitigating the cross-border payment risk that is unique to the AI industry.
• Flexible Billing for AI Models: FastSpring provides robust tools to facilitate sophisticated subscription management, perfectly suited for metered and usage-based AI services. For example, with FastSpring’s Managed Subscriptions, your system retains control over billing logic. Your platform monitors customer usage (tokens used, compute time, API calls, etc.) and then leverages our API to dynamically set the price and trigger the charge. This seamless integration allows you to bill variable, usage-based amounts on your own schedule — while offloading all the underlying payment and compliance complexity to us.
• Full-Service Payment Support: If a customer has a problem with a payment, our global support team handles it, not yours.

To learn more about HomeDesigns AI or see their FastSpring checkout, visit their website.

Go Global With FastSpring

Expanding into new markets doesn’t have to be complex. Your company’s core mission is to build groundbreaking AI, not to become an expert in EU VAT returns.

With FastSpring’s Merchant of Record platform, you get a partner that handles the entire complexity of global commerce. You can tap into high-growth economies, reduce cart abandonment, and increase revenue, all while dedicating 100% of your resources to building the future of AI. 

Book a demo today to see how our AI-specific solution protects your revenue and empowers sustainable growth.

The post Payment Solutions for AI Startups: How a Merchant of Record Solves Global Compliance appeared first on FastSpring.

Every company knows that friction is the enemy of conversion. A clunky, slow, or inconsistent checkout experience doesn’t just create a bad impression of your brand, it actively drives buyers away, leading to cart abandonment and lost revenue. In a global, mobile-first market, your checkout performance isn’t just a technical detail—it’s a critical component of your buyer experience and your bottom line.

The question is, does your payment partner treat checkout speed as the revenue-driver it is?

Our Obsession with Performance

At FastSpring, we’ve never settled for “good enough.” While other providers accept inconsistent checkout speeds as a standard trade-off of doing global business, we’re not content with less-than-optimal load times—regardless of region or device. That’s why we aim for a checkout load time of under three seconds for every user, everywhere in the world.

A single issue rarely causes slow checkout times; instead, it’s more like “death by a thousand cuts”—a multitude of small, seemingly minor inefficiencies that, when combined, add precious seconds to the checkout process. 

FastSpring’s checkout infrastructure is optimized by:

• Intelligently Caching and Distributing Assets: We leverage a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver assets as close to your buyers as possible, dramatically reducing load times regardless of their location. Our team meticulously fine-tunes our CDN, changing caching rules to eliminate constant, unnecessary checks for new content. For users on a 3G network in Brazil as an example, this means their browser doesn’t have to re-validate every single image, shaving critical seconds off the checkout process.
• Running Processes in Parallel: Sequential operations can often create digital waiting lines. With FastSpring, these processes execute simultaneously, which significantly compresses the time it takes for the checkout to become fully interactive.
• Loading Smarter, Not Harder: Why load code for a payment method a customer isn’t even using? Our conditional loading for scripts, such as regional payment APIs, only run when explicitly needed. This optimized process improves performance for the vast majority of checkouts.

From Seconds to Milliseconds

FastSpring is obsessed with continually improving the checkout experience for our customers. We’ve gone from hitting our speed targets in some regions to exceeding them in nearly all of them. Today, we offer our fastest and most reliable performance ever. In fact, when compared to other payment partners, we offer the fastest-loading checkout on the market.

Recent engineering enhancements have delivered dramatic speed boosts in critical workflows for our partners. For one of the most common actions—adding a secure item to the cart—we’ve seen breathtaking results. And these aren’t just marginal improvements. We’ve shaved more than a full second off a critical step in the buying process, creating a faster, more seamless experience that secures revenue—and gets your customers back to work—or play—without delay.

Choose a Partner Who Engineers for Your Success

Connecting a buyer with the item, service, or subscription they want should be effortless. Don’t let a slow checkout experience cause them to trip at the finish line. A faster checkout leads directly to higher conversion, giving you an immediate lift in revenue without changing a single thing about your products.

FastSpring’s commitment to performance is the difference between a simple payment processor and a true revenue partner. We handle the complexities of global performance optimization so you can focus on creating and marketing great games and products.

Ready to build your business on a platform engineered for checkout speed and conversion?

Partner with FastSpring and ensure your checkout is as high-performance as your product. To learn more, schedule a conversation with our team or visit FastSpring.com. 

The post Milliseconds Matter: How FastSpring Optimizes Checkout Speeds to Drive Revenue appeared first on FastSpring.

Since we launched Steer Safe™ for in-game steering on iOS earlier this year, major changes have happened in the market. Most notably, steering will most likely be allowed on Android devices in the U.S. starting October 22, 2025.

We’re excited to announce that Steer Safe™ for Android will be available from day one, giving you access to the full mobile market. Steer your players through an external Chrome browser or Chrome Custom Tabs for a seamless, branded checkout flow.

Steer Safe™ lets you easily add purchase buttons or links directly in game or in app and securely pass player information, product information, and more to your FastSpring-powered checkout on the web. Then it returns the player to the game, all while delivering the fastest least-taps path possible.

New Additions to Steer Safe™ on Android 

• Flexible Deployment Options: Deploy checkout in the way that best fits your brand using either an external Chrome browser or Chrome Custom Tabs for a lightweight experience.
• Customizable Checkout Options: New customization options let you tailor checkout to your brand. Choose between our traditional embedded checkout or the new stacked layout to match your design and flow. Offer Google Pay, Apple Pay, and saved payment methods first for faster, easier purchases.

Note: For a step-by-step technical guide on how to enable an integration with FastSpring Steer Safe™ (using Unity and Unity Games Services as the examples), check out our product documentation here. Or, schedule some time with our dedicated Solution Engineers to see for yourself how FastSpring can work with your specific use cases.

Why Use Steer Safe™ by FastSpring on Android?

Steer Safe™ by FastSpring makes getting in-app steering launched easier than ever by enabling:

• Drop-in secure links or buttons for purchase
• Synced backends and trusted player transaction authorization
• Secure payments and data protection
• Seamless in game to web flows

The result is a faster path to steering users from in app to web, less player dropoff during checkout, and more revenue for your business. 

Want to learn more? Visit fastspring.gg/steersafe or schedule some time with our Solution Engineers.

The post FastSpring Announces Steer Safe™ for Android Mobile Games and Apps appeared first on FastSpring.

The latest version of the FastSpring Store Builder Library (SBL), v1.0.5, is now available. This release delivers improvements in speed, security, stability, and features to our JavaScript library, ensuring your checkout stays modern, optimized, and competitive. If you’re still on an older version, now is the perfect time to upgrade.

What’s New and Why Upgrade

SBL v1.0.5 brings key improvements that enhance both your store’s performance and your customers’ checkout experience:

• Faster Checkout: Optimized load times and responsiveness to boost conversions.
• Enhanced Security: Patches for known vulnerabilities to protect buyer data.
• New Features: Access functionality and enhancements exclusive to this version.
• Improved Compatibility: Smooth performance across modern browsers and mobile devices.
• Greater Stability: Bug fixes for a more reliable purchase flow.

Upgrading ensures your storefront stays secure and easy to use while reducing errors and providing the latest tools to improve the buyer experience.

Updating to the Latest Version

To integrate SBL v1.0.5 on your site:

1. Go to FastSpring Dashboard → Checkouts → Popup Checkout → “Place on your website.”
2. Copy the updated <script> snippet.
3. Paste it into the <head> section of your site to load the latest version.

Risks of Not Updating

Continuing to run an outdated version of the SBL can negatively impact your store with:

• Security holes that could expose buyer data or compromise transactions.
• Slower performance that can lead to increased cart abandonment.
• Missing features that limit your store’s potential.
• Browser compatibility issues that break the checkout on newer devices.
• Unpredictable bugs that hurt your customer experience and trust.

Upgrade Timeline

Most upgrades take 30-60 minutes, or up to 3 hours for complex setups. 

The process involves:

• Reviewing your current implementation.
• Updating your script reference.
• Testing to confirm smooth functionality.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I check my current version?

Inspect the <script> tag used to load the SBL on your site, or ask your FastSpring CSM.

Will updating affect my custom code or integrations?

The update is designed to be backward-compatible, but testing is recommended if you use custom or deprecated features.

Can I test before going live?

You can test the updated SBL in a production environment using a test product or a test purchase using test cards available on checkout. Reach out to Support for help with testing workflows if required.

Does FastSpring provide update support?

Contact our Support team if you need any assistance.

How often should I check for updates?

We recommend reviewing quarterly or whenever a new release is announced.

Where can I find the changelog?

See the full version history in the SBL documentation.

Are there any breaking changes we need to be aware of?

To clarify, the migration from your current legacy Store Builder Library (SBL) to v1.0.5 is straightforward, and there are no breaking changes in the core methods or API calls that you’re already using. All existing calls (e.g., fastspring.builder.*) remain fully supported.

Stay Current. Stay Competitive.

Keeping your Store Builder Library up to date is one of the easiest ways to protect your storefront, improve the buyer journey, and future-proof your checkout. Don’t wait — upgrade to SBL v1.0.5 today.

Explore the full documentation and update steps in our FastSpring SBL documentation.

The post Unlock New Features and Faster Checkouts With Store Builder Library v1.0.5 appeared first on FastSpring.

FastSpring now makes it simple for publishers and developers to steer players from in-game experiences to a secure, localized web checkout and back to the game — all in a matter of seconds.

With FastSpring’s Steer Safe™ buttons and links approach, you can easily add purchase buttons or links directly in game or in app and securely pass player, product information and more to your FastSpring powered checkout on the web before returning the player to the game — all while delivering the fastest, least-taps path possible.

To learn more about how FastSpring combines its payments, monetization, and global compliance tools with Steer Safe™ to help publishers scale direct-to-consumer payments for their games visit fastspring.gg.

Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Steer Safe™ Buttons and Links Approach

• Shortest path possible:
  • Link directly to your store or link directly to a web hosted checkout for the least taps path possible.
• Drop-in secure links or buttons for purchase:
  • Add buy buttons or links that go to a FastSpring checkout, or your web store directly from in game and securely pass encrypted player data, product data, and more.
• Increased conversion with automatic mobile-native payments:
  • With Payment Hierarchy, automatically detect your users’ device and default to Apple Pay on iOS or Google Pay on Android
• Synced backends and trusted player transaction authorization:
  • FastSpring webhooks notify your backend when a purchase is complete, so you can grant entitlements and update player records in real time. These simple principles apply whether you’re using platforms like Unity Gaming Services, Firebase, or your own custom backend.
• Seamless in-game to web flows:
  • Fully customizable checkout experiences ensure that your game’s brand remains consistent from in game to the web. Plus, when a purchase is complete, players return directly to your app via deep links–never losing their place in the flow.

Why Steering With the Steer Safe™ Approach Matters

Steer Safe™ removes friction from the purchase process while giving you complete control of the player relationship. You deliver the experience, and FastSpring handles secure global payments, tax, and compliance.

No matter what backend you use, FastSpring makes direct-to-consumer checkout simple, secure, and player friendly.

How the Steer Safe™ Approach Works

For a step-by-step technical guide on how to enable an integration with FastSpring Steer Safe™ using Unity and Unity Games Services as the examples check out our product documentation here. Or, schedule some time with our dedicated Solution Engineers who can help you understand how FastSpring can integrate with your specific use cases.

Steer Safe™ is a backend agnostic approach and can be used to integrate with your backend of choice. In this post, we’ve done the build using Unity Games Services, but you can use others like Firebase, Playfab, or an in-house custom backend system.

Once integrated, you’ll use a signed checkout URL from your backend that includes the product and user ID via secure payload when a player taps the button or link in game. Your game then opens the URL where FastSpring takes in your player information and securely initializes your game’s checkout or web store. 

When the purchase is complete, FastSpring sends webhooks to your backend letting you know the order has completed so you can grant entitlements, and the player is seamlessly returned to your app via deep link.

Why Use the Steer Safe™ Approach by FastSpring?

The Steer Safe™ approach by FastSpring gives you a simple, secure way to steer players from in game to a web checkout and back again. It keeps sensitive data protected, defaults your players to their most trusted payment methods, and then returns them back to your app seamlessly in seconds. 

The result is a faster path to steering users from in-app, less player drop off during checkout, and more revenue for your business. To learn more about how FastSpring combines its payments, monetization, and compliance tools with Steer Safe™ to help publishers scale direct-to-consumer payments for their games visit fastspring.gg. Or schedule some time with our Solution Engineers.

The post Introducing: FastSpring’s Steer Safe™ Approach for In-Game Steering From Game to Web (D2C) appeared first on FastSpring.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can optimize your buyer journey to drive up conversion rates, and how FastSpring is suited to be your partner in improving conversion rates across the globe.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

How User Behavior in Emerging Markets Is Different From The Rest of World

Markets like India, SEA, and LATAM are unique in how they engage with digital goods and content online. These are markets where a majority of users exist in a world where they had very limited access to desktop computers but now have access to mobile devices. 

For example, a recent study by Apptile showed that India and Brazil each saw a 30% increase in mobile commerce sales in 2024. This means that in “mobile-first” markets such as those, a mobile-optimized checkout isn’t optional — it’s mandatory, even if you’re offering a product that’s primarily purchased on desktop in other regions of the world.

Using checkout options that offer integrated mobile-friendly payment methods such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, UPI, Pix, and others is an easy step in the right direction towards optimizing for mobile-first transactions. 

Businesses entering these markets must take into account the different payment preferences as compared to more established markets. 

For example, credit cards remain dominant in North America and much of Europe, but they are far less common in countries like India and Brazil, where most users rely on bank transfers, mobile wallets, and domestic card schemes. 

Taking it a step deeper, in India, fewer than 5% of consumers even own a credit card — less are internationally capable cards — while UPI now accounts for more than 75% of all digital retail transactions. Plus, UPI’s integration with mobile wallets like Google Pay and PhonePe means that most users can complete transactions without the need to ever enter any card details.

In Brazil, Pix has quickly become the most-used payment method, as reported by the Banco Central do Brazil, with more than 150 million users relying on its instant, fee-free bank transfers, and 24/7 availability. Local card schemes like Elo and Hipercard are also prevalent, especially among buyers without international credit access. 

Companies that fail to support local payment methods such as these are risking high cart abandonment in these emerging markets, particularly when users are forced into unfamiliar payment flows.

The most successful companies in emerging regions (and elsewhere across the globe) don’t just offer more payment methods: They offer the right ones. 

A merchant of record like FastSpring helps businesses integrate the most preferred options in each market — like UPI, Pix, Hipercard, and more — while automatically displaying local currencies and brand-consistent checkout designs. 

Emerging market buyers are highly sensitive to trust signals, local relevance, and pricing transparency. When the checkout experience meets these expectations, payment success rates go up, drop-off goes down, and new revenue becomes unlocked from previously hard-to-reach markets.

Why Branding Matters

It’s not uncommon to find a new product or subscription you’re interested in purchasing, but when you begin the checkout process, a change in style, branding, or experience gives you pause — and ultimately, you decide not to make the purchase. 

Companies looking to increase their conversion rates should look for ways to maintain a consistent brand look and feel throughout the entire purchase journey. 

A study by Baymard showed that 19% of shoppers in the US abandoned their purchase because they “didn’t trust the site with [their] credit card information.”Another example from WPFastestCache showed that an online retailer was able to increase their conversions by 220% by focusing on trust in their checkout experience. 

Offering validation to your customers through testimonials, security badges, consistent branding, consistent URLs, and more have an effect that is much greater than the sum of the effort to add them.

The same is true in gaming. Players who visit your web shop but are presented with a site that doesn’t look like the game they came from — or who have a checkout experience that doesn’t match the branding of the publisher — are more likely to drop off than players who are given a familiar experience to the shop and game they’re playing.

Further customization in experiences during checkout have been shown to make 80% of consumers more likely to buy, according to a study from Epsilon research. 

What does this mean? Use the information you already know about your buyers to make the experience more tailored to them. 

If you have buyers sign up for an account, pre-populate their name and email into the checkout page. If they’ve made a purchase from you before, offer them single-click payment options. These small details go a long way to not only building buyer confidence, but also to reducing purchase friction along the way.

Consistency in branding can be as advanced as adding a discrete embedded checkout to your website or as simple as applying a “dark mode” theme. 

Considerations that your business should be making are things like:

• Where are my buyers coming from? 
• What devices are they using to make their purchase? 

For example, decisions like these become important to users in a mobile-first economy because they may be making a purchase late at night, so offering a dark mode checkout prevents blinding screen glare that comes from a bright checkout. Or, offering a clean, embedded checkout experience on your site that is primarily reached by desktop buyers can maintain a frictionless experience that will lead to the uptick in conversions you’re looking for.

Even small checkout branding considerations like the above make a difference for your buyers and your business. At FastSpring, we offer checkout themes to help you match your site’s branding, offer different themes of checkout, and more to ensure that whether your buyer is browsing from bed, or you’re offering a premium embedded experience on desktop, we have the flexibility to match your business’ needs.

Ready to upgrade your online checkout with an all-in-one payments platform that includes branded checkout, localized payments, and even VAT and sales tax management? Schedule your personalized demo now.

How Fewer Steps and Simplicity Drive Up Conversions

Each step or form field in a checkout is another opportunity for your buyers to drop off. Research consistently shows that simplifying the checkout flow — reducing the number of pages, clicks and required inputs — can drive significant conversion gains. 

According to Baymard Institute, nearly one in five online shoppers have abandoned an order specifically because checkout was too complicated or took too long. Their research also shows that businesses can achieve up to a 35% conversion lift simply by streamlining checkout UX.

One way that companies have seen success in driving increased conversions is by taking multi-step checkout processes and reducing them into a single, straightforward page. This can mean offering the ability to purchase without creating an account, or reducing the number of fields required for checkout completion. 

At FastSpring, we offer flexibility through our platform to meet your requirements for data entry on checkout for your buyers. These are features like the ability to deselect unnecessary fields like addresses, zip code, or others.

Plus, we’ve streamlined our embedded checkout to simplify data entry and remove unnecessary checkout steps, including combining the month and year into a single field and adding credit card icons into the credit card entry field for easier visualization.

Beyond reducing steps, improved clarity and user guidance play critical roles in driving conversions. Small changes such as clearly labeled buttons, auto-complete fields (which can be done via FastSpring’s Store Builder Library), or other simplified forms can lead to dramatic results. 

Each incremental improvement in clarity and simplicity helps buyers feel more confident, reducing hesitation and significantly increasing the likelihood of completed purchases.

How Do You Know When Conversion Rates Need Improvement?

When evaluating conversion rates, aim to be within the 2-4% range, according to industry experts like Shopify. These rates can fluctuate depending on your industry and the goods you’re selling, but it’s always important to watch for signals and changes in your conversion rates. Signals like a sudden spike in cart abandonment, consistent declines in specific markets or regions, or lower-than-average conversions on mobile devices are all metrics you can use to monitor performance in emerging markets as you grow your business in those regions.

To support your growth, FastSpring offers its Checkout Conversion Dashboard to monitor checkout problems at three critical milestones: Sessions, Orders, and Completed Orders. 

For example, an unusual dip in “Orders” relative to “Sessions” might suggest that buyers are not entering their payment details, possibly due to confusing UI elements or a misalignment in branding from your site to your checkout.

Our dashboard goes a step deeper by enabling targeted analysis through its built-in filters. You can drill down by timeframe, product line, country, or customer segment to isolate specific issues. For instance, you might notice a high rate of abandoned checkouts in a certain region, indicating that you need to enable a local payment method there.

Switch to FastSpring to Improve Your Purchase Flow

No matter if you’re selling in-game content via your web store, offering presets for your photography editing collection, selling audio production software, or anything in between, the reality remains that reducing friction and uncertainty at checkout boosts conversions across the globe, and more so in emerging markets. 

And whether that’s by streamlining the UX, offering the right payment options (and currency) for each customer, or reinforcing brand trust and consistency, each improvement has measurable results. These changes mean that even though you might have run into conversion rate challenges, a large portion of those churned purchases are preventable. By addressing known buyer pain points, you can hold on to a big slice of revenue from your buyers.

Continuously refining your purchase flow by making it fast, easy, and tailored to your user needs across all markets will increase the percentage of your website visitors that turn into paying customers, without the need to spend more on user acquisition. 

FastSpring is here to help. With our suite of tools including Embedded Checkout, Automatic Payment Method and Currency Localization, Advanced JavaScript Library, Conversion Rate Monitoring, and much more, we’re built to help you be successful in your business’ growth endeavors.

Ready to learn more about how FastSpring is Powering the Digital Economy®? Set up some time to speak with our experts today.

The post How Changes to Your Checkout Can Affect Conversion Rates appeared first on FastSpring.

So, what can digital goods companies do to break into these markets effectively? 

Supporting country-specific debit networks, mobile wallets, and bank transfer schemes gives buyers seamless and trusted payment options. In turn, businesses gain access to the entire global market, boosting conversion and revenue along the way.

But don’t take our word for it; the results from a Baymard study speak for themselves:

• Businesses that enable regionally preferred payment methods see 21% higher growth rates than those that don’t.
• Websites that localize pricing twice the conversion rate of those that do not.
• 76% of shoppers prefer sites that display pricing in their home currency, which directly impacts buying decisions.

Global Payments: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

While credit cards are the default in most Western markets, they are far from the norm in high-growth regions like India, Brazil, and Asia-Pacific. In these markets, the rise of mobile-first economies has fundamentally changed how consumers pay for goods and services.

Take India, for example. With over 700 million Internet users and counting according to a Nielsen study, India has leapfrogged traditional banking models in favor of mobile-driven financial services. Credit card penetration remains strikingly low — fewer than 5% of Indians own a credit card according to Times of India — due to strict banking requirements, limited access to credit, and a consumer preference for real-time, bank-linked transactions. 

Instead, UPI (Unified Payments Interface) has become the dominant force, processing over 75% of all digital retail transactions. UPI’s success is primarily due to its seamless, mobile-first experience, allowing users to make instant payments via mobile apps like Google Pay and Apple Pay without requiring a credit card. 

For businesses looking to capture the Indian market, supporting UPI has become a requirement.

The shift away from credit cards isn’t unique to India. Digital payments have also taken center stage in Brazil, with Pix emerging as the country’s most-used payment method. Launched by the Central Bank of Brazil, Pix now has 153 million users and has been adopted by 68% of mobile wallet users in the country. The appeal? Instant, fee-free transactions that work 24/7. 

For businesses selling in Brazil, integrating Pix is critical to reaching the majority of digital consumers who prefer bank transfers over traditional card payments.

Beyond Pix, Brazil’s payment ecosystem also relies heavily on local card networks like Elo and Hipercard, which serve a broad consumer base and can be offered only if you have local acquiring. Elo is the third-largest card scheme in the country, while Hipercard remains widely used, particularly among lower-income consumers who may not have access to international credit cards. Companies that fail to support these preferred payment methods risk high cart abandonment rates and lost revenue.

A Merchant of Record Handles Local Payment Methods for You

Partnering with a merchant of record (MoR) with a focus on the right local payment methods opens up emerging markets to companies looking for growth. With FastSpring, companies gain instant access to these key benefits:

• Local Acquiring and Card Schemes:
  • Higher Conversion Rate: Get improved transaction success rates, due to local acquiring.
  • Access to additional market share: Around 20% of Brazilian customers use local cards like ELO.

As global digital commerce expands, one-size-fits-all payment strategies no longer work. Businesses that fail to tailor their payment options to match consumer behavior in these high-growth regions will struggle to scale. 

By integrating UPI in India, local cards in Brazil, and other country-specific payment methods around the globe, companies can unlock new revenue streams, improve conversion rates, and build trust with their global customer base.

FastSpring’s Expanded Local Payment Support

At FastSpring, we know that seamless transactions drive conversion and revenue. However, not all payment methods drive the same results in every market. That’s why we take a data-driven, market-specific approach to expanding our global payment capabilities. We focus on methods that improve approval rates and cross-border transaction successes by aligning our strategy with how customers in each region prefer to pay.

Our goal is simple: to give you the payment methods that generate meaningful revenue. To do this, we continuously analyze payment data, market trends, and consumer behaviors to identify where demand is shifting. That’s why we’ve expanded our support to include:

• UPI in India: Meeting the needs of a mobile-first economy where credit cards are rare and real-time, bank-based payments dominate.
  
• Pix and Brazilian Local Cards (Elo & Hipercard): Unlocking Brazil’s vast digital economy by supporting the most widely used bank-transfer system (Pix) alongside local card networks.
  
• New Taiwanese Dollar (TWD) Currency Support: Expanding cross-border sales potential in Taiwan’s growing digital economy.

But we don’t stop at just adding payment options — we go one step deeper. 

We collaborate with our payment partners to understand the nuances of different industries and how customer preferences vary even within the same country. 

While Konbini is Japan’s most commonly used payment method, gaming customers overwhelmingly prefer PayPay. The same applies in South Korea, where Toss has gained more traction in gaming than Naverpay. By tailoring our offerings based on real-world payment behavior, we help businesses maximize approval rates, reduce friction at checkout, and drive higher conversions.

Expanding global sales isn’t just about accepting more payment methods — it’s about accepting the right ones. With FastSpring, you get a partner that helps your business position itself for success in the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.

Trusted Payment Methods Reduce Friction

Beyond our expanded payment support, FastSpring continues to provide comprehensive payment solutions that cater to global businesses:

• Automatic Currency and Payment Method Localization: Our system dynamically presents customers with the most relevant payment methods and currencies based on their location, increasing trust and conversion rates.
• Expansive Support for Global Currencies and Payment Methods: This includes AliPay, Pix, WeChat Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more, ensuring businesses can process payments seamlessly in high-growth regions.
• Data-Driven Optimization: FastSpring analyzes payment trends to continually refine and expand its payment offerings, helping businesses stay ahead of market demands.

By providing trusted payment methods, reducing friction, and delivering a localized experience, businesses can enhance customer confidence, streamline transactions, and foster brand loyalty.

Go Global With FastSpring

Expanding into new markets doesn’t have to be complex. With FastSpring’s expanded payment capabilities, you can offer the right payment methods at the right time to tap into high-growth economies, reduce cart abandonment, and increase revenue.

Ready to maximize your global reach?

Partner with FastSpring and make every transaction count.

The post Use FastSpring’s Expanded Local Payment Methods to Grow Revenue in New Markets appeared first on FastSpring.

To succeed in these regions, businesses must support local payment methods–like debit networks, mobile wallets, and bank transfers that locals already trust. Doing so removes friction, increases conversion rates, and drives new revenue.

That’s why we’re launching several key updates in our Spring 2025 release, including:

• UPI Support.
• New Taiwan Dollar (TWD) Support.
• Hipercard and Elo Support in Brazil.
• Checkout Conversion Dashboard.
• Improved Checkout Customizations.

UPI Support Opens the Door to 350M+ Digital Buyers

As a mobile-first economy, and with Indian regulations that are unfriendly to foreign-made payment methods, India’s digital consumer market is heavily reliant on government backed payment rails like UPI. Easy-to-use on mobile, and used by more than 90% of India’s online buyers, UPI eliminates purchase friction for buyers and opens up the vast majority of the Indian market to outside companies. 

With UPI, FastSpring users can:

• Replace low-converting card payments with instant, secure UPI transactions.
• Comply with Indian financial regulations and avoid foreign card blocks.

Learn More about UPI.

Offer Localized Experiences in Emerging Markets With Local Brazilian Cards and TWD in Taiwan

Websites that localize pricing have twice the conversion rate of those that don’t. To further help businesses who are expanding across the globe, we’ve added additional payment methods in Brazil with support for local cards like Elo and Hipercard on top of the domestic only Visa and MasterCard cards as well as enabling TWD in Taiwan. (Coming Q2 2025)

Learn more about Brazilian Cards and TWD.

Track Conversions in Real Time With the Checkout Conversion Dashboard

When selling products, understanding key points in the buyer journey is essential to improving conversion rates. With FastSpring’s new Checkout Conversion Dashboard, get a clear visualization of your users’ checkout conversion journey through monitoring user Sessions, Orders, and Completed Orders. Plus, pinpoint where buyers drop off and why.

With Checkout Conversion Dashboard, FastSpring users can:

• Visualize performance of products across an Area and Funnel Chart.
• Filter data by timeframe, product, country, and segment.
• Understand key points in the buyer journey like Sessions, Orders, and Completed Orders.

Learn more about Checkout Conversion Dashboard.

Improve Conversion Rates With Popup Checkout Themes and New Embedded Options

Brand cohesion throughout the entire purchase journey is a key lever in improving conversion rates. To better support our users, we’ve released the first of our new themes: Dark Theme. This brings a dark mode checkout to our modal popup offering that can be enabled by a simple toggle in checkout settings. Plus, we’ve streamlined our embedded checkout to simplify data entry and remove unnecessary checkout steps.

With the Spring Checkout Improvements, FastSpring users can:

• Match their checkout theme to their site’s branding for a more cohesive buyer experience.
• Reduce required steps in embedded checkout with a single field for MM/YY, fewer input fields, and improved usability icons (Coming Q2 2025)

Learn more about Checkout Customization.

With support for region-specific payments and tools to improve every step of your funnel, FastSpring makes it easier to scale globally, no matter the market you’re expanding into. Ready to learn more? Schedule some time with FastSpring today.

The post FastSpring Launches Support for Indian Payment Method UPI and More Market Expansion Features With Its Spring Product Releases appeared first on FastSpring.

Or, you can simplify the system with one global merchant of record. 

When Excire became a popular enough product line that it was being sold in both Europe and the U.S., Managing Director Mathias Martinetz and CTO Thomas Käster knew their current online checkout setup — having one solution for Europe and one for the U.S. — was not efficient. 

“And we had a lot of manual work,” Mathias says. “Basically, each and every sale had to be manually organized and given to our tax advisor.”

And if they wanted to continue scaling their business and expanding into more countries, they needed a better system. 

That’s when they discovered the merchant of record model and, subsequently, FastSpring.

Completely switching online commerce systems can be daunting, especially when switching from one type (such as a very basic online checkout or web shop system) to another (such as a comprehensive merchant of record). But Mathias and Thomas did their due diligence, and they’re glad they found FastSpring.

Here’s what they did to ensure they’d find the right merchant of record (MoR) and have a successful transition.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Excire Needed a Simpler Payments and Taxes System

Excire is an award-winning line of photo and video management software products that help photographers organize, find, and cull their photos at lightning speed. With Excire Foto as a standalone product or with Excire Search as an Adobe Lightroom plugin, photographers can leverage meta data and AI for keyword search, facial recognition, grouping shots, image analysis, and more.

As the product line grew in popularity and the team was able to move from only selling Excire in Europe to selling it in the U.S., they found themselves with two separate shop systems. 

“As we were growing and wanted to grow more, we were looking for a solution that would allow us to have only one shop, but that could also be used around the world,” Mathias recalls. 

Thomas adds, “We encountered some technical challenges, which is to be expected when managing an ecommerce system independently. Additionally, we faced issues with our tax workflows, which were no longer sufficient to support the level of growth and scaling we had already achieved.”

They appreciated the value of offering localized currencies and payments to buyers, but as it was already unwieldy to have two online shops for two regions, they didn’t want to add more shops as they moved into new regions. They also knew they didn’t like managing all the sales taxes the way they had been, and that more growth would only make that even more difficult.

There had to be a better way, so they started looking around to see what other companies were using. 

Similar Software Companies Recommended FastSpring

Mathias and Thomas reached out to some contacts of theirs at another software company, and that company referred them to FastSpring. 

“The interesting thing for us is,” Thomas says, “if I see similar companies using FastSpring in the same way as we’d like to use it, that’s a good sign that FastSpring was the right decision for us.”

Without having to think for very long about it, they can easily list a handful of software companies in their industry who also use FastSpring, which makes them even more confident about their decision. 

Talk to Similar Businesses About THEIR Experiences

Besides just noting that many businesses like theirs were already using FastSpring, Mathias and Thomas recommend asking them for more information about what it’s actually like to use a particular payments platform or merchant of record. “Get their experience,” Mathias advises. 

Thomas adds, “In the end, you never know, right? When you decide to switch off an existing technical system completely and onto a completely new system, you never know if it will be the right decision.” So besides just observing what your own competitors are using, reach out to businesses you’re friendly with and “Talk a lot to the people.”

Pay Attention to the Responsiveness of Each MoR’s Team as You Begin Reaching Out

Excire was fortunate to have a very short list of possible ecommerce solutions, as FastSpring seemed like the clear winner just based on how many other companies were already using it. 

But if you have a few options on your list — or if you want to validate that the one you’re leaning toward is eager to meet your needs – you can learn a lot from how a possible vendor’s team responds to your initial inquiry. 

This may seem counterintuitive, as most people and organizations will be eager to ensure the first experience you have with them is excellent. And Thomas says that it’s not always easy to make a decision based on those first impressions. 

But he clarifies, “Even from a first impression, the FastSpring team does a better job than the competitors.” The Excire team had also approached an MoR company that had a team based in Germany, so Thomas and Mathias could speak with that team in their native language. 

“But the first contact with them was not as good as the first contact with FastSpring,” he continues. Besides the technical requirements he wanted to ensure were met, “The way the team took care was very important for the final decision to go with FastSpring.”

Define Your Needs Clearly and Communicate Them to Potential Vendors

Observing competitors, talking to similar businesses, and initiating contact with various vendors are all important parts of the external planning phase when evaluating a new ecommerce system, but there’s an important internal planning phase too. 

As Chief Technical Officer, Thomas is very hands on with the technical aspects of their various systems, so he knows how important it is to know what you need and communicate that to potential payments platforms. 

He explains it this way: “Summarize and describe your own necessities, or the aspects that are most important to you. Especially, what are the requirements of such an ecommerce system? When you explain it in the best way you can, then you’ll get the best, most concrete answer from the FastSpring team.”

There were several sessions back and forth between the Excire team and FastSpring as they worked through the technical details of what their team needed and how FastSpring could meet those needs. Thomas said those sessions helped them “come to the point where we were really sure about our decision to go with FastSpring.”

He continues, “I guess this is something every company needs to do on its own first: to check all the aspects that are important to them, and to communicate those aspects in a clear manner.” 

Besides wanting to combine their international payment systems into one simpler system that could continue expanding their global sales, Thomas and Mathias were also looking closely at competitive pricing, payment failure systems, ease of international pricing management, newsletter systems, subscription capabilities, and integrations. 

The Excire team also found FastSpring’s pricing better than the other merchants of record they evaluated.

Upgrade to a Merchant of Record Like FastSpring

It was looking at and talking to companies similar to Excire that tipped off Mathias and Thomas to the merchant of record model as the answer to their global payments and taxes question.

“That’s how we found out that the solution could be a merchant of record,” Mathias says. “So that’s how we got more into it and found out that there is an advantage: that all tax and currency related activities can be handled much, much easier than if we would do it on our own.”

Switching from separate systems for different regions to one global solution would be an upgrade, but finding an ecommerce model that also managed sales taxes and VAT for Excire sales would provide an even greater improvement to their operations.

FastSpring has also made many of the smaller, day-to-day management tasks easier. For example, Mathias says that “We can easily define prices worldwide; that’s quite smooth. And it was helpful to implement a subscription model, right, Thomas?” 

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Thomas adds.

When Excire initially launched on FastSpring in 2023, they ran into some challenges with email and analytics integrations. The FastSpring team worked hard to meet Mathias’ and Thomas’ needs, prioritizing additional help for the Excire store integrations and finding ways to meet their needs.

Thomas says of their more recent subscription launch, “This kind of integration was very easy.” He says that their integration requirements may be more complicated to fulfill than some companies’, but that the communication between FastSpring and their licensing vendor has been “really easy and robust.”

Partner With FastSpring to Simplify Your International Software Sales

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? 

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, gaming, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post How Excire Simplified Their International Software Sales (and Taxes) With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

You don’t have time to troubleshoot checkout errors, and the moment passes. The baby’s awake. 

Too many players face this reality during high-traffic events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, character releases, or season resets. When payment partners fail to adapt to player demand and scale quickly, players leave your web shop empty handed, creating dissatisfaction that could have been prevented.

Publishers and developers need a payments partner built specifically to scale with player demand, ensuring reliable transactions and uninterrupted revenue — even during the most intense spikes in player demand.

Below, we’ll cover:

• Why scalability is important for video games and D2C.
• How FastSpring approaches scalability.
• Why our scalability approach is different.
• How FastSpring handled scalability for gaming customers during Cyber Weekend 2024.

Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games: FastSpring is a payments partner you can trust for your players and which you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts. We empower you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more. To learn more about how FastSpring supports publishers and developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Why Scalability Is Important for Video Games and D2C

Publishers without a scalable payment processing platform risk checkout failures, slow load times, and — ultimately — lost player confidence and sales.

When checkouts fail, you miss out on revenue. Slow purchases and delays frustrate players and may even reduce future conversions. And negative experiences during checkout and payment processes can damage your brand’s reputation and negatively impact player retention.

That’s why it’s vital for game developers to choose a payment solution that can scale at a moment’s notice — a platform that solves for:

• Infrastructure that expands dynamically in response to traffic spikes.
• Predictive planning to anticipate peak demand.
• Real-time adjustments to prevent checkout failures before they happen.

How FastSpring Approaches Scalability

FastSpring’s platform is built from the ground up with scalability in mind — it’s built into everything we do.

Ahead of your major sales events, FastSpring can expand server capacity, ensuring traffic surges never impact performance. And we prepare proactively, so game developers never have to worry about last-minute slowdowns.

Even at peak demand, FastSpring systems use only a fraction of our total capacity (our system aims for handling 10x peak load). That means less disruptions, fewer delays, and a checkout experience that performs flawlessly, regardless of player traffic.

Tailored Scaling for Your Unique Game

At FastSpring, we know that every game is different. Some see regular and predictable seasonal spikes, while others may experience sudden, less predictable surges related to new character drops or limited-time sales. To handle that, FastSpring scales infrastructure informed by each game’s unique needs, based on season resets, character releases, planned sales, new game launches, and more. 

Our team partners with you to help forecast demand spikes and proactively prepare our infrastructure accordingly. Whether it’s a planned event or an unexpected surge, FastSpring adjusts in real time to maintain a seamless purchase experience for your players.

Real-Time Responsiveness

Of course, not every sales surge is a planned or predictable one. That’s why scalability is about more than just adding infrastructure — it also requires the ability to stay ahead of potential issues and respond in real-time when they arise. FastSpring continuously monitors transaction flow via machine learning models that are under the oversight of an enterprise-grade team of infrastructure and payments experts. 

We can identify and respond to any anomalies before they have a chance to impact the player experience or your revenue flow.

With AWS elasticity and real-time observability, FastSpring can make adjustments and scale instantly, ensuring uninterrupted transactions — no matter how many players are buying.

Why FastSpring’s Scalability Approach Is Different

At Fastpring, we recognize that every game is unique. They vary in genre, player demographics, live ops cadence, and so much more — and that means revenue spikes and demand spikes are unique, too.

We partner closely with publishers throughout the year to anticipate demand fluctuations across their games. We review expected spikes — such as season resets, character drops, or regional promotions — and align our infrastructure plans accordingly. This means that we coordinate directly with publishers on timing and projected volume and then build plans that match, to ensure that player transactions can continue without disruption even when traffic surges.

At a platform level, we aim to operate with 10x headroom above average peak load. That capacity buffer allows us to handle sudden increases in player traffic without the need for reconfiguration. We combine this with real-time observability and a proactive alerting system to always maintain low-latency performance, even under extreme load. This approach eliminates bottlenecks, prevents degraded player experiences, and supports stable revenue flow through our publishers’ web shops.

Moreover, we have an enterprise-grade engineering team that has built and maintains a scalable and resilient cloud-native stack using AWS. That includes autoscaling, redundancy, and failover capabilities across regions. 

To ensure that our payment services are operational during peak load, we maintain infrastructure capable of high-throughput performance. This includes strategies such as provisioning high-IOPS database instances, tuning I/O subsystems, and ensuring we have the correct connection configurations to support increased payment requests during transaction spikes.

FastSpring Is Your Partner for Scalability

At FastSpring, scalability isn’t just about infrastructure — it’s about delivering consistent, reliable experiences that players trust. We ensure your checkout is fast, seamless, and responsive, even under extreme load. That kind of reliability protects both your revenue and your relationship with players, reinforcing trust every time they return to buy.

For our publishers, we go further. Our team works closely with yours to anticipate traffic spikes, configure infrastructure and fraud settings, and validate performance ahead of major moments. You don’t need to monitor systems or resolve issues mid-launch — we handle the technical complexity of payments, so you can focus on your game. With our purpose-built approach to scale, observability, and risk management, we help you capture more player revenue and deliver dependable purchase experiences that keep players coming back.

How FastSpring Served Gaming Customers During Cyber Weekend 2024

Our strategy for dynamic scalability boils down to proactive communication, rigorous execution, and thoughtful iteration.

Let’s take a look at how this allowed us to maximize Cyber Weekend 2024 for our gaming customers — with thorough, proactive capacity planning and risk management.

The Preparations

We began preparing for Cyber Weekend in September. With our base principle of being able to support 10x current peak traffic at any time, we reinforced our infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted service during one of the busiest commerce weekends of the year.

We further prepared with our publisher partners so we could understand their expectations for Cyber Weekend, what sales they planned to run, if they had any releases coming up, etc. This — combined with our real-time monitoring tools, hundreds of automated alerts, and anomaly detection — ensured that payment uptime wouldn’t be impacted by any amount of volume surge.

The Execution

In parallel, we ran a 24/7 live operations internal team to coordinate engineering, payments, and client communications. 

Plus, publishers using FastSpring were using our game-specific risk models that evaluate transaction behavior using the customer’s own historical data. 

These bespoke models drastically improved approval rates, reduced false declines, and eliminated common risk model issues such as repeat buyers being flagged incorrectly. In several markets, we saw measurable increases in successful transaction completion rates.

The Result

Our systems stayed well below critical load thresholds, with headroom to support 20x the actual buyer traffic during Cyber Weekend. 

In other words? A frictionless payment experience for players, even at global peak scale.

Whether it’s a major holiday like Cyber Weekend, a bespoke event, or a simple surge in traffic, we ensure both our payments and checkout infrastructure are always ready to address your game’s unique needs.

We work directly with publishers to proactively plan for events or other expected changes in player purchase behavior — even with very little notice — and adapt both our payments and checkout infrastructure and risk model to adapt to your unique needs.

Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games: FastSpring is a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and more. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Payment and Checkout Scalability for D2C Gaming and Mobile App Partners appeared first on FastSpring.

Need more information on any of the steps below? Visit our FastSpring Docs developer hub.

Step 1: Integration Setup

To automate follow-up emails for abandoned carts, integrate your FastSpring Checkout with an email marketing service like Mailchimp. This integration ensures that cart abandonment data is seamlessly communicated to your email service.

Step 2: Email Collection

During the checkout process, make sure to collect the consumer’s email address. This is a critical step, as it enables you to send follow-up emails to encourage cart recovery. You can also add an optional checkbox for consumers to subscribe to your mailing list. 

To force email address capture during the checkout process, you can configure the settings to ensure that the email address is collected. This can be done by enabling the “Get updates about our products and offerings” checkbox in the checkout process. This checkbox must be checked for the email addresses and cart data to be communicated to your email marketing platform, such as Mailchimp.

Here’s how you can configure this setting:

1. In the application, select Checkouts, then click the Settings button on the applicable Checkout..
2. Under Customer Information, there is a drop-down labeled Newsletter Subscription Checkbox.
   • Choose Show, Checked to include the checkbox for subscription emails and leave it selected by default.

This setup ensures that customers are prompted to provide their email addresses, which can then be used for marketing and communication purposes.

Stay current with FastSpring Checkout settings by viewing the Customer Information section in our Checkout settings documentation page.

Step 3: Identify Abandoned Carts

FastSpring considers a cart abandoned if no activity occurs for 30 minutes after the email address is recorded. The system flags the session as abandoned, creating a data point for follow-up. This Abandon point cant be recorded and tracked utilizing the webhook mailingListEntry.abandoned.

Step 4: Communicate Data

Once a cart is flagged as abandoned, FastSpring communicates the consumer’s email address and cart data to your email marketing service. This automated communication is essential for timely follow-up.

Step 5: Automate Follow-Up Emails

Set up automated email campaigns in your email marketing service to target consumers with abandoned carts. These emails should include:

• A reminder of the items left in their cart.
• Personalized messaging to re-engage the customer.
• Incentives such as discount codes or free shipping to encourage purchase completion.

Step 6: Verify the Integration

Ensure the integration is functioning correctly by checking your audience list in your email marketing service. Abandoned cart email addresses should populate this list, ready for follow-up campaigns.

Using FastSpring Webhooks for Advanced Tracking

FastSpring offers webhooks to provide real-time updates about cart activity. Here are three key webhooks to incorporate into your workflow:

• mailingListEntry.removed: Triggered when a customer unsubscribes and their email address is removed from your mailing list.
• mailingListEntry.updated: Triggered when a new email address is added to your mailing list, such as when a customer opts in during checkout.
• mailingListEntry.abandoned: Triggered when a customer enters their email address but does not complete the purchase.

These webhooks allow you to:

• Maintain an up-to-date mailing list.
• Monitor abandoned cart activity in real-time.
• Trigger personalized follow-up actions based on customer behavior.

To learn more about all of FastSpring’s developer tools — such as webhooks, REST API, and JavaScript libraries, visit our Developer Tools page.

Tips for Successful Abandoned Cart Emails

• Timing: Send the first email within an hour of abandonment to capitalize on immediate interest.
• Clarity: Include clear visuals of the abandoned items and a prominent call-to-action (CTA) button.
• Incentives: Offer discounts or free shipping to entice customers to complete their purchase.
• Testing: Test A/B test subject lines, email designs, and incentives to find the most effective strategy.

FAQs

• Why focus on cart abandonment? Reducing cart abandonment boosts revenue, enhances customer experience, and recovers potential lost sales.
• Must I use Mailchimp with FastSpring’s integration? No, you can use any email marketing platform, but Mailchimp is pre-integrated for seamless setup.

Boost Your Conversion Rates Today

By integrating FastSpring with an email marketing service and utilizing webhooks, you can effectively track and address cart abandonment. These tools not only help you recover lost sales but also enhance the overall shopping experience for your customers. Start implementing these strategies today to drive higher conversions and grow your business!

FastSpring is how SaaS, software, digital products, and video game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself. 

The post How to Track and Address Cart Abandonment With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.