I have been meaning to write about my experience with FastSpring.com for a few months, but it kept getting pushed onto the backburner for a variety of different reasons. After a recent experience with the company, I finally feel compelled to get this post out of the Drafts folder.
Before FastSpring
Since launching Today in April of 2008, I was handling all of the purchasing in-house using a combination of a custom-built Web store and a bank provided merchant account. It worked reasonably well, but was limited for a few reasons:
- Anytime I wanted to add functionality to the store, I had to build it myself and I hate Web programming.
- Architecturally I designed it for a single product, which was causing problems as I was prepping to launch Check Off 4 as my second paid application.
- I never got around to adding tracking and analytics to the store, so I was running way too many manual SQL queries to analyze my sales data.
After making the decision to outsource another aspect of my operation, I started researching options. The obvious contenders were Kagi, eSellerate and e-Junkie. While each of them were decent solutions, I always left my trial feeling something substantial was missing or loathing the workflow the products offered. In fact, the only solution I found that didn’t give me that feeling was FastSpring, which I had never heard of until I discovered a Windows application I purchased using it as their store. The purchase experience was top-notch which was important, and as I looked into their backend offerings I was equally impressed.
The Good
First off, the FastSpring backend, called Springboard, is attractive and intuitive. I spend a bit of time each day analyzing my sales and adjusting variables in my store so not hating the user interface is important. That was one of the primary reasons I opted against eSellerate and Kagi. I found their user experience to be a bit convoluted.
FastSpring also offers Google Analytics integration, which helps me analyze where I am getting the most referral traffic from, how much revenue that referral is generating and more. If you’re doing any online advertising, this is a major plus because it can help you analyze what works and what doesn’t.
One of the primary reasons I opted to use my own merchant account and store out of the gate was that I found the other provider’s rates to be sky high for what they were offering whereas a bit of legwork up front got me a merchant account that offered a much fairer rate. FastSpring seems to be the best of both worlds. It’s rates are clearly stated as 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction or a flat rate of 8.9%: you pick. No tiered percentage levels. Simple.
The final and most important thing I absolutely love about FastSpring is their support. They advertise their phenomenal support as a selling point of the service, and I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful it is. The FastSpring folks go above and beyond to answer my questions and resolve my issues. For example, when I was adding Check Off to my store, I knew I wanted to offer both a personal and a family pack license option. I wasn’t exactly sure how best to implement this in the store so I contacted support. Within an hour they had reached out to me with a recommendation and offered to set it up for me so I could see how they did it for future reference. That was above and beyond what I was expecting and sold me on their service even more than before.
The Not So Good
When this post was in my drafts folder, there were two major items on the not so good list. The first was the lack of support for NFR or free license generation either via coupons or the Springboard administration panel. The second, though minor, was lack of native support for AquaticPrime as a license generation option.
As of last week, both of these points are moot as the FastSpring folks have added support for both features!
There are still a few smaller issues I have with the service.
- There’s no automated way to handle a storefront. In other words, you cannot go to https://sites.fastspring.com/secondgearsoftware and be presented with a listing of all of the products presently available. There workaround for this is to create a container product that lists all the available products, but I’ve never fully grasped how to do that and get it to link to that root URL.
- I am always struggling to find the documentation linked on the FastSpring Web site. Once I do find it, it’s hard to read as the images are blurry, the typography and spacing is a bit of a mess and periodically there is yellow highlighted text that just burns my eyes. I’m not sure why the FastSpring Web site is so cluttered and messy, because Springboard is fairly clean.
- Styling your store has a messy workflow. The process involves downloading your template as a zip, making changes locally, uploading it to the Web and then checking it to make sure it renders right. If not, make more changes, upload fresh copy. At a minimum I’d like the option to edit the HTML and CSS in Springboard, but I’d prefer a drag & drop experience a la Squarespace.
None of the issues outlined above are things that bother me on a daily basis. In fact, I can unequivocally recommend FastSpring as a merchant provider for any Indie Mac development shop. If you’d like to see it in action, check out the my product ordering pages:
