Payment processing for subscription based, high value, downloadable software

Jan, Thank you for your feedback about Avangate. We will make sure that the costs and ways to activate features will be presented more clearly in the future on our website and applications.

The pricing scheme used by Avangate may seem a bit complicated at first and that is because our approach involves custom pricing to customers with non/standard or advanced needs. And that is where the Avangate account manager steps in. His role is to understand your business needs, your business history and projected future, in order to recommend the best and most cost effective features for you.

I agree that at some point Avangate may look a little expensive, but our customers are willing to pay a little extra when considering the value received in return, especially if they are not looking just for a fully featured technical platform, but also for value adding services like marketing campaigns optimization, tracking of sales and marketing efforts, a/b testing etc…

According to your pricing strategy we have different packages / schemes and you can choose which one suits you best: http://www.avangate.com/start-selling/fees.php (see the comparison and details) Most of the features you need are free of charge, like: license key handling, international transaction handling.
Some are not, for example the DRM handling (Avangate Codebox) will cost you a 3% extra - but on the other hand, that is an advanced software protection and license management tool.

Hope this information helps and that you will consider taking a closer look at what Avangate platform has to offer in return of the fees. And don't worry, "contacting sales" at Avangate means getting free assistance to setup more complicated features in the Control Panel or getting a custom feature implemented :).

As your dedicated ecommerce consultant, contact me directly and I will be glad to answer any questions or other concerns you might have.

Ovidiu Marin

I also have a high value download products and chose Avangate. Avangate provides very good customer service - I've seen much worse fees than theirs, and their secure downloads system is worth the cost - but their payment system is very slow. They pay on the 16th of each month, for the previous month. So, if you make a sale on May 1, you have to wait until June 16 for them to make the payment to you, plus whatever time it takes for the money to get to your bank account. So, depending on when you make the sale and how quickly it gets to your account, you could be waiting 7 weeks to get paid. This was a real problem for me, as I wanted my project to be self-funding - so I had to wait for the money to arrive to start advertising. Also, in some cases, it seems you have to "Confirm" the payment - I only found this out by chance - and Avangate doesn't process the transaction to your account until you do this. So, I had a sale on the last day of the month, and because I didn't know until a couple of days later about confirming it, they wouldn't include the sale in that month's payment. So I had to wait until the 16th of the month after - despite my request. I do think that a big company such as Avangate should be able to pay twice monthly - and should be able to "bend" a little to include a sale that was made a couple of days prior. Sticking with them for now ...

I'd recommend you talk with the folks at FastSpring. While they don't have everything you are looking for, they are very easy to work with and driven to make things work the way you need them to.

We've used them for our eCommerce since going live and have had a great experience. They've been excellent at supporting our questions (at late hours... on weekends...) and their rates are clear and understandable.

It's great to do business with a group of people that engender trust; in the end that's near the top of my list when I look for partners.