However, many founders quickly discover that the biggest hurdle to global growth isn’t product-market fit — it’s the structural drag of an entirely different set of Western administrative and regulatory requirements.

Companies are often caught off guard by the technical requirements and administrative realities. Moving into the West is not just about switching currencies; it’s a fundamental shift in how you manage your customer lifecycle and your business’s legal footprint.

Every new market demands its own web of legal entities, localized contracts, domestic banking, and tax registrations. That means that a lean, engineering-led startup can quickly become bogged down in legal and finance operations.

Based on FastSpring’s own internal data and our experience helping thousands of sellers scale, here are six proven strategies to navigate the high-stakes transition from APAC into Western markets.

FastSpring is how companies in APAC enter the western market online and 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. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

1. Leverage the Merchant of Record (MoR) Model

Selecting the right financial architecture is the most critical decision an APAC seller can make when selling beyond their home region. For many, the merchant of record (MoR) model provides a shortcut through the bureaucratic hurdles that typically accompany international growth. The MoR serves as the legal entity responsible for every transaction, allowing your team to focus on the product experience while the MoR handles the heavy lifting of global commerce.

• Immediate Market Entry: An MoR eliminates the need for APAC companies to establish local legal entities in the U.S. or Europe, enabling global expansion in days rather than months. Entity setup is not just a one-time cost — it creates ongoing legal, financial, and operational overhead.
• Compliance Outsourcing: The MoR handles the calculation, collection, and remittance of sales taxes and VAT, and it assumes the risk for fraud and chargebacks. And while taxes are very important, this is also critical  for companies using traditional PSPs, because it is just one part of a much bigger operational burden.

2. Meet Digital Goods Regulations in Europe

Europe has moved aggressively to standardize the digital economy, introducing frameworks that require absolute precision in data handling and tax reporting. Navigating these rules requires a proactive approach to ensure your checkout process remains both compliant and conversion-friendly. 

The following recent and ongoing mandates represent a hard line for international sellers, where universal requirements have replaced previous exemptions for smaller companies. 

• VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA): As of Jan. 1, 2025, previous VAT registration thresholds have been eliminated. Every B2C digital sale, no matter how small, is now a taxable event that must be reported through the One Stop Shop (OSS) system.
• The EU Data Act: Starting in September 2025, European customers have a “cancel anytime” right for cloud services, allowing them to terminate contracts with two months’ notice regardless of legacy terms. Providers must also ensure data portability, and by early 2027, all “switching fees” will be prohibited.
• Privacy as a Trust Factor: Beyond legal mandates such as GDPR, 2026 marks a shift toward “Privacy by Design.” Western buyers increasingly treat data transparency as a competitive requirement, so showing clear, auditable trails for data residency and automated decision-making is no longer just a legal hurdle but a primary driver of customer trust.

3. Navigate US Tax and Subscription Enforcement

The United States market is currently defined by complex state and federal regulations. Success in the U.S. requires a keen eye on shifting state legislation and a commitment to clear, accessible user terms that protect your business from regulatory scrutiny. 

Balancing these local tax obligations with federal consumer protection rules is essential for any APAC brand looking to establish a long-term presence.

• The Nexus Maze: Many U.S. states now impose sales tax on digital downloads and SaaS. For example, starting July 1, 2025, Maryland enacted a 3% sales tax specifically on technology services.
• Subscription Transparency: The FTC continues to aggressively enforce subscription transparency under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). Companies must offer simple, accessible cancellation options and clear disclosures about auto-renewal terms or risk significant penalties.
• Data Minimization: In line with the FTC’s focus on consumer protection, Western brands are shifting toward “data minimization”: the practice of only collecting what is strictly necessary. For APAC companies accustomed to data-rich “super-app” models, adopting a lean data approach is essential to avoid the multi-million-dollar settlements that are common under U.S. state privacy laws such as California’s CCPA.

4. Bridge the Gap Between Design and UX

APAC and Western customers often operate on different visual logic. While many high-growth Asian interfaces thrive on information density (such as surfacing multiple options, promotions, and data points all at once to show value), Western users typically favor minimalism and progressive disclosure. In the U.S. and EU, consumers don’t view a cluttered UI as feature-rich; instead, they perceive it as overwhelming and even spammy.

Here are a few tips on how to design for these audiences as you expand your business:

• Design for Focus, Not Completeness: Western SaaS buyers prioritize speed and ease. They expect a clean, minimalist layout with a single, clear call-to-action (CTA). In Western markets, whitespace is a functional tool for guiding the eye; removing it can lead to higher bounce rates.
• The Trust of Transparency: While APAC buyers often build trust through multi-sensory engagement, Western buyers build trust through visual clarity. This includes clear typography, a subdued color palette (moving away from high-energy reds and golds), and a direct, step-by-step onboarding flow that reveals features only as needed.
• Actionable Adjustment: Audit your marketing site and product dashboard for visual noise. Shift from a high-density, all-in-one layout to a streamlined experience that highlights one specific outcome at a time. This reduces the mental effort required for a Western buyer to say “yes” to your product.

5. Optimize Payment Performance and Risk

Cross-border payment performance is a silent variable that can either accelerate your growth or quietly drain your revenue through high decline rates. Friction at the point of purchase is often the result of poorly localized payment methods, or of inadequate fraud management that flags legitimate international buyers. 

For APAC companies, the most significant hurdle is often infrastructure: transitioning from a region where digital wallets and real-time payments are the primary engine of commerce to Western markets that remain deeply rooted in one-click payment systems.

• Local Optimization: Adding local payment methods (such as iDEAL in the Netherlands) can increase checkout conversion rates by up to 30%. Successful brands use dynamic checkouts that automatically detect a user’s location to display relevant currencies and billing frequencies.
• Managing Risk: Fraud and risk are harder to manage internationally. For example, while India’s UPI transactions are generally irreversible, Western credit cards offer robust consumer protections that make disputes easy. Utilizing an MoR can help mitigate this by assuming the legal and financial risk for fraud and chargebacks, protecting your bottom line from the volatility of international payment disputes.

6. Implement Advanced Pricing Strategies

Simply converting your home-market pricing into USD or EUR is rarely a winning strategy. To truly capture the market, APAC brands must adopt sophisticated pricing models that reflect the actual purchasing power and billing expectations of Western customers. These adjustments aren’t just cosmetic — they’re data-backed methods for increasing the lifetime value of every user you acquire.

• Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): Universal pricing often fails. SaaS companies that implement PPP-adjusted pricing — reflecting local economic conditions — see up to 18% higher growth rates and 25% higher revenue per customer.
• Annual vs. Monthly Billing: While monthly retention in Asia often hovers around 75% compared to 85%+ in the West, annual subscription retention is nearly identical globally. Understanding how customers like to buy (e.g., promoting annual plans) can help stabilize revenue and offset higher Western acquisition costs.

Scale Efficiently With FastSpring

Global expansion can get expensive quickly when each new market adds more internal complexity. FastSpring handles the global checkout, tax management, and regulatory compliance so you can focus on building your SaaS or software business rather than managing administrative overhead.

Ready to scale your SaaS beyond borders? Schedule a demo today.

The post 6 Proven Strategies for APAC Companies to Successfully Enter Western Markets appeared first on FastSpring.

Now, you’re looking outward. The goal is no longer just regional dominance; it is global expansion.

But selling software to a customer in Texas or Berlin is fundamentally different from selling to one in Rio. Many high-growth LATAM founders fall into the trap of thinking global expansion is just a matter of translating their website and adding a few currency options.

The reality is that once you cross borders, the rules of the game change completely. You’re suddenly exposed to a tangled web of tax liabilities, cross-border payment friction, and operational headaches that can stifle your growth before it truly begins.

Here are the four hidden barriers to global scaling — and how savvy founders overcome them.

1. The Tax Trap

A common misconception among international founders is that your company’s location determines your tax liability. You might think, “”I’m a Brazilian company, so I follow Brazilian tax laws.”

Unfortunately, in the world of digital product sales, tax obligations are almost always determined by where your customer sits, not where you sit.

Here are just a few common examples:

• The U.S. Nexus Maze: If you sell to buyers in the United States, you aren’t just dealing with “U.S. tax.” You’re dealing with economic nexus. Nexus is the legal status you reach when you cross a specific sales threshold. Once you sell more than that amount in a jurisdiction, you must start collecting its local taxes. With rules varying by state, county, and even city, you could find yourself owing taxes in 50+ different jurisdictions, each with its own rates and filing requirements.
• The VAT Burden: Similarly, if you sell into the European Union, you are responsible for collecting Value-Added Tax (VAT) at the buyer’s country’s rate (e.g., 19% in Germany vs. 20% in France) and remitting it to the local authorities.

For a growing finance team, international taxes can be an administrative nightmare. You’re forced to either hire expensive international tax firms or risk audits and fines that could cripple your business.

2. The Payments Paradox

When you expanded within LATAM, you learned that offering trusted local methods like Pix or Mercado Pago was critical to regional success. It’s tempting to apply the same logic globally by adding every possible payment option to your checkout page.

However, an overwhelming number of payment methods can actually backfire, creating decision fatigue or even confusion — which lowers conversion rates.

A customer in the Netherlands wants to see iDEAL. A customer in the U.S. expects credit cards or Apple Pay. If a German buyer lands on your checkout and sees a list of irrelevant options intended for Brazilian or American shoppers, trust erodes immediately.

You don’t need more payment methods; you need a dynamic checkout experience — a system that automatically detects a user’s location and device and displays only the currencies and payment methods relevant to them.

3. The Leaky Funnel

It’s natural to assume that a conversion occurs when a customer clicks “Buy.” In reality, cross-border sales face hidden obstacles that silently kill conversions and erode margins.

First, you face false declines caused by a lack of local acquiring.

• What Is Local Acquiring? It’s the ability to process a payment through a bank in the buyer’s own country. Without it, your transaction looks “foreign” to the buyer’s bank, triggering security flags and declining valid customers. This creates involuntary churn: Your product works, the customer wants to pay, but the banking infrastructure rejects them.

Second, you face value erosion.

• What Is Value Erosion? Even when payments succeed, standard payment service providers (PSPs) often apply high foreign exchange (FX) fees on every transaction. You might be making the sale, but you aren’t capturing the full value of the revenue.

4. The Finance Burden

Selling globally is exciting for the sales team, but without a unified platform, it creates a resource drain on your back office.

The core problem is fragmentation.

• What Is Fragmentation? If you sell in USD, EUR, GBP, and JPY using standard PSPs, your finance team is forced to reconcile multiple merchant accounts, inconsistent report formats, and varying settlement dates.

What should be a simple month-end close turns into weeks of spreadsheet wrangling to consolidate data. This operational debt scales with your growth — the more you sell, the harder it becomes to report on it.

The Solution: A Merchant of Record

The do-it-yourself approach to global sales — piecing together a PSP like Stripe with third-party tax tools and fraud plugins — often leads to a bloated total cost of ownership.

This is why high-growth SaaS companies partner with a merchant of record (MoR) like FastSpring.

When you sell through FastSpring, we become the legal seller of the product. This shift offers three critical advantages:

1. Immediate Tax Compliance: We handle the calculation, collection, and remittance of taxes in more than 240 countries worldwide, including all U.S. tax jurisdictions. You don’t need to register your business in Berlin or Texas; we are already there.
2. Higher Approval Rates: Because FastSpring processes payments locally in major regions, we see significantly higher authorization rates than standard PSPs. We also manage dunning behind the scenes to recover revenue that would otherwise be lost to churn.
3. One Wire, One Report: You can sell in 20+ currencies to maximize conversion, but FastSpring converts and remits a single, clean transfer to your bank account. We absorb the complexity so you can focus on your product and your business’ growth.

Go Global Without the Headaches: Partner With FastSpring

You’ve built a world-class product in LATAM. Don’t let the complexity of global bureaucracy slow you down.

By partnering with FastSpring, you gain a liability shield against tax risk and fraud, while delivering a seamless, localized experience to buyers anywhere in the world.

Ready to scale your SaaS beyond borders? Schedule a demo today and let us handle the complexity.

The post 4 Mistakes LATAM SaaS Companies Make When Selling Abroad — and How to Overcome Them appeared first on FastSpring.

For digital-first businesses, the easiest way to manage all aspects of billing is to choose a solution that acts as your merchant of record (MoR). A billing solution that acts as your MoR gives you access to multiple payment processors (which lets you accept more payment methods and is useful when accepting payments globally, as we explain below) while taking on the liability of all transactions for you. An MoR also takes the lead on chargebacks, fraud prevention, tax audits, legal compliance, and more.

When selling physical goods and services (online or in person), various Stripe alternatives built for physical goods payments (such as Amazon Pay, Square, etc.) can provide payment processing, order fulfillment, financing options, and more. (It’s worth noting that most of these solutions can also be used by SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods companies; however, none of them is a complete payment solution.)

In this guide, we compare eight of the best Stripe alternatives in each of these categories. Since our expertise is in providing MoR services to digital-first companies, we’ll start with an in-depth review of our solution, FastSpring.

Table of Contents

• MoRs for digital goods companies:
  • FastSpring: International payment solution for SaaS, software, video game, mobile app, AI, eLearning, and other digital product businesses.
  • Paddle: Payment infrastructure platform.
  • Verifone: Formerly 2Checkout.
• Billing software for selling physical goods and services:
  • Square: Popular payment platform for startups.
  • PayPal for Business: Available on major ecommerce platforms.
  • Authorize.net: For merchants and small businesses.
  • Adyen: Robust financial technology platform.
  • Amazon: Payment service and order fulfillment.

Note: Information in this article was validated at time of publishing and is subject to change.

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

All-In-One Payment Solutions (MoRs) for Digital-First Businesses

Most companies using Stripe (or something similar to Stripe) know it’s more than just a payment processing platform — but that there are challenges to making the system work for a global SaaS company. It can require tons of add-ons, a complicated pricing structure, and additional fees — and still lack or limit some key features.

For example, Stripe advertises subscription management features as part of the Stripe Billing package; however, many companies end up integrating with another service like Chargebee or Recurly to get the subscription management features and ease of use they need.

Often, digital goods businesses end up with a payment tech stack of over a dozen tools for:

• Calculating and remitting international taxes.
• Accessing additional subscription management features.
• Covering fraud protection.
• Handling chargebacks.
• Implementing a checkout.
• Getting higher authorization rates in other countries.
• And more.

Making it all work together puts a massive strain on the development team.

Plus, you’ll need to maintain a large team of tax and legal experts to stay up to date on regional regulations and maintain global compliance (because solutions like Stripe don’t usually help with legalities). For example, while it’s true that historically, SaaS and ecommerce companies haven’t always needed to pay VAT or sales tax, that’s no longer the case. If you don’t collect and remit the right amount of tax in each jurisdiction where you sell, you could face hefty fines — or even be banned from selling in that region in the future.

Choosing a payment processing solution that also acts as your MoR solves all these problems. 

A merchant of record (MoR) takes care of the entire digital goods billing process for you, including collecting and remitting local and international taxes (such as VAT and local sales tax), staying compliant with local laws and regulations, online payment processing, chargebacks, and much more.

FastSpring Is an International Payment Solution

FastSpring has been acting as an MoR for global software and video game companies for over 20 years, so we know what it takes to expand globally almost overnight. Here are some examples of how FastSpring helped other SaaS and software companies expand globally and increase revenue:

• Mailbird achieved over 100% growth by switching to FastSpring. They previously experimented with platforms like Stripe and PayPal. Read the Mailbird case study here.
• Capture One increased their conversion rate by 40% by switching from an in-house solution to FastSpring to help them with global payments. FastSpring offered them localized checkout experiences that automatically display accurate pricing, language, currency, and taxes around the world. Plus, it was clear that FastSpring is an invested partner with the scalability to grow with their business needs as Capture One expanded their global reach. Read the Capture One case study here.
• SocialBee doubled its monthly recurring revenue and managed tax compliance by switching from Braintree to FastSpring. Read the SocialBee case study here.

Next, we’ll take a deep dive into a few of FastSpring’s billing solutions. 

Note: The following solutions are also offered to digital-first businesses selling downloadable software, video games, app subscriptions, and other digital products. 

Leverage Multiple Payment Processors to Increase Revenue

Many digital-first companies and founding teams initially think they just need one payment processor to accept payments. However, most of those companies eventually end up needing more in order to:

• Accept more payment methods: Customers are more likely to complete a purchase if they can use their preferred payment method. However, not every payment processor supports the same list of payment methods. Working with multiple payment processors lets you accept more local payment methods and, therefore, increase revenue.
• Increase authorization rates for international transactions: Card networks are more likely to authorize transactions when the payment processor is in the same country as the buyer. Some payment processors will establish a legal entity in multiple locations; however, most companies still need to work with multiple payment processors in order to process all payments locally. 
• Accept payments from more countries: Some payment processors only support payments from select countries or regions. Working with multiple payment processors lets you reach customers in more locations.
• Minimize failed payments: Working with multiple payment processors can also solve connectivity issues or system failures. If one payment processor is experiencing a network failure, you can reroute the transaction to a payment processor that’s fully operational. 

With FastSpring, you’ll be supported by multiple payment processors that specialize in global transactions and accept the most common payment options around the world — including but not limited to Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH bank transfers, SEPA, Amazon Pay, Pix, AliPay, UPI, and more (with more added all the time).

Click here to see the full list of payment methods accepted by FastSpring.

FastSpring connects with multiple international payment gateways, and our platform uses intelligent payment routing to send each payment to the gateway with the highest authorization rates for that payment method and location. Then, if a transaction fails, we automatically retry the transaction using a secondary payment processor.

Related: Top 10 International Payment Gateways: An In-Depth Guide

Prevent Fraudulent Transactions Without Blocking Valid Transactions 

The right fraud protection can help you increase authorization rates, decrease chargebacks, and protect your company from attacks. However, if legitimate transactions get marked as fraud, you’ll lose revenue.

FastSpring takes the lead on fraud and risk activities by partnering with Sift for advanced risk analysis and fraud protection. Sift uses machine learning and AI to analyze millions of global transactions each month to identify risky transactions with higher accuracy. This means your fraud protection is constantly evolving to provide better security and improve approval rates.

FastSpring can also block transactions from countries and jurisdictions where companies are currently not allowed to do business. 

Note: You also have the option to block transactions from certain regions or limit products in each region.

If one of your customers does initiate a chargeback, or there’s an issue with fraud, FastSpring takes the lead to resolve it for you.

Discover more and read FAQs about FastSpring’s GDPR and PCI compliance, how FastSpring helps protect against high-risk transactions, and more.

Avoid High Fines and Penalties by Letting FastSpring Handle Local Legal Compliance for You

Even if all legitimate transactions go through, you could face hefty fines or be prevented from transacting in that region if the transactions don’t comply with local laws and regulations. (For example, the Reserve Bank of India limits automatic recurring payments to ₹15,000 INR, or approximately US$170; transaction attempts above that amount simply won’t go through.) 

Most companies need a full compliance department of legal professionals to keep up to date with all the laws and regulations of each jurisdiction they do business in. 

You can also face fines or penalties if you don’t file consumption tax. SaaS companies didn’t always have to pay tax, but tax regulations for digital sales are changing and being increasingly enforced.

Companies that use Stripe (or another point solution) must handle tax on their own. While Stripe will help gather sales tax, you’ll need other software to collect VAT, GST, and other forms of consumption tax. Plus, you’ll need a staff of tax experts to remit the tax at the end of each tax period. 

FastSpring handles the whole process of calculating, collecting, and remitting global sales and consumption taxes for you by: 

• Collecting all consumption tax (including GST, VAT, SST, etc.) and remitting it at the appropriate times.
• Taking the lead on legal compliance (including audits).

FastSpring collects and files taxes in more than 55 countries, 13 provinces, and all 45 U.S. states with sales tax (the other five states don’t collect sales tax). We even handle tax-exempt transactions in the U.S. and B2B reverse charges (when and where allowed) internationally.

FastSpring is fully compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Additionally, we renew our level one certification — which is the highest level possible — with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) every year. FastSpring also participates in the Data Privacy Framework (DPF) for international data transfers. Learn more at our Trust Center.

We build and maintain relationships worldwide with tax law specialists who keep us aware and up to date on laws and regulations as they change.

Manage Everything From Checkout to Subscriptions in One Platform

Instead of building and onboarding a payment stack of over a dozen different solutions to help you manage subscriptions, checkout experiences, reporting, analytics, and more, FastSpring lets companies streamline and manage all aspects of digital goods billing directly from their FastSpring dashboard. 

Below is a brief overview of these features. For a complete list of features (including digital invoicing and interactive quotes) visit FastSpring’s product overview page.

Custom, Localized, and Optimized Checkout Experience

FastSpring gives you full control over your checkout process with our Store Builder Library (SBL). You can customize your checkout, and our team will offer personalized customer support along the way.

We also offer three pre-built experiences. With minimal code, you can embed the FastSpring checkout into a web page or insert a pop-up checkout. Or, if you want to outsource the entire checkout process, you can choose the web storefront option to send customers to a secure web storefront managed entirely by FastSpring. You can also customize the storefront to match the visual branding of your website.

Whichever checkout experience you choose, FastSpring can automatically localize your checkout based on the customer’s location, including translation into 21+ languages and price conversion to many local currencies. You can also set your own language, currency, and price for each region or opt to let your customers choose for themselves.

Related: International Recurring Payments (How We Handle It for You)

Subscription Management

FastSpring lets you create a variety of custom trial and recurring billing models without writing a line of code. You can set up:

• Automatic weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom recurring billing.
• Prorated billing to accommodate upgrades — and downgrades — mid cycle.
• Free or paid trials of any length.
• Trials with or without collecting payment details.
• Automatic or manual renewal.
• Upsells, cross-sells, one-time add-ons, and discounts.
• Automatic failure handling, notifications, and retries to reduce churn.
• B2B digital invoicing.
• And much more.

You‘ll also have access to FastSpring’s developer-friendly API and webhooks library to build more complex custom subscription logic and integrations.

If you want to see how FastSpring compares to Chargebee, read this article. 

Dunning Management

FastSpring handles all failed payments and customer notifications for you — simply choose how you want it handled, and we take care of the rest. Our platform offers flexible dunning management options, which include: 

• Proactive reminders when payment information needs updating. Automatically send flexible, custom email reminders to your customers before a debit or credit card expires. We offer a pre-made email template — or you can customize your own email and set it to send two, five, seven, 14, or 21 days after a payment failure.
• Automatically retry failed payments. FastSpring retries the original payment method multiple times, including before sending each reminder email.
• Flexible failed payment logic. Continue (or pause) service until the last notification has been sent out. Pause (or cancel) the service once all notifications have been sent out and the payment is still getting declined.

With FastSpring, your customers will also have an easy-to-access and intuitive self-serve Customer Account Portal where they can view their order history, update payment information, and manage their subscriptions. The portal is managed by FastSpring but matches the branding of your checkout for a cohesive customer experience.

Reporting and Analytics

While Stripe does offer revenue recognition tools for accounting purposes, many SaaS companies using Stripe end up adding a reporting and customer analytics tool to give them more insight into stats such as MRR, churn rate, new customers by product type or geography, and more. 

FastSpring’s Reporting and Analytics, on the other hand, is a robust suite built for digital products businesses. You can view key performance indicators (KPI) for your customer base and subscription models to better understand:

• How each product contributes to your bottom line. 
• When customers are most likely to drop off.
• What coupons or promotions are working.
• Which subscription models generate the most revenue.
• Where your customers are located.
• What currencies and payment methods customers prefer.
• Chargeback rates by customer segment.
• Chargeback rates by product line.
• The status of your active webhooks.
• And much more.

Our platform features several dashboards, which include:

• Revenue Overview.
• Subscription Overview.
• Revenue Recognition.
• Chargeback Overview.
• Webhook Status.

If you don’t see exactly what you need, you can create and save your own custom reports. You can also reach out to our team for help finding or building the report you need. Export and share reports as a CSV, PNG, or XLSX file. 

For a complete list of features — including Digital Invoicing and Interactive Quotes — visit our website.

One Simple Pricing Model; All the Benefits

Most payment processors (like Stripe) typically charge a low processing fee; however, they’ll charge extra for features such as subscription management, additional payment method support, tax collection, and more. 

They’ll also usually pass along transaction fees such as network/scheme downgrade fees.

Plus, you’ll have to pay for any additional software needed for a complete billing solution — and the staff to manage the entire process. 

For most companies, what starts as seemingly low, flat-rate pricing ends up being an expensive route to take.

On the other hand, FastSpring manages your entire digital goods billing process for one flat rate. You’ll get access to our whole platform — including every feature and all services — in a single comprehensive package. 

Our team works with you to find an affordable monthly fee based on your transaction volume (and you’ll only be charged for successful transactions). Plus, you won’t need any additional software or headcount since we’re liable for transactions and take the lead on sales tax and VAT.

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Paddle: Payment Infrastructure Platform

Paddle is another Stripe alternative that acts as an MoR for SaaS and software companies. Paddle has features such as: 

• Multiple payment gateways.
• Secure checkout.
• Recurring billing management.
• A robust payments toolkit.
• Fraud protection.
• Transaction and subscription reporting.
• Invoicing. 
• And more.

Learn more about Paddle alternatives.

Verifone: Formerly 2Checkout

Verifone is a Stripe alternative that can act as your MoR or just as a payment service provider. This gives them the flexibility to support small- to medium-sized companies in different industries offering both in-person and online goods or services (e.g., retail and hospitality). 

Verifone functionalities include:

• Integrated point-of-sale (POS).
• Kiosks.
• Subscription management.
• Hosted checkout.
• Partner sales channel management.
• And more.

Some of these features are included with Verifone packages, while others are add-ons with their own additional fees.

With over 20 years of experience serving international software companies, FastSpring is one of the longest-standing MoRs for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other digital products companies. Use our expertise to help grow your business quickly. To learn more, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

Stripe Alternative Billing Software for Selling Physical Goods and Services

While digital product companies can use almost any billing solution to sell their product (although some will be more effective than others), not every solution will be effective for companies selling physical goods or services. Companies selling physical goods and services need solutions that can manage both online and in-person transactions. 

When selling physical goods or services, most companies end up using two or more software solutions to build a complete billing solution. However, there are ways to minimize how many you need and how much it will cost you. The best place to start is to carefully consider your current needs (e.g., are you selling in person and online?) and plan for your future needs (e.g., are you a new business owner who might want to start selling online in the future?). 

Then, you can evaluate each billing solution by asking a few key questions: 

• How many aspects of billing does the software cover? Is each offering truly sufficient for your current needs (e.g., maybe they offer a subscription billing solution but don’t support the business model you need)? Do the features leave room for your company to grow?
• Does their pricing model allow you to get all features for one price, or will you have to pay extra for the features you need? Will the price be sustainably cost effective long term, as your company grows?
• Does the software offer seamless integration with other software you use?
• Is the software user friendly? 

Next, we cover five Stripe competitors for companies selling physical goods and services to help you get started with your search. 

Square: Popular Payment Platform for Startups

Square is a popular point-of-sale solution for companies of all sizes. With Square, you can accept payments from your online store, in-person, or via social media. Beyond payment processing, Square also offers solutions for: 

• Virtual terminals (so you can accept credit card payments using your computer).
• Business management.
• Customer engagement.
• Banking (including merchant accounts, savings accounts, and loans).
• Team management (including payroll, time off, etc.).
• And more.

PayPal for Business: Available on Major Ecommerce Platforms 

PayPal is a well-known digital wallet for personal online payments; however, they also offer payment processing for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. PayPal supports debit card and credit card processing in store or from your online business.

(Digital-first businesses using FastSpring can also process payments using PayPal.)

PayPal for Business also includes: 

• QR code and POS systems.
• Donation tools.
• Built-in integrations with major ecommerce shopping carts (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce, and more).
• Risk management and chargeback protection.
• Mass payouts.
• And more.

Note: PayPal also has a payments option called PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree) that offers your own merchant account.

Authorize.net: For Merchants and Small Businesses

Authorize.net (a Visa solution) is a payment service provider that supports mobile payments, phone payments, and ACH. They also provide a card reader for in-person payments and support online purchases. 

Other features offered by Authorize.net include: 

• Simple checkout button.
• Recurring payments.
• Digital invoicing.
• Advanced fraud detection.
• Optional merchant account bundle.
• And more.

Adyen: Robust Financial Technology Platform

Adyen is an end-to-end solution for payment processing, data, and financial management. In addition to payment processing, Adyen offers features such as: 

• Virtual and physical card creation.
• Tools to optimize traffic in real time.
• Fraud detection.
• Automated dunning.
• Business bank accounts for your users.
• And more.

Amazon Pay: Payment Service and Order Fulfillment

Amazon Pay lets your customers use the payment information already stored in their Amazon account on your website. You can use Amazon Pay as a stand-alone payment solution without becoming an Amazon Marketplaces seller — or you can easily use Amazon Pay on your own website and become an Amazon merchant (which gives you the option for fulfillment by Amazon).

Amazon Pay includes: 

• Optimized checkout flow (modeled after Amazon’s own).
• Co-marketing campaigns.
• Self-service reporting dashboard.
• Fraud protection.
• Easy integration tools.
• And more.

Note: With FastSpring, your customers can pay using Amazon Pay and many other payment methods. 

Need a Stripe Alternative for Your SaaS, Software, Video Game, Mobile App, or Other Digital Product?

Let FastSpring help!

FastSpring lets you manage every aspect of global payments from one platform — without managing tons of different software solutions. We shoulder the liability for online transactions and take the lead on VAT and sales tax management, regulatory compliance across the globe, and much more for you. 

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

This post was originally published in January 2023 and has been updated.

The post Stripe Alternatives for 2025: In-Depth Guide and 8 Options appeared first on FastSpring.

Today, oeksound is a global software company in the audio and video space, with their plugins used by some hugely recognizable names in the music industry.

To learn more about how they did it, listen for the full insights into:

• How oeksound’s pricing and trial options make their products more accessible to more users.
• Why the user experience and user feedback is so important for improving and marketing plugins.
• Why a frictionless purchase process is such a key focus for oeksound to continue expanding their sales.

To hear all this and more about oeksound’s experience with taking their plugin business global, listen or watch now!

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

The post EP30: How oeksound Took Their Audio Plugins Business Global appeared first on FastSpring.

Are you a Digital River customer in emergency need of a new payment and subscription provider ASAP? Click here — our team of specialists is standing by, and requests are prioritized and routed by geo to ensure you have a fast, smooth experience.

There are a lot of Digital River alternatives on the market, and you may not know what makes any of them stand out in particular. 

It’s especially important to note that Digital River is a merchant of record (MoR), which means that many payment service providers may not include the kind of comprehensive services you’re used to with an MoR. 

In this post, we cover: 

• What a merchant of record is, and why it’s so important to make sure your MoR-level service isn’t disrupted if you’re thinking of switching providers.
• Why FastSpring is an excellent Digital River alternative.
• Three other payments options in 2024.

FastSpring handles the entire payment process from checkout to remitting end-of-year taxes for SaaS companies. To learn more about how FastSpring can help you scale quickly, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

Why the Best Digital River Alternative Is a Merchant of Record

If you’re familiar with Digital River but aren’t familiar with the term “merchant of record,”  you might not be familiar with exactly how many benefits come with using one. 

Here’s a refresher on what an MoR is and why — if your business is currently using one to monetize your SaaS, software, or other digital product — you probably want to ensure you keep using one.

What Is a Merchant of Record?

A merchant of record (MoR) is the entity that actually sells the goods and services to the customer. Companies can serve as their own MoR, but many opt to outsource that responsibility to a company like Digital River or FastSpring to sell goods and services on their behalf.

The MoR takes on the liability of SaaS transactions for you, meaning they handle everything from payment processing, to chargeback management, to collection and remittance of taxes, and even compliance with local laws and regulations. And because the MoR is liable for issues in those areas, they handle resolving those issues so you don’t have to. 

Digital-commerce-reliant businesses that utilize an MoR can focus less on ecommerce and more on making great software, SaaS, video games, mobile games, or other digital goods. 

What Makes a Merchant of Record Different From Payment Service Providers?

Payment service providers (PSPs), like MoRs, serve as a bridge between businesses that want to sell a product, and the specialized networks and services that are needed on the back end to make those transactions happen. Those specialized networks and services may include payment gateways, payment processing, a merchant account to accept debit and credit card payments, and others.

PSPs usually also include some sort of ecommerce platform and/or integration functionality (such as APIs, plugins, special integrations, etc.) to integrate their payments platform or checkout with your online store or website, but options will vary.

However, payment service providers usually stop short of managing risk, handling taxes, and assisting with chargebacks. If rules and regulations change in any of the regions or countries where you sell your product, you’d be responsible for keeping track of those changes and updating your PSP processes and checkout accordingly. 

Some PSPs may offer upgradeable payment solutions to get their services closer to those that an MoR includes automatically, but they are often bolt-on features, and they will come with upgrade fees. For example, Stripe has a fraud prevention upgrade called Radar, but it comes with additional costs per transaction fees.

Grow With FastSpring, an Experienced Merchant of Record

FastSpring is the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year.

Here are just a few of the reasons we’ve earned that reputation.

We Have Decades of Experience

Founded in 2005, FastSpring has two decades of experience with enabling global payments, and we’ve been a part of the SaaS landscape as it has grown. 

Because of this, our team deeply understands the complexities of selling digital goods and software, including subscription management and all of the nuanced needs that come with it.

We’re Backed by Great Investors

You don’t need to worry about FastSpring being profitable or reliable. Along with our experience, we also offer the peace of mind that comes with being backed by a top-performing, highly reputable investment firm. 

Thanks to Accel-KKR, FastSpring has the resources and proceeds needed to help scale your business with online payments, while providing excellent corporate, privacy, and security governance.

We Grow When You Grow

Our many years in the global payments platform industry has also enabled FastSpring to grow over time — but that growth has only happened because of our great customers. 

That’s for two reasons: because we work on a revenue-sharing model, and because we’re a partner who wants to help you continue growing.

1. FastSpring Makes Money When You Make Money

Thanks to FastSpring’s revenue sharing model, we make money when you do. When your buyer makes a purchase, we charge a small commission fee on that transaction.

That means that if you’re not transacting, we’re not charging that commission.

Our team will work with you to determine simple, flat-rate pricing based on your volume of business and transaction time, and that pricing includes all of our platform’s features and tools. 

Learn more about FastSpring’s pricing here, or request a meeting to discuss more details. 

2. FastSpring Wants to Be Your Partner, Not Just Your Payments Solution

Stardock was able to make the transition to SaaS subscriptions thanks to FastSpring’s ready-to-use existing subscription infrastructure, but they saw the mutual investments that we were putting back into our own platform to continue developing new features and products. 

This made Brad Sams of Stardock feel secure in Stardock’s partnership with FastSpring, because he could see we were in it for the long haul. “Because the better we do, the better FastSpring is going to do. We’ve got to make sure that everybody’s winning, and things with FastSpring just felt aligned.”

“FastSpring was on that path of continued investment and wasn’t just collecting the paycheck every month and doing nothing.”

– Brad Sams, Stardock

Read more about Stardock’s experience with FastSpring here.

TestDome has also been very happy with FastSpring’s support, noting that it goes from assistance with buyer issues and chargebacks all the way up to the top of the company and our CEO. 

TestDome CEO and co-founder Mario Zivic is happy to have been using FastSpring for a decade, saying that FastSpring has been the clear and easy choice for their merchant of record needs. 

Besides more common support for buyer issues like chargebacks, credit card issues, and refund requests, Mario even received an offer of advice from FastSpring’s CEO. That resulted in a personal phone call and “an extremely valuable piece of advice,” noting that he has seen firsthand that “the willingness to help and support was not limited to Support — it went all the way up to the CEO.”

Read more of TestDome’s story about our partnership.

Award-Winning Customer Support and Customer Success

The high level of support and service has not only been recognized by our customers — it has also been recognized in our industry. 

In April of this year, FastSpring’s support team won a Silver Stevie® award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year in the “Technology Industries – Computer Software” category.

Then in June, FastSpring’s customer success team won a gold Globee® award for Customer Excellence in the “Achievement in Team Customer Success” category.

We don’t just say we want to be a partner — we set out to prove it. 

Our Hands-On Migration Team Strives for Your Success

FastSpring support isn’t only there for you after you’ve onboarded — we want to ensure you get up and running on our payments platform as quickly and easily as possible.

Our implementation team of hands-on, highly efficient sales engineers are experts in FastSpring’s pre-built web storefront solution, the flexible and extensive FastSpring API, webhook features, and more. They’re there to help you make a seamless transition through migration and integration. 

FastSpring has powerful integrations with best-in-class third-party solutions, including WordPress, Zapier, and multiple Google services. Learn more about FastSpring integrations here. 

Other Great FastSpring Features

Here are a few more great reasons to use FastSpring: 

• You’ll automatically be compliant with sales tax, VAT, and privacy regulations around the world.
• FastSpring accepts the top payment methods in 200+ regions across the globe with 23+ currencies and in 21+ languages.
• You can customize seamless embedded or modal popup checkout experiences on your website.
• We make it easy to offer coupons, discounts, and dynamic price points for promotions.
• Checkout can be streamlined to a single click with 1ClickPay.
• Strong documentation that includes AI-powered search for precise, relevant responses in real time.
• And so much more!

To learn more, check out our product overview, or sign up to check out our platform yourself. Want personalized answers? Request a demo with one of our experts.

3 More Digital River Alternatives

The following options are common alternatives you might look at if you’re assessing Digital River competitors. Keep in mind that none of the below options are merchants of record, so you may need to supplement their services, either internally or with additional vendors and services.

Stripe

Stripe is a well-known payment processor that allows businesses to accept debit cards, credit cards, and mobile payments, with features such as:

• Payment processing.
• A customizable UI and pre-built checkout flows.
• Simple subscription management.
• Online invoicing.

You may be wondering if it’s an option for your business simply because it’s so ubiquitous, and it may appear at first to have lower pricing than the merchant of record you’re currently using. But that’s because Stripe isn’t a merchant of record. 

If you’re looking to lower your transaction costs and you have the scale, expertise, time, and teams to support the many services you’ll be losing by switching from an MoR to Stripe, this may be a good option for your business. But you’ll need to make up the difference in services lost, including tax compliance, fraud management, and more. Stripe does offer products to cover some of those needs, but they are add-ons that will increase your overall cost — so any initial cost savings might quickly disappear.

However, if you want to switch from Digital River to a business in the same category with the features and peace of mind an MoR provides, Stripe probably isn’t the right Digital River competitor for you.

Adyen

Adyen bills itself as an “end-to-end payments, data, and financial management in a single solution.” Its payment solutions and financial services include features and products such as:

• In-person and online payments in one system.
• Revenue optimization with intelligent payment routing to improve conversion rates.
• Subscription management features like dunning automation.
• Risk management with fraud detection and prevention.

While Adyen has some of the features a merchant of record offers, you will still need to manage your own company accounts and merchant accounts.

PayPal for Business

PayPal is a well-known digital wallet for personal online payments, but they also offer a payment processing option for small business. PayPal for Business is both an in-person and ecommerce solution.

(SaaS companies using FastSpring can also process payments using PayPal.)

Other features of PayPal for Business include but are not limited to: 

• Built-in integrations with major online shopping carts (such as Shopify). 
• QR code and POS systems.
• Invoicing.
• Chargeback protection (only available for business accounts with Advanced Credit and Debit Card checkout).

Besides PayPal for Business, PayPal also has a payment processor specifically for SaaS called Braintree.

How FastSpring Can Help

Need a merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally? FastSpring is a full-stack, all-in-one payment solution for SaaS, software, video games, and other digital product businesses. 

Our services include VAT and sales tax calculation, collection, and remittance; payment localization; regulation compliance; award winning consumer support; and so much more! 

Sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

Other Articles You Might Be Interested In

• 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Comparing Payments, Taxes, and Platform Features (+ Pricing)
• Stripe Alternatives for 2024: In-Depth Guide and 8 Options
• International Payment Gateways: An In-Depth Guide and 10 Payments Options

The post Digital River Alternatives for 2024 appeared first on FastSpring.

But if you’ve decided to use merchant of record FastSpring to help you monetize your video game or mobile game directly to consumers (D2C), we’re here to make it as easy as possible.

That’s why we’ve released a new guide to implementing D2C sales for video games using FastSpring.

This technical integration guide provides a recap of current industry trends, an overview of FastSpring’s solution for video game monetization as a merchant of record, technical details for implementing FastSpring with your game, and stories from other happy game devs and studios who are already succeeding on FastSpring. 

Click here to download How to Implement Direct to Consumer Sales for Video Games With FastSpring.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been 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 just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Related Reading

• Why FastSpring Is a Great Complementary Solution for Your Existing Video Game MoR Integration
• 4 Best Xsolla Competitors in 2024
• How to Sell a Mobile App or Game Outside App Stores
• Marketing Your Video Game Outside of Game Marketplaces & App Stores
• Digital River Alternatives for 2024
• Is What Epic Wants for App Stores What Other Game Developers Actually Want?
• Merchant of Record for Mobile Games: What It Is and Why You Need One
• Videos: D2C Web Shops for Mobile Games at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki
• Using a Gaming Payment Gateway to Monetize Your Game’s Web Shop

Find more video games industry ideas and news here.

The post New Guide: How to Implement Direct to Consumer Sales for Video Games With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview affiliate marketing veteran and attribution animal Adam Riemer of Adam Riemer Marketing about his thoughts on: 

• What proper affiliate marketing looks like.
• How to weed out fraudsters & shady attribution affiliates.
• How to go about recruiting the RIGHT affiliates to help drive meaningful growth in your business.

If you’ve set up an affiliate program and don’t know what to do next, or you’re looking for tips on how to tame your existing affiliate program, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Listen or watch now!

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

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage, a podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In today’s episode, I’m really excited for this topic.

It was a bit of conversation in a Slack community I’m part of and really wanted to bring this topic live here on the podcast. We’re going to be talking about advanced affiliate marketing for SaaS software and digital product companies specifically and joining us for that conversation. I’m proud to bring to Growth Stage Mr. Adam Riemer. Adam, welcome to Growth Stage.

Adam Riemer (00:56)

Hey Dave, thanks for having me.

David Vogelpohl (00:58)

Awesome. So glad to have you here. And of course, I’ve known you for forever and a day and really looking forward to picking your brain here to talk about advanced strategies for digital product companies. And for those watching and listening, Adam is a digital marketing and affiliate marketing veteran. He’s an attribution animal. He’s really well known for proper attribution models and putting value in commissions where value are due.

and he’s going to share his thoughts on what proper affiliate marketing looks like, how to weed out fraudsters and shady affiliates and how to go about recruiting the right affiliates to help drive meaningful growth in your business. So Adam, I know these are topics that a lot of folks are interested in. And so I’m really excited to have you here. So Adam, I’m going to ask you the first question I ask every guest on Growth Stage.

What was the first thing you bought online?

Adam Riemer (02:01)

I remember. So it was in, I think, 1999 or 2000. I heard a record at a nightclub in Pittsburgh that I really liked and I’d already started DJing. And they told me it was only available from one store. And that store happened to be in the Netherlands called Dance Grooves. And so I had to order the LP to be shipped overseas, like…

I think I was still on an AOL connection and I actually ordered the first thing I purchased was a vinyl record to spin Adorave from Dance Grooves. I thought I was going to be a CD but no, that was the first purchase I had ever actually made.

David Vogelpohl (02:45)

It’s actually been a bit of a theme of people have answered this question as I’ve asked it, is it like that extreme need for something and only being able to get it online? That sounds really interesting. So how long was it after that roughly before you bought music directly, like a digital song?

Adam Riemer (03:08)

I didn’t really have digital back then because iPods weren’t out yet and neither were the… iPod was the first one, yeah, and then it became the iPhone. So yeah, it was a long time before. I was still burning CDs and everything. The first digital product I bought probably wasn’t until the last 15 years.

David Vogelpohl (03:21)

Nice.

Okay, makes sense.

Adam Riemer (03:30)

I just, I really like holding books. I really like, I don’t know, I liked having the movie collection. Now I’ve switched. I prefer my movies to just be a couple of clicks away, but I still love books. Like I don’t find the same pleasure out of an reader that I do holding the actual book, flipping the page, going into the bookstore. I love that. I do shop for books online a lot, especially if I’m on the road and I rip through one, I need the next one delivered. It makes it easier to go online, but I really like holding books.

David Vogelpohl (03:59)

Nice. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Adam Riemer Marketing and what you do there. And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’re the owner and CEO or something like that. Is that right, Adam?

Adam Riemer (04:12)

Yeah, at least for now.

I need to find somebody that can actually manage it for me so I can do the things that I love, which is the marketing and working with my team where I fall flat is working with the clients because I, as you said, I tend to be a little bit hard headed and I get a bit passionate and that’s not always a good thing. It’s a good thing that I’m passionate about the work, but not always for the clients. So what we specialize in what our strengths are is conversion rate optimization, top funnel and value adding affiliate programs.

SEO work as well as content marketing and strategy. We do help companies with their lifecycle marketing which includes email and win back and at different stages in the customer journey what are their needs now and how do you develop and that includes consumer products as well as B2B, lead gen and the service space.

David Vogelpohl (05:03)

Excellent. So kind of a full service digital marketing agency, if you will. And I heard you mentioned as part of that value added affiliate marketing. And so this is kind of a nice segue into my first question on the topic of this podcast, which is what does value added or proper affiliate marketing mean to you? What defines that?

Adam Riemer (05:29)

So the way that we define value adding is would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point? Did the affiliate touch point actually have some form of financial gain or does it create a financial loss or is it a neutral financial touch point?

So an example of that would be if all of the sales are happening at the very end of the sale and the transaction, somebody’s just looking for a coupon code, if you removed them from the affiliate program, would that consumer still come through and would they be coming through your funnel and converting at the same rate? If the answer is yes, which most of the time it turns out to be yes, it’s a no value affiliate and you’re probably taking a financial hit.

if that same affiliate also has top funnel traffic suppose you sell t -shirts or suppose you’re a CRM software company and you are showing up from an influencer that does show up for the coupon phrase but also has a lot of traffic coming in from their YouTube channel around the best CRM systems how to optimize your sales funnels and they’re funneling off of that traffic that you cannot reach on your own at that point you have to test is the top

funnel more profitable than the bottom funnel and by allowing that bottom funnel and am I chasing away smaller partners that know they’re going to lose some sales to that.

So it’s a really fine tuned game of cat and mouse, but it’s easy to track. The one thing you’re going to run into is nobody has your best interests in mind as a business owner or as a marketing team. The networks make money off of the actual touch point and conversions that come through their network by allowing this to happen and saying, well, it’s part of the customer journey. They make more money. So they’re going to be encouraging you to work with some of these bad behaviors, use your data and understand how it goes.

One other touch point is a review.

A review does add value and a review can help convince a customer to convert with you over another, same with comparisons. But what happens if you would use an ambassador instead of an affiliate and you would help that ambassador optimize for your terms? That ambassador now shows up for your brand press review. You have to pay a one -time fee and a one -time fee only. You no longer pay commissions every single time a customer’s in the review. You have to pay an upfront cost.

But in the long run, you save a lot of money because you’re no longer paying commissions over and over and over. And now you have the chance for a full value add in top funnel affiliate program.

David Vogelpohl (08:03)

So as I think of folks that are running digital product businesses like SaaS and software, it’s a lot of companies that are 50-, 100-person teams or less. And so they look at affiliate marketing from the outside, and they see this complexity, and they see this need for audits and this need to be picky with who they partner with. And I really like how you simplified it in that statement when you said,

Would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point? And you gave a variety of examples there, and I love extremes for a minute. So a really bad affiliate would be maybe someone with malware that’s stuffing cookies in browsers. So that would, that sale would have occurred if that bad actor had not have done that. So that’s an example of someone doing something really bad. And then you were talking about some gray zones a little bit where.

You had maybe a coupon site that was primarily, you know, getting their sales at the end of the sale. And then you were talking, I think about comparison and review sites a little bit where maybe it’s a little bit more in the middle of the decision process. But I like that litmus test of would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point. And I guess where your point is, is if the answer is no, then this is where it falls outside the realm of proper.

But when the answer is yes or maybe, how do you think about that blended value? Is it like all commissions are none or do you think about splitting it up or maybe weighting it based on the level of value that you think affiliate’s driving?

Adam Riemer (09:44)

I’d definitely lower the commission if it’s a lower value touch point. And that’s a proper thing to do. It’s the same as when you’re going with lifetime commissions on recurring. What if the person promoted you for a year and then decided to stop should they still be getting paid six and seven years later when they’re promoting competitors. That’s up to you to update your program terms and conditions and make it very clear.

you could add in a clause that says if you stop promoting us and haven’t driven new customers within a year, we’re going to turn off the lifetime commissions.

we’re looking for long term relationships and stability, not one and done referrals to friends where you make money forever. This is a partnership relationship. So it’s up to you to determine. You could set up attribution lines where if there’s a top funnel click and a mid funnel click, you give the top funnel 75% in the mid funnel 25% of the sale and that’s going to split it nicely for you. But if that top funnel has room to grow and someone else comes along and offers them more money and has an

equal average order value and has an equal type of commission, they’re going to be more profitable. So you’re going to lose that top funnel partner. So you have to tread lightly. You have to make exceptions. If it’s a no value, low value, I just say kick them out. Why lose money? You could be actually profitable with your PPC campaigns. For example, there’s a keyword that’s sometimes profitable, sometimes not. Track the low value conversions to see if there’s a PPC click too. We just had this happen.

Turned out if we remove those low value and no value partners, PPC became profitable and we could reinvest that money into the profitable keywords.

David Vogelpohl (11:23)

Okay, so really focusing both on the attractiveness to the right affiliates and then leveraging your budget where it’s most profitable for you relative to the affiliates, especially you’re spending your time on. So again, if I’m a smaller company operating an affiliate program, I guess I’m gonna wanna be really choosy about who I let into it and think about their role in the funnel.

and how much I want to reward that. And then you also kind of brought up, well, there’s other people trying to get those rankings or the spots on those affiliates web pages as well. And so I got to think about that competitive aspect of it. Okay, so we’ve talked about affiliates that can cause problems, affiliates that do very bad things like cookie stuffing or affiliates that just don’t provide a lot of value. So what type of affiliates do you like focusing on recruiting?

Which ones do you want to sign up for your program or which ones do you help your clients actively reach out to recruit?

Adam Riemer (12:27)

So we go after the evergreen ones first, ones that have the ability to show up inside a YouTube search result, inside a Google search result, or a long-term social media channel with a relevant audience. By that I mean Pinterest has a different audience than TikTok, than Facebook, than Instagram. And so if your audience isn’t there, who cares if they have a million followers, you’re not going to reach them. So we go after the ones that have the long-term reach.

a webpage or a YouTube video has the opportunity to drive traffic for a few years versus an Instagram post which might last for a few days. By building the program first with evergreen copy or recruiting insights that are topically relevant and able to show up for those phrases, we’re building a nice foundation. After that, we go after the short-term boosts.

So that would be your influencers, your Instagramers, your LinkedIn people, because a LinkedIn post with a new algorithm could last for a few months. We recruit them and we line up posts about the right times a year, like right before busy season, during busy season, or at slow seasons where they may be able to influence a boost in sales. And that way we can constantly try to hit our numbers. It takes a long time to do because you have to recruit, then you have to get them to sign up, then you have to get them to agree.

Once the content’s created, for example, with the evergreen, you have to then hope it actually shows up in the search engines. Once it does, you have to hope the readers click to your link and then you have to apply your conversion rate. So after all of that, if you have a 5 % conversion rate, you have to wait till 20 unique visitors have clicked through to even have the chance at a first sale. So it’s a very, very long-term thing.

David Vogelpohl (14:08)

Makes sense on the long game. If I boil that down, thinking about the types of affiliates you were talking about going after, it really sounded like it boiled down to people publishing content. And obviously, people publishing content that’s relevant to a recommendation for a particular type of product.

The word affiliate is a big word. Matter of fact, in a lot of affiliate networks, they’re called publishers. But affiliates can take different flavors. With SaaS software and digital product companies, do you find that there are technology partners that use affiliate marketing to refer customers for products that might be symbiotic? Like maybe I have an SEO product that I’m going to recommend some email marketing product as part of my flow. Is that the other, do you look at?

recruiting those types of affiliates as well.

Adam Riemer (15:04)

Yes, anyone that has a relevant audience could be an affiliate. So I’ll give you a few examples. Some of our B2B clients have perks portals and you’ll find affiliate links in there. Other times when I’m speaking of conferences, I’ll disclose that this is an affiliate link and I’ll put up a QR code or a URL on the screen so people can do it and they can follow, people can click,

start a trial and have an experience because the tool or the software is relevant to the presentation or the workshop I’m giving and the way to get that exposure is to have me as a customer and as an affiliate. Others do a loyalty and rewards program with a cross promotion so there’s a lot of different ways you can do it. There’s also email blasts with complimentary companies. You just want to make sure that open rates are a very skewed and incorrect metric. You want the actual click -throughs and conversion rates.

just like an influencer. They only have influence if people are taking actions. The action you’re most interested in as an affiliate is taking out their wallets.

David Vogelpohl (16:01)

I like it. I like it. One of my favorite sayings is sort by conversions. And it sounds like you share that sentiment on some level. So when we talk about recruiting, I think there’s like the idea of like, where do you get a list to recruit from? And how do you go about that? One of my favorite approaches whenever I take over an affiliate program is to look at the short tail keywords that we’re bidding on and search and just see who ranks for them for like a list.

But what do you recommend? How do people start to build a list of affiliates to recruit? And then how do they go about organizing and pulling all that off? They’re using CRM’s help me understand how you like to approach that.

Adam Riemer (16:46)

So what we do is we will use that same PPC data and SEO data because if you already have the top ranking, what are the rankings below you? Anyone that’s a publisher is a potential affiliate and we know that the conversion rate is high. That gives us the ability to create a forecast. If you add us in here, the potential income you could be making over your CPM ads on the publisher site is X, Y, and Z per month and at that point,

we’ve made a strong case for why they should include our client within that post and the money they could be making.

We use BuzzStream that’s our preferred tool for recruitment and it doesn’t actually do the recruitment on its own although I believe they have something in beta right now but it does give our team own ability to share the messages what’s working what’s not working yes we’ve already reached out to this person so don’t touch them I’m already on it or you can reassign it hey this is better suited to David’s needs and David’s skill set so I’m going to tag and pass it over to them it’s just a really nice funnel and system to cross

remote and track your recruitment efforts.

David Vogelpohl (17:50)

So this sounds like, I mean, it’s effectively a sales process. It’s just what you’re effectively selling as a partnership for the revenue for the affiliate, revenue share of the affiliate commissions. Is that a good way to think about affiliate recruiting? Is that it’s very similar to a sales process with like an account management backend or how do you think about that?

Adam Riemer (18:10)

Yeah, unlike a backlink for SEO where you just need the link to your website, with affiliate, you have to get that link and you have to get revenue from it. So it’s all about the relationship. It’s about building trust. It’s about ensuring there’s some form of gain for both companies. It has to be mutually beneficial to work and be copacetic.

David Vogelpohl (18:31)

You know, thinking about using SEO and targeted keyword data to discover affiliates, are there any other, like do you use like Ahrefs looking for like backlinks or how do you, what are some other discovery methods for like affiliate recruiting lists?

Adam Riemer (18:45)

So I personally don’t use Ahrefs, it’s a good tool. The services that they offered, they canceled, they lost their license or something. So I closed my account down years ago, but I know a lot of people that love them and I have a couple of clients that love them. So I wouldn’t count them out. I actually use SEMrush, which is their biggest competitor,

for a lot of tracking and data and discovery. But if you want for specifically SEO style at— affiliates, Majestic is going to be your good one to go to. And I don’t use Majestic, but I do highly recommend them for this. And what you can do with Majestic is you can plug in your competitors affiliate link style, as long as the merchant ID is first in the path. And you can actually find out exactly who’s promoting you and generate a list because it’s the same thing as a backlink profile.

David Vogelpohl (19:16)

Yeah

Adam Riemer (19:34)

which is just all of the links that the database can find and Majestic has the largest in the world.

You can also go in and find citations, mentions of the competitor’s name and then you can do is this on an .edu site, is this on a major media site, and you can funnel through there and figure out where they’re being mentioned with a direct backlink that helps their SEO. By replacing those backlinks with affiliate links, one you’re causing damage to your competitor’s SEO making it easier for you to climb and replace them in the search engines, AND you’re taking the traffic they were getting for free and

you are now getting that traffic. The benefit to the person that was featuring them is they can make money whereas they were losing money previously by sending the traffic for free. So it’s a really compelling place and it crosses multiple channels. If you do get onto the major media and you haven’t been featured before there’s a chance you can now feature that logo in your PR bar which is a trust builder for consumers and may help increase your conversion rates. So affiliate has an impact on multiple channels as long as you’re doing it smart.

David Vogelpohl (20:42)

Awesome. That sounds like some good recruitment and list building tips. I know that that’s a deep well to draw from, and it’s interesting how many opportunities there are to surface when you’re going deep on affiliate recruitment. You talked before about types of affiliates that you like to keep out of the program, those that don’t add a lot of, you know,

I guess value at the bottom of the funnel or to the transaction, would it happen without their presence kind of thing? So if you put yourself in the shoes of, you know, an SMB technology company and they wanted to keep it lean and mean in the beginning, what sort of affiliates would you recommend they say, you know, no, or not now to?

Adam Riemer (21:33)

I would avoid the review sites first and I would look at the types. I would go for complimentary companies. That’s the first one. Number two, look for the people in that space that have email lists and try to get a quarterly blast or a feature. You may have to start with a media buy at first and then when you see the conversions that come through, like look, if you became an affiliate, you would have had this many conversions.

Now you have to remember one thing, an email list is the same email list. It’s constantly growing, which is good, but these people had already seen your business before, so the results may be smaller each time you do it. At the same time, there’s a certain amount of touch points that have to happen in between. So that would be a really good one. And then look at the YouTubers, especially in the SMB and SaaS space, because they have the opportunity to rank in Google search as well as on YouTube. And a lot of people are looking for solutions and a visual and verbal queue

is a really good way to learn how to do something whether it’s a B2B software system enterprise or small business or even fixing something in your house. Having that visual builds the trust and shows you what it’s going to be like to use if it’s going to be adoptable and adaptable to your clients teams and then if you are the one being demonstrated in the video it builds the trust that your software really is a solution.

David Vogelpohl (22:53)

Adam in that response you had mentioned avoiding review sites in the beginning and I feel like many of the technology product companies I’ve worked with over the years. It’s like one of the biggest sort affiliates in their niche is like. I don’t know “top 10 X service” in their review sites, but they’re they’re ranking for like

“top provider does X types of queries.” Do you recommend folks avoid that or are you thinking avoid it where they say like I have a review of your brand? The latter?

Adam Riemer (23:28)

 was your company, David, I would say avoid letting people and going after sites that say FastSpring reviews. This is just your own customers. This is just your own traffic that they’re intercepting. If it’s the best software to do X, Y, and Z, that’s something that adds value. It doesn’t have your brand, but it features your brand as a solution. So that’s a touch point that’s going to bring someone to you.

if they also have a review after but that review is maybe 20% of the traffic coming through and that other 80% has a really strong conversion rate then I would say both are fine and keep them just make sure there’s advertising disclosures on the top of each page.

David Vogelpohl (24:08)

Now, yeah, I was going to say on the disclosure side, so like when you when you have these affiliates that are running review sites about your brand and you’re paying commissions and really in any case, you need disclosures that it’s a paid ad, but in particular when you have these types of reviews or assessments, do you have anything else to add on that front? I’m guessing that’s pretty important.

Adam Riemer (24:33)

It’s, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not licensed to give any legal advice in any way, shape or form. So what I’ve been told by different clients and each client has different policies is to just make sure it’s clear, concise, visible, and states exactly what happens. So if the list and if the rankings on the list are based on how much the affiliates making, well,

David Vogelpohl (24:35)

Right here, yeah.

Adam Riemer (24:58)

they need to disclose that. It needs to say the amount we make influences the review and where they are in our list. Just like they have to say, I’m getting paid to feature you. If they were just featuring you on that list out of the kindness of their heart, they weren’t going to make any money in commissions, probably don’t need a disclosure because there’s no compensation. They just genuinely think you’re a good service. But if there’s money, whether it’s free product, a review, a year subscription or a trial account,

that has to be disclosed and before the brand is exposed to the consumer.

David Vogelpohl (25:31)

Yes, so if I if I really like a product and I write a review about it, but I want to make money from the review and I use an affiliate link, I can do that as long as I disclose it effectively on the affiliate side. And then you were also referencing other types of sites where the ranking is based on the revenue. Now, I think a lot of people think that means the commissions that they’re paid by the affiliates. I’m going to pay you $100 to sign up. My competitor is going to pay you $50 to sign up or $200 to sign up.

But it’s more than that, right? It’s it’s like the number they sell and the total amount of commissions they make, not just the amount per unit is, I mean, is this a factor in how they’ll rank the revenue from these review listings?

Adam Riemer (26:17)

Yes, exactly. So most of those listicle sites and most of the media companies, they have an internal EPC, earnings per click, which is separate from a network EPC, which is also a flawed and fake metric. And what happens with their internal earnings per click? They’re taking the amount of money they make, which is a combination of the total people that have clicked through. So if everyone at your company is clicking on those links, you’ve just lowered the earnings per click.

David Vogelpohl (26:30)

Haha.

Adam Riemer (26:44)

if they’re getting one click in a sale each time because it’s a review or a coupon the earnings per click is going to be massively high. So that’s why they break it down by page and if that page is generating a high EPC the algorithm and some of them are now automating this you may see in the morning you’re in the fifth position and in the afternoon you’re in the second position and at night you’re in the tenth position that’s because their algorithm is automatically updating the template and moving these around to where and when they’re most profitable.

And now there’s actually some affordable software out there. I think they’re called a Affilimate. They came across my radar about a year ago and they built one of those tools that the major media companies use for consumers, or not for consumers, but for some of the smaller publishing houses and affiliates. And I was blown away and that takes a lot. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. So they are building something pretty cool and special.

David Vogelpohl (27:14)

So it’s a.

So if you want to get listed, and whether they use that tool or something else, but if you want to get listed on one of these sites, it’s a game, right? It’s your price point, how much in commissions you’re willing to pay, your ability to convert those users, and all of that together results in an amount of money for them. So you might have higher commissions by three times as much, but if you convert less than three times as often, you’ll have a worse deal with somebody paying lower commissions. And so…

Adam Riemer (28:08)

Correct and use, sorry, you said something interesting there which is your price point. Having the lowest price point means lowest commission if you’re not doing flat fee. So having a medium or a competitive price point or being the brand and having really strong branding and a brand presence could cause a similar conversion rate and because you have a higher price point even with an equal commission, if the conversion rate’s the same, you generate a higher EPC for the affiliate.

David Vogelpohl (28:10)

Yeah, go ahead.

Adam Riemer (28:37)

But as a founder and an owner, you have to remember your baby’s not that special and it’s not the prettiest baby out there. So you have to think of it from a consumer standpoint. Does the consumer understand the brand value? And if not, you need to work with your marketing team and your branding team to say, here’s what we could be saying. How do we get the consumers to understand this better? And sometimes it’s to remove the branding and focus on the selling points and the value, which means getting rid of all the fluff and all the buzzwords. That’s something very hard for founders to let go of.

David Vogelpohl (29:08)

Yeah, it’s a good point. Like, “What do you do?” is a pretty simple question that we answer in very complex ways. My last question for you here today is we’ve talked about what running a proper affiliate program looks like. We talked about recruiting, building lists, reaching out.

What when I have an affiliate and they’re part of my program, how do you think about getting them to keep referring customers or to refer more customers? Like how do you think about the management of those relationships?

Adam Riemer (29:43)

I keep notes on every single affiliate inside their affiliate accounts. That way if something ever happens to me or if I stop managing and I have a team member take over, they’ll see exactly what happened and one of those notes is motivators for that partner.

We have some partners that are making 10 and $30 ,000 a month and they don’t care about the money they’re making enough even though a higher commission is always going to be attractive. Sometimes they just want like a nice food treat and that’s when Gold Belly comes in and I’ll ship them something really cool or something fun like there’s one of my favorite gifts to send is the not fried chicken ice cream. It looks like a piece of fried chicken but it’s actually a really good ice cream and the bone inside the chicken drumstick is like a Kit Kat type of

candy. And so things like that. It keeps us in front of them It keeps the goodwill going and then other people are impacted by money. So what you’ll do is you’ll run cash incentives, you’ll run bonuses if you can hit this goal over last year what you did, then we’ll pay you this type of bonus. Some people want recognition and I’ve sent trophies and plaques for them to hang on the wall if they’re a consultant and they— like a divorce lawyer, for example

and they’re sending people in for housing and to get a new house and real estate leads. What we’ll do is we’ll put a top XYZ company partner plaque for them to put on the wall, which builds trust in the brand. And the person may actually start filling it out from their office through their affiliate link. Everyone’s motivated differently and keep track of their motivators cater to those. It’s not a one size fits all, especially in the B2B space.

David Vogelpohl (31:13)

I like it. What a great point to end on. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really educational. And as always, I love nerding out with you about affiliate marketing. Of course, of course. If you’d like to learn more about what Adam is up to, you can check him out on LinkedIn or visit adamriemer.me, R-I-E-M-E-R is how you spell Riemer. Thanks everyone for listening to the Growth Stage Podcast.

Adam Riemer (31:24)

Thank you for having me, David.

David Vogelpohl (31:41)

If you’d like to learn more about FastSpring, you can check us out at FastSpring.com. Thanks everybody and have a great day.

The post EP21: Advanced Affiliate Marketing for Saas, Software, and Digital Products appeared first on FastSpring.

CURITIBA, Brazil, April 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — FastSpring, the leading merchant of record for global SaaS and software companies, and EBANX, a global technology company specializing in payments for rising markets, announce today a partnership to enhance users’ payment experience within FastSpring’s product suite in Latin America through local payment method Pix.

Pix, Brazil’s instant payment system introduced by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020, has rapidly gained popularity among consumers as a preferred digital payment method. According to market data from EBANX’s annual study, Beyond Borders, Pix is projected to account for 40% of the total value of digital commerce in Brazil by 2026, tied with credit cards in market share. Furthermore, Pix is expected to comprise 20% of digital commerce transactions within Latin America by the same year.

As part of this partnership, FastSpring’s platform will integrate EBANX’s Pix payment processing capabilities, enabling global SaaS, software, video game, and digital product companies to offer Pix payments to Brazilian customers seamlessly. This partnership also allows Brazilian digital products companies to utilize FastSpring’s platform to power their global expansion while seamlessly maintaining Pix payments for their consumers at home. This integration marks FastSpring’s debut in accepting Pix payments and reinforces its commitment to providing localized payment solutions to its clients in the Latin American market.

“This partnership with EBANX allows FastSpring to leverage local payments, starting with the largest Latin American market, by delivering one of the country’s preferred payment methods,” stated Dan Garcia, Sr. Director of Payments, Risk, and Compliance at FastSpring. “The FastSpring platform enables sellers of digital goods to accept the most popular global payment methods. Adding Pix opens up the Brazilian market to new buyers who do not have internationally enabled cards. It’s a must-have payment method in Brazil. Our partnership with EBANX enables this code-free upgrade for  our customers.”

EBANX, known for its expertise in facilitating cross-border payments in Latin America, will serve as the exclusive partner processing Pix payments for FastSpring in Brazil. Through EBANX’s extensive regional knowledge and infrastructure, FastSpring aims to streamline payment processes and enhance the overall purchasing experience for its clients and their customers in Brazil.

“The collaboration between FastSpring and EBANX means a significant step forward in providing tailored payment solutions for digital product companies operating in Brazil,” commented Gregory Cornwell, Vice-President of Channels and Business Development at EBANX. “By integrating Pix payments into FastSpring’s platform, we are facilitating access to a key payment method in the Brazilian market, ultimately enabling businesses to expand their reach and drive growth.”

In addition to Pix, FastSpring’s platform offers a comprehensive suite of e-commerce solutions, including merchant of record services that handle tax calculation, collection, and remittance, thereby reducing operational complexities and costs for digital product companies expanding globally.

ABOUT FASTSPRING
FastSpring powers global payments for SaaS and software companies, video game publishers, and other digital goods businesses. As a merchant of record, FastSpring provides a fully managed payment solution including checkout, fraud mitigation, comprehensive sales tax and VAT compliance, and more. Founded in 2005, FastSpring is a privately owned company headquartered in California with offices in the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada.

For more information:
Website: https://fastspring.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fastspring/

ABOUT EBANX
EBANX is the leading payment platform connecting global companies with customers from one of the fastest-growing digital markets in the world. The company was founded in 2012 in Brazil with the mission of giving people access to buy in international digital commerce. With powerful proprietary technology and infrastructure, combined with in-depth knowledge of the markets where it operates, EBANX enables global businesses to connect with hundreds of payment methods in different countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. EBANX goes beyond payments, increasing sales, and fostering seamless purchase experiences for businesses and clients.

For more information:
Website: https://www.ebanx.com/en/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ebanx

Media Contact:
Leonardo Stamillo
leo@contentco.tech

SOURCE EBANX

Click here to read the press release on AP.

The post Press Release: FastSpring and EBANX Forge Partnership to Expand Pix Payments for Digital Products in Brazil appeared first on FastSpring.

The country recently published guidance requiring providers of electronic services — select digital products and services — to register for VAT if they meet certain criteria and thresholds. 

In the below article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about Thailand’s new VAT requirements for sales of digital products and services.

• Foreign e-services provider requirements
• What are Thailand’s VAT rates for E-Services?
• Do I need to register for VAT in Thailand?
• How to register for VAT in Thailand
• List of possible VAT penalties

New requirements for foreign providers of e-services

On September 1, 2021, Thailand extended its VAT legislation to cover the supply of digital products and services (e-services) provided by non-resident businesses to Thai consumers. Previously, this type of business was not required to register for VAT.

To track compliance with this new regime, Thailand’s Revenue Department is maintaining a public list of non-resident digital businesses that register for VAT.

Thailand recently published a guide that provides information on a host of compliance-related topics such as VAT filing and payment, validation of VAT numbers, and the use of foreign exchange (FX) sources.

There are a few terms included in the guide that is worth defining:

• E-services: Includes non-physical products delivered over the internet or any other electronic network in an automated way that’s impossible to ensure in the absence of IT (i.e. online games, web and mobile applications, software).
• Electronic Platform: Any market, channel, or other procedure that digital service providers use to deliver services to consumers. These platforms are intermediaries between service providers and service recipients and facilitate service transactions.
• Simplified VAT System for E-Service (SVE): The electronic system that Thailand’s Revenue Department offers service providers and electronic platforms to register for VAT, file VAT returns, pay VAT, and request for VAT refund electronically.

You can read more about Thailand’s VAT on Electronic Services in the official guide.

What are Thailand’s VAT rates for E-Services?

Thailand’s VAT system is very similar to the European Union’s system, which requires recalculation and payments to the tax authorities at each transaction point in the sales chain.

To calculate your VAT amount, multiply the service value in Thai Baht by the 7% VAT rate.

Learn more on Thailand’s VAT for Electronic Service (VES) via the official Thailand Revenue Department website.

Do I need to register for VAT in Thailand?

If you provide electronic services to a non-VAT registered person, such as a consumer or small unregistered business, you will be required to register for VAT if the taxable services exceed 1.8 million Thai Baht (approximately $55,800 USD) within a calendar year.

Non-resident businesses should register for VAT in Thailand if they meet these criteria:

1. Provide e-services, receive payments, and deliver e-services through an electronic platform from abroad.
2. The e-service is used in Thailand by a non-VAT registered customer
3. Income from the e-service surpasses 1.8 million baht in a calendar year or accounting period.

Refer to the Key Elements section of the guide for more details.

How to register for VAT in Thailand

FastSpring sellers don’t need to worry about registering for VAT or calculating, collecting, or filing taxes in Thailand because we handle it on their behalf.

If you’re not using FastSpring for tax management, we suggest you review the guidance issued by Thailand’s Revenue Department. Here’s some information to point you in the right direction:

• Foreign e-service providers and electronic platforms can register for VAT electronically via the SVE on the Revenue Department’s website.
• VAT registration forms should be submitted separately by each entity. If your business has multiple branches or subsidiaries, each entity that meets the requirements for VAT registration should register separately through SVE.

For more information on VAT registration, read the official VAT for Electronic Services (VES) Registration Guide.

List of possible VAT penalties

Here’s a list of possible penalties your business can face for failing to comply with VAT requirements in Thailand.

Civil Penalties

Criminal Penalties

Let FastSpring take on your tax liability

Businesses that sell software and digital products can avoid the hassle of managing global tax obligations by signing up with FastSpring. Our intuitive platform handles all of the complexities required to sell products globally on your behalf, so you can focus on building great products and growing your business.

Our tax experts work around the clock to stay up to date on changing tax laws and partner with outside specialists to ensure your business is protected and compliant.

There’s a reason why over 3,500 businesses trust our global tax solution:

• Offloads your tax liabilities
• Automates tax calculation at checkout
• Collects and remits global taxes on your behalf
• Manages the complete VAT compliance process
• Supports tax-exemption on orders

We’re constantly optimizing our tax engine to stay up to date on the latest regulations. Let us take on your tax management needs — sign up for free today!

The post How to Navigate Thailand’s New VAT Requirements for Sales of Digital Products and Services appeared first on FastSpring.

More often than not, if a person has the choice between something that they’ve never heard of or something that they are familiar with, you can probably take a wild guess what they’re going to choose. 

Before you take it personally, remember, this particular bias is human nature. Even though choosing the best option is the most logical, most people prefer to choose the most familiar one. Multiple studies have proved that the more people see something, the more they like it. Shopping for digital products is no exception. 

Whether you’re selling ebooks or software, people gravitate towards digital products they’ve already come across or have heard of through word of mouth.

The question then becomes, “How do you increase awareness of your digital product so that people not only recognize your product when they see it, but they actually recall your product as the first choice when they’re shopping?”

While there are many strategies out there that work for increasing product awareness, today, we’ll discuss one of the best ways to get a buzz going about your product: promotional offers. 

Increase Visibility Through Promotions 

Research reveals that promotions increase sales of your product at its discount price and its regular price. 

Why? Because promotional offers introduce your brand to a broader audience. When there’s a good deal going, people are likely to talk about it to their friends and discuss it online.  

Long story short, promotional offers are a great way to attract attention. Offers, deals, discounts, and promos will get people talking about your product, boost awareness, and inspire customer loyalty. 

Let’s look at some of the different kinds of promotional offers that can work wonders to increase your digital product awareness. 

Percentage Discounts

Offering a percentage off is a straightforward, no-nonsense way to give your customers a deal. You can offer a percentage discount for a specific product, or off of the entire order.  

Small discounts can pique people’s interest, whereas larger discounts of 50% or more can really get people talking. If you’re interested in liquidating your entire inventory, a significant discount is a great tactic.

Here’s a great example by Brilliant, offering their clients 20% off for a limited time. 

Dollar Discounts

Another popular method of promoting your digital product is a dollar value discount. When people receive a $15 discount, it can be even more appealing than a percentage discount. Studies suggest that dollar discounts have a higher conversion rate than percentage because dollar value discounts make people feel like they’re receiving “free money.” There’s also the added perk of not having to do any math. 

Here’s an example from Norton, offering $65 off to customers for the first year subscription.

You can even encourage customers to buy more by offering a more generous dollar discount the more that they spend. For example, you can offer $20 off of orders over $100, and $30 for orders over $150, and so on. 

Discount Codes

Discount codes are a time-tested method for boosting sales. Not only can they drive your purchase volume, but they’re a great way to analyze the success of your marketing campaigns.

Creating a different discount code for each marketing campaign you’re running can provide valuable insight into which one works the most effectively.

Make the Most of Your Promotional Offer 

Promotional offers are a terrific way to get people acquainted with your digital product. By giving them a deal on something they weren’t familiar with before, they’ll be much more likely to talk about your product with their friends and family.   

By planning ahead and understanding the best tactics you’ll create lasting and mighty awareness of your product in no time. Ready to learn more about running a successful promotion campaign? Check out our latest report, Your Essential Guide to Effective Online Software Promotions.

The post How to Increase Awareness of Your Digital Product With a Promotional Offer appeared first on FastSpring.

Are you an artist, author, software engineer, or maybe just a hobbyist in your field? When it comes to selling digital products, your title doesn’t matter. With a computer, time, and energy, you’re more than capable of transforming your passions, talents, or expertise into a potential source of revenue.

Need some inspiration? We’ve outlined a shortlist of popular digital products that you can start selling today.

1. Software
2. Ebooks
3. Audio Files and Music Production Software
4. Games
5. Photography
6. Video

1. Software

A report conducted by Software.org reveals that software contributed more than $1.14 trillion to the total U.S. value-added GDP and employed 2.9 million people. As the software industry continues to grow, we’ll continue to see its direct impact on the U.S. economy and the output in new software solutions.

It’s important to remember that software can be any solution or service that is powered by code. As long as you can find the right talent to code your product, the possibilities to develop products like desktop software, web-based applications, mobile apps, and templates are endless.

Nelio software is one example of a SaaS company that decided to develop a software solution to meet the needs of a growing market. After recognizing that WordPress users wanted more out of their WordPress site, Nelio developed a suite of plugins—like their A/B testing tool—to allow users to better optimize their website for conversions. By partnering with FastSpring, Nelio was able to focus exclusively on developing great WordPress plugins and attracting customers from over 80 countries around the world.

2. Ebooks

The emergence of devices like eReaders and smartphones has skyrocketed the demand for ebooks. Readers are no longer required to lug around bulky physical copies of their favorite books and can instead opt to open an electronic version directly from their smart device.

The growing adoption of ebooks also presents a unique opportunity for established and emerging authors. It doesn’t matter if you’re producing research reports, guides, or books; advancements in ecommerce allow authors to self-publish their works without having to partner with a publisher. At FastSpring, we support direct downloads and signed PDF fulfillments, so partnering with us can get you started selling right away with these convenient options for accessing your ebook.

3. Audio Files and Music Production Software

Audio has always been a powerful medium for communicating messages. Given the customer’s increasing preference for video, we now place an even greater emphasis on the value audio tracks have in helping to tell stories and transmit information.

Some examples of the audio files and audio software currently sold online include:

• Reusable sound effects & adlibs
• Audiobooks
• Music samples
• Recorded lectures
• DJ Software

Companies like inMusic are developing music production software to help meet the increasing demand for audio assets. Learn more about how InMusic was able to use FastSpring’s ecommerce platform to implement a more user-friendly checkout process that increased conversions by 30% within their first month.

4. Games

Indie and veteran developers alike can benefit from the ability to sell their games directly to customers. Traditionally, developers would list their games on marketplaces or work with publishing studios to get their titles in retail stores. One of the drawbacks of this distribution model is having to offer intermediaries (marketplace & publishing studios) a share of the game sales. Selling directly on your ecommerce site helps protect profit margins by allowing you to keep more of your sales revenue in your pocket.

5. Photography

Like ebooks, digital imagery is one of the earliest digital assets sold on the internet. In 2012, Shutterstock licensed more than 70 million photos, vectors, and other digital imagery. The widespread use of images for web design and blog publication means there will be continued demand for high-quality, premium photos.

Photo editing software has also grown in conjunction with the increasing demand for digital assets. Skylum, a global leader in complex photo editing applications for Mac and PC, is all too familiar with this rapid growth. Skylum knew that to take advantage of their growth and maximize sales revenue, they had to transition the bulk of their sales from the Apple Store to their website.

Click here to see how Skylum’s partnership with FastSpring allowed them to reduce costs and increase their average order values.

6. Video

Video seems to be all anyone can talk about right now, and it’s easy to see why. With the advancements in technology, even our smartphones are capable of taking videos that you can share with the world. Another great aspect of selling videos is that a video can reach a much higher engagement rate than text alone can. So it’s easier for viewers to get through the content because all they need to do is click play.

Since videos are highly effective, people are more likely to be willing to pay for them, which makes video a lucrative market for you to start selling them. Whether they are informational, promotional, or educational video offers a multitude of opportunities to sell them online. With FastSpring’s ecommerce platform, selling your videos online can be done directly on your site to provide a seamless experience for your consumers.

Which Digital product is right for you?

With all these options available for selling online, there’s plenty of opportunities to find the best fit for you. Whether you see yourself creating videos or writing ebooks, the technology advances in recent years have made selling digital products online more accessible than ever before. At FastSpring, we want to help you reach your goals with our full-service SaaS ecommerce platform. Not only will we help you get started, but we’ll support you every step of the way so you can sell more, stay lean, and compete big.

The post 6 of the Most Profitable Digital Products and Goods to Sell Online appeared first on FastSpring.

On the other hand, you might be surprised to find that there are plenty of soft, refreshing, and absorbent Kleenex alternatives out there work just as well for blowing your nose.  

The bottom line is, just because a brand name is genericized doesn’t mean it is superior to its alternatives. Shopify alternatives are no exception.

Although Shopify is excellent at what it is (a user-friendly, flexible platform for online merchants that doesn’t require much technical skill), it’s not necessarily an all-in-one solution that works for everybody. 

First of all, it doesn’t come without its problems. Some of the most common Shopify complaints are:

• Limited advanced features 
• No customized checkout experience
• Extra transaction fees
• Overloaded customer support
• Product restrictions 

If you start to look around, you won’t just begin to realize there are free alternatives to Shopify out there absent of those issues, but alternatives that fit your business even better than Shopify. 

Let’s take a look at some of the best Shopify competitors for growing your ecommerce business.

BigCommerce

Lots of Built-In Features – No Tax Management Solution

This ecommerce site has generated sales well over $15 billion, making them one of the most impressive platforms out there. They offer a wide range of tools with the promise of building your online store, no sweat required.  

BigCommerce proposes pretty spectacular themes for free which can be especially attractive to merchants who want to avoid premium costs if they can.

If you love the straightforward user experience similar to Shopify, then you’ll love the simplicity of Big Commerce’s layout.  Savvy marketers will love the advanced content-marketing features that make it easy to promote your products.  

It’s important to note, however, that it may not be the best fit for smaller brands since BigCommerce tends to gear itself towards bigger online stores. Another key point to consider is that BigCommerce does not include any built-in solutions for managing global sales taxes. This can end up being a huge headache for sellers come tax season!

FastSpring

Best Solution For Global Customers

If you’re looking for a modernized ecommerce solution for selling desktop software, SaaS, or any other digital products all over the world, then FastSpring is a terrific option for you.  

This full-stack ecommerce platform is ideal for companies looking for a solution to the frustrations of international checkouts. Fastspring provides global customers with a checkout process in their own language and currency, which is hugely convenient for international clients. The result?  Significantly reduced cart abandonment. The localized shopping cart experience makes it that much easier to expand into new global markets for companies thinking big.  

Magento

Fully-Customizable Solution – No Localization Available

Magento is an open-source self-hosted Adobe product and a free alternative to Shopify. A self-hosted platform can be compared to driving your own car rather than taking the bus. Simply put, when you drive your own car, you get to decide your route while the bus only lets you off at certain stops.  

This Shopify alternative is ideal for companies with their own development team who want plenty of design freedom. So, if you don’t know much about code, then choosing Magento could put you at a disadvantage.

3dCart

Strong Features With an Attractive Price Point – Heavy Focus on Physical Goods

Businesses of all sizes looking for a competitively priced Shopify alternative should start paying attention to this ecommerce solution. Boasting more built-in features than Shopify, you won’t need to worry about spending more than you need to on costly integrations. 

You’ll have access to all of the same tools and marketing features as Shopify for the same or less, minus the transaction fees giving you the most bang for your buck. It’s important to remember that 3dCart is primarily focused on physical goods and B2C companies. Any B2B companies selling Software or SaaS will find a lack of invoicing, quote-to-cash, and other essential ecommerce features they need to run their business successfully. 

Ecwid

For Small Businesses On a Budget – Focused on B2C Companies and Physical Goods

Ecwid is an awesome alternative to Shopify for smaller online businesses looking for a simple widget on their page, from Facebook to Instagram. No coding skills? No problemo! Ecwid makes it possible to create an instant online store without having to rely on programmers or designers.  

Signing up is a painless process, making it less of a headache for businesses who would rather spend their time making their products than selling them. Best of all, Ecwid is free of charge for users selling ten items or less. 

Again, this is a solution that is specifically designed for B2C companies selling physical products. Companies selling software, SaaS, or other digital products will notice there are key features like licensing and download management missing with Ecwid.

WooCommerce

For WordPress Websites  – No Tax Management Solution

If you’re looking for something to use with your already existing WordPress account, then WooCommerce is, without a doubt, the best choice for you. This open-source solution offers a full range of flexibility, making it a favorite amongst developers. 

Few ecommerce platforms offer such a customizable experience that’s free and open source. With WooCommerce, you can build a site that can easily stand up to more expensive ecommerce solutions. Can we get a “Woo!”? Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to remember that WooCommerce is not a Merchant of Record, therefore key features like tax management are not available with their solution out of the box.

Wix

All In One Solution For Newbies and Advanced Users – Primarily Focused on B2C and Physical Goods

Wix is popular for a reason. It’s an easy to use website builder that makes it a breeze for even non-technical folks to build a gorgeous website. There’s nothing to install, and no code required.  

If you’re looking for a free option, however, Wix isn’t your best bet. Without a paid plan, your site will be covered in ads, and you won’t be able to choose your own domain name.  The good news is that paid plans are pretty reasonably priced, giving it an advantage over Shopify.

The drag and drop editor alone is particularly advantageous for people with little to no web design experience. While Wix makes it easy to build your website, there are serious limitations to collecting payments, managing global taxes and setting up licensing and download options for your digital products.

The Bottom Line: Shopify is Only One of Your Options

Ultimately, Shopify is an effective ecommerce solution for selling your digital goods. But as you can see, it’s not the only option out there that works for everyone.  Once you start to look at all the options out there, you begin to realize that Shopify may not meet all of your business’s needs after all. 

When you think of an ecommerce platform like a shoe, it’s unreasonable to expect the same shoe to work for everything. Some shoes are made for running, while some shoes are made for dancing.  The type of Shopify alternative that you choose all depends on what you need to do with your metaphorical feet.

By looking at all your digital goods solutions rather than assuming one shoe fits all, you might be surprised there’s the perfect fit out there just for you.

The post Shopify Alternatives For Selling Your Digital Goods appeared first on FastSpring.