I need more twitter friends.  Show some love or something.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

We switched to SupportCenter after having some issues with Kayako. Kayako was great software too, but it’s encoded and required a performance robbing decoder that affected the entire server. That and Kayako’s customer service sucks.

The Support Desk

SupportCenter does just what we need it to do without all the extra fluff. You can tell they really took a Gmail philosophy to UI design with their “less is more” AJAX interface that is clean and easy to use. There is a full featured trouble ticket system complete with escalation rules, multiple cues and notifications, custom data fields, and email piping. We use these features in a couple different ways:

Web Based Tickets-

SupportCenter allows you to insert a ticket submission form anywhere on your website. For us this was key as we wanted to integrate the support form in to our Secure Delivery app and pass user information from Secure Delivery to the help desk system. We set up a few custom data fields for user information that we use in troubleshooting problems customers are having- things like their account email address, customer ID in our system, and account class. Once there were set up we designed the integrated support ticket form to pass these variables for logged in users using simple hidden form fields.

When the tickets come in the are automatically filtered based on the custom fields like account class- tickets from paid accounts go in to a high priority queue while free accounts go in to the regular queue. Using the Support Center notification system I have an alert set up to send me a text message to my cell phone email address for priority paid tickets so even if I’m sipping on burbon in the back yard I’ll know a paying customer needs me.

Email Based Tickets-

Support Center also supports email piping, the must have feature for a serious support solution. Basically what email piping does is parse incoming emails to a specific address, read them, and insert them in to the web based support ticket system. This is important basically two ways-

First, when we reply to a web based ticket (the standard way for SD users to create support requests) the reply is automatically sent to the customer’s email. They can then simply reply to the email in their email reader to update their ticket. Their replies are piped to Support Center, parsed in to the support database, and show up in our web based administration panel automatically. This is far superior to other systems where you have to click on a link to go to a reply web page, enter a ticket ID and password, and then reply.

Second, email piping allows users to create new tickets by simply sending an email to our support@ address without even going to the web site. Although we don’t get the custom field information on the customer such as user ID when they email their support requests in directly, we do store the custom field information within Support Center so if they have ever submitted a ticket through the web form in the past it still shows up with their email. All custom fields have the option to be ticket based (associated with this incident) or user based so that their custom info shows up on every ticket they submit, even through email.

There is great value here for the money, and at $99 as opposed to the $299 Kayako eSupport price its really hard to beat.

Knowledgebase

Support Center also includes a built-in knowledgebase system that is quick and easy to use. You can easily create categories and KB articles. You can attach images to KB posts while you create it making the generation process that much quicker- no seperate ftp uploading. The KB generates search engine friendly URLs automatically and actually generates static HTML pages as opposed to dynamic docs. To check it out in more detail you can see the Secure Delivery Knowledgebase.

The knowledgebase is nearly perfect- the features you need without any extra crap slowing you down. I love it- now I just need to find the time to write about 100 kb articles…

Oh, and one other thing- the web based ticket forms, even custom integrated forms, can load KB article suggestions as the users type their questions in through a bit of javascript- an awesome feature that keeps users from asking already answered questions over and over again :)

Support Center… Support

I have only had one problem with Support Center- a funny error with generating KB articles. The great thing is that after contacting the developers they diagnosed the issue, solved the problem, and had an update posted to their website in less than 3 days! I know a little bit about web application development, and let me tell you- this was awesome.

They regularly update Support Center as you can see from their changelog. They use web based delivery to issue updates, so you can easily log in to your account and download the most current version at any time.

The only gripe I have with Support Center, if you can even call it that, is that its mildly difficult to customize. I’m used to looking at complex web applications, so I can somewhat sort through the mix of AJAX, php, and HTML to find what I’m looking for, but they sure didn’t make it easy. While they did provide some basic template files to change the basic submission form, knowledgebase layout, etc. I could see novice developers having a hard time wrapping their head around customizations.

Still, this is a small price to pay for all the power and functionality you get for such a great price, and I would recommend Support Center to anyone who wants a full featured, reliable support desk without breaking the bank.

Give Support Center a look, try their online demo, or download the free single agent version to give it a try- you won’t be disappointed.

Note: The links above are not affiliate links. We personally use this software at Secure Delivery, I love it, and thats why I’m recommending it. If you want an affiliate link you can click here :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

A bit of a rant (I love those) with a lot of truth, it talks about how everyone exploiting the loopholes in social media services has watered down the results for everyone.

Let’s say you’re having a party, and you’ve set aside a certain amount of booze for all of your guests. When you have 10 guests, everybody gets happily loaded and goes to bed with the wrong people and the world is as it should be.

But imagine that each of your friends invited 10 of their own friends. Or 100. Or 1,000. Then you’ve got 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people sharing the original amount of hooch. No-one’s drunk, and everybody’s looking at each other and wondering why.

That, and any article that has the line “We added shit to the wine and then wondered why the wine tasted like shit”  gets my vote.

Check it out, its a great read.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

(11:17:22 AM) Jacob: where’s the deluge of new signups? :)

(11:18:43 AM) Chance: I’m pretty sure we have to tell people about all the cool new features before they clamor to our door

(11:18:51 AM) Chance: at least I think that’s how it works

(11:19:10 AM) Jacob: damnit

Sigh, I guess we need to pony up some cash for advertising now, eh?

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Attrition in layman’s terms means “a reduction or decrease in numbers, size, or strength”. To the subscription service operator, it pretty much means “people who quit”.

Noob in Internet speak means “someone new at something”.

Because we have an easy to use service that caters to beginners we have a high rate of attrition on paid accounts. On more than one occasion I have had people send me a support ticket that said “Hey, love the service but I’ve had my product for sale for a whole month and not made one sale! I guess its not going to work out, cancel my account please.” This person was obviously new and mislead. I think most of the issue stems from the myth that “making money online is easy” or that it “requires no work to make sales”.

As someone who has sold digital products before I wanted to say “Hey buddy, take a deep breath and give it some time and promotion.” As the subscription service operator, I am obliged to say “Yes sir, your account is canceled per your request”.

While our growth is steady and we do manage to pick up more new subscriptions each month than we lose, it would be a lot better if we didn’t lose so many to discouraged noob, or new, marketers. For Secure Delivery to grow in profitability, we need to attract die hard, experienced marketers who generate sales, or at the very least, realize that a new product might take a few months to take off without an expansive marketing list or expensive advertising blitz.

How To Attract Veterans

Well, we need to provide the advanced features veterans look for of course. Secure Delivery is already an advanced system for product delivery- our delivery controls, security, and setup options are rich with features and options- but we do not market it as such because we have always thought our best asset was our great, easy to use setup.

We are working to launch some advanced and unique features over the next couple of months, mainly our product marketplace, our product affiliate system that allows individuals to run their own affiliate systems on individual products (or their whole catalog), and a couple other secret (for now) but exciting options.

These new features are going to be aimed primarily at experienced marketers that want to take their sales to the next level, or to automate complicated tasks that there previously was no easy, automatic method to complete.

What Does This Mean?

The bottom line here is this- we love helping new marketers sell their products. We encourage anyone- be it a college kid, someone who wants to make extra money on the side, or work at home mom- to sign up for a free account and give it a go. We will always make Secure Delivery easy to use for everyone, even if they know nothing about payment processors or IPN URLs or relay response codes or whatever. But we will start adding advanced features that more experienced marketers will want to utilize more than the beginners.

In a way, this is how it should be- The bread and butter of Secure Delivery should be users who consistently rely on our services to deliver their products and manage their programs, while beginners are free to sign up for the free and basic plans to test the waters. With the future availability of advanced features like affiliate programs and the like, these beginners eventually become veterans and move up. Its a sustainable model in theory- we’re going to work to make it happen in practice.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

I don’t know what kind of response I will get from the listing (if any) but the price was right to try it out so I thought I’d give it a go. Does anyone else have any experience listing their script or program on HotScripts? I’d be interested to hear your tale.

The premium listing allowed me to attach Screenshots with captions- I thought this was important because we’re very proud of our easy-to-use user interface and I wanted to show it off. These screenshots are currently waiting for admin approval, but they should be up on the listing within the next 24 hours or so.

It allowed me to show off the pages of Secure Delivery that people don’t get to see unless they subscribe for a free or paid account, and hopefully I can lure a couple people in. After all, nobody has EVER said “Secure Delivery sucks” after they try it- heck, people love it! :)

Anyone interested in viewing the Secure Delivery listing on HotScripts is welcome to, and of course I would love it if anyone who is using Secure Delivery would be so kind as to write a review or at least give us a rating :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Our traffic has dropped a bit from September, but thats ok. In September I tried a bunch of random traffic producing methods- everything from “buying traffic” to social bookmarking and forum posts. While we did get a big surge in traffic from what I suspect was pop-under traffic and surf consoles, there was not a corresponding big surge in sign-ups.

This confirmed my suspicions, but hey- I wanted to try it out anyway. At least now when I say buying visitors is a crock of @&*$ I have the experience to back up my claims instead of hearsay and conjecture.

Throughout September Secure Delivery got a number of reviews, both paid and free, from other bloggers. They continue to bring quality traffic to Secure Delivery and I suspect they will continue to in the future. In addition to the blog reviews, Secure Delivery was picked as on of the prizes for the Problogger Birthday Giveaway. This resulted in several posts on Problogger. While this didn’t bring a whole heck of a lot of traffic (there were always many other product links beside ours) I know for a fact that quite a few people who did come through created an account.

Add to that the random distribution of prizes meant that only 3 of the 5 people who won lifetime subscriptions actually sold digital downloads and could use the account and the cost of promotion on that one went way down. I’ll have to think of something to do with the other two lifetime prize subscriptions if they are not eventually claimed…

Fraud!

We had our first fraud claim on PayPal this weekend. Evidently someone signed up for a paid plan, decided they didn’t want to use the service, and decided to file a fraud claim against us in PayPal to get their $10 back.

You know, we hate it that someone wanted to cancel their subscription. That really sucks, and we’d love to know why. What really chaps our ass about this particular cancellation is that they could have just dropped us a support ticket saying that Secure Delivery was not for them and we would have happily canceled their subscription and given them a full refund.

Interestingly enough, the fraud reason was “Unauthorized use of PayPal account” even though they used their business domain email, set up a product being sold on that domain, and even added our buy button before canceling. Lies and deceit I tell you- when all they would have had to do is ask, and not even nicely at that.

Features Features Features….

Both my business partner and I are working on new features and trying to get ready for a publish.

A publish is a big thing to us- it pretty much copies our dev environment to the live site and lets all the new features we are working on behind the scenes out to the public. Being how our service directs people’s money and products to the right parties, we spend a long, long time testing new features in our dev environment before we publish to live, so we get pretty excited when we get to stop testing, throw the big switch, and actually launch new features and see how subscribers use them.

What will probably be in this upcoming publish includes a new payment processor (2CheckOut), a new method of putting your products “On Sale” and setting up “Introductory Offers”, and a few other tweaks and updates. Of course, all this is subject to change and development complications might move features further down the time line, yada yada yada.

Sorry for neglecting the blog, this whole running a business online thing is a lot of work. Thanks to all three of my readers- I’ll try to keep you updated as time permits :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Reviews and Blog Mentions

A number of things contributed to increased traffic on the Digital Product Delivery site, the primary being other bloggers reviewing and trying out Secure Delivery. After looking at my web stats, here are some of the sites that have reviewed Secure Delivery and sent traffic over:

• Burt over at osworld is a long-time and strong supporter of Secure Delivery (thanks Burt!) and has mentioned it numerous times- recent examples include how to set up an auto-return bonus offer using Secure Delivery and a proper review with video showing the product setup process.
• Mark over at 45n5 did a review including a Secure Delivery tutorial showing how to set up a product.
• TylerCruz.com mentioned Secure Delivery in a post on how to monetize your blog.
• Sarah over at AIS By Sarah did a review of Secure Delivery after it “saved her bacon” as she so eloquently put it :)
• Empress at Building My Empire went over the virtues of the Secure Delivery free plan and gave a bit of a review on her site.
• Finally, Adnan over at Blogtrepreneur did a paid review of Secure Delivery on his blog.

If you have mentioned Secure Delivery or did a review and I missed you, please let me know- its possible someone might have slipped through the cracks and I’d like to give credit where credit is due!

The Result?

I haven’t really decided if I want to show actual traffic numbers on this blog- thats quite a bit of information to be giving competition. I will however give you an idea of the traffic growth Secure Delivery has experienced this month with the following graph from my stats program:

Some Quick Facts:

• Traffic at Secure Delivery has increased almost 1250% this month.
• We have experienced a 150% increase in Free Plan signups
• We are currently experiencing a 14.2% conversion rate from Free to Paid plans, although I expect this number fluctuate and drop before becoming stable on a lower number
• 3rd Party payment processors have begun to actively seek us out and request that we integrate them
• We have received feedback from actual users and reviewers, which is priceless
• We have to actually pay out affiliate commissions this month :P

All in all, not a bad first month of “serious marketing” for Secure Delivery. In the next month we are looking forward to launching a major feature or two and buying a couple reviews on high-profile sites to get Secure Delivery more exposure. Stay tuned, and I’d love to hear your feedback!

What is the first thing I do when I find out we could have done something better?

I issue a refund for that month of service. No questions asked, no strings. I give them their money back and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience I have caused them.

What does issuing a refund do?

First of all, it makes the customers a lot less irritated. Second, it recruits the customer as a troubleshooter- they actually want to help you track down the problem and correct it instead of just expecting you to “fix it now!” Third (and most important) it keeps the customer from canceling their subscription.

Secure Delivery is a subscription based service. As with any subscription service that relies on recurring payments user attrition- or “users quitting” in plain English- is a (and maybe “the”) main concern. Issuing a full or partial refund alleviates this concern for us.

After all if you paid $10 for something, it didn’t work as expected, and the guy who sold it to you gave your money back and worked with you to solve the problem… what is there to be mad about? Not only do you get to continue to use the service for free for the rest of the month, but you also get to work directly with the developers to tweak a feature to your liking. We fix all bugs in days (and usually within hours) so even if the customer can’t use the service as intended for a couple days they are still winners- getting the rest of the month free to boot.

Will this practice work in the long run?

I think so. I haven’t issued a refund in weeks because the bugs are all being discovered and ironed out. From a financial standpoint I am not worried about the bottom line because I know that while I had to give $10 back I am still going to make $110 more off of that happy customer for the rest of the year when its fixed to their liking.

Because of this practice we have never had a customer quit Secure Delivery in anger. Sure, we have had what I like to call “phantoms”, or people who subscribe, never set up a product in SD, and later quit without any communication with us, but never has a customer brought an issue up, got pissed off at the way we handled it, and quit.

While I am sure big business CEOs and the like would disagree, I care more about keeping the customer happy than making money off them. It is my firm belief that happy customers are the best sort of marketing you can get, and we need great word of mouth marketing. Happy customers don’t quit subscription services, and without massive user attrition the money will take care of itself.

I would love to hear your experiences with issuing refunds to your customers, and if you think I have gone off the deep end by giving money back to the customer without a fight.

It’s not a free trial or a try-before-you-buy kind of thing. There are no restrictions on how many sales you can make, how many downloads you can deliver, or any of that crap. Its not time limited and will never expire leaving you stranded. The fact is it really, really is free. No billing, no credit card numbers, cancel anytime. No strings attached, really. Heck, we don’t even “build a list” or market to free users with advertising or special offers for other products that we endorse.

Unfortunately, free is not free enough for most forums and communities.

You see to post offers in “Freebie” forums like at Digital Point or the Warrior Forum you are not allowed to request contact information. You can’t collect email addresses or names. You can’t send emails to users after they sign up, even if its to say “Holy Crap! You sold something and made $20!” or you get warned, banned, and tarred and feathered and run out of town. This is where the rub lies as to set up a free account you actually have to, you know… set up a free account.

(as a side note, you can ask any user of Secure Delivery and they will tell you they love to get our emails- just ask Burt)

There is such a stigma surrounding the word Free, especially in internet marketing, because of so many promises of free stuff *with a catch. Its proving nearly impossible to get people to understand that all we want to do is get subscribers to use and abuse us on our dime.

Case in point-

I noticed the rules on the Freebie forum at DP said you could not collect emails to give away something for free. Knowing that our free service would send up a red flag because the person would actually have to sign up for a free account to get a free account (I know, crazy right?), I sent a PM to the guy who posted the freebie rules and asked him for his approval.

This was his reply:

Its not a free download its a “free service” you must make some money from it try services but i guess free is ok but i am not sure

After I recovered from brain damage trying to unwrap his grammar, I decoded his terminal run-on sentence:

Ain’t nothin free! You gotta be making money you ain’t foolin’ me! So um I dunno omg I like pie.

The simple fact is this- We give out free accounts with no strings attached because we want people to be successful selling their first digital product. We know that if Bob sells his first ebook and makes $100 he will probably make another one. When bob wants to sell 2 or 3 ebooks he has to upgrade. Cha-ching! Bob is successful, Secure Delivery has a happy paid subscriber who learned the ins and outs of selling their first digital product on us and has no problem with spending $10 a month to earn $100-10,000 a month, and everything is right in the world.

We don’t want to market other peoples products to our free subscribers. We don’t want our free subscribers wasting time looking at ads for some half-baked “Auto Cash Machine” or other nonsense.

What we want is our free subscribers to focus on marketing their own products, earning money, and deciding to take the next step and make more.

Now the question is, how do I get everyone else to understand our brilliantly simple subscription model without thinking I am trying to pull the wool over their eyes?