The First Year of Click2Sell

· Filed under Click2Sell

Click2Sell service was launched just a bit more than a year ago. Believe me, I still remember the day we decided to finally go public very clearly. I remember every month of the first year. They passed extremely quickly. The year was full of expectations, new people, feedbacks, tweakings and so on.

Even though Click2Sell system was being developed and tested for two full years, even though it seemed that everything was laid out and polished in the best possible way, the first year of service showed and teached us a lot. Of course, that’s very natural, you can’t perfectly foresee the needs of your future customers.

We always said that every feedback about Click2Sell system was very welcome. We are happy that people heard that and provided us with a lot of suggestions. The whole first year was dedicated to adding new features, improving the performace of the system, tweaking minor functions or completely reworking some pages.

Let us just review what additions and changes were made in the first year of Click2Sell’s life.

Improvements

Complete rework of databases in order to make the system a lot faster.
At Click2Sell we gather a lot of data that merchants and affiliates can analyze. The reality showed us that our originally created database structure is not effective enough for really active users. Statistics pages became slower and slower, thus we felt the need to dedicate some of our development time in to system optimizations. It was a really long job, but the outcome was simply wonderful – 10 or 100 times faster report loading speeds.
Click2Sell forum upgrade
Yes, we have to admit that our original forum software was really bad and very inconvenient. We decided to abandon the development of our own forum and just use popular vBulletin forum software instead. I think that was a simple win-win situation for both parties of users and us: Click2Sell users got the proven and comfortable forum system, while we saved some development time.
XML feed of C2S marketplace
We received a lot of questions where XML feed of Click2Sell marketplace could be acquired. It was not possible for quite a long time (there were simply more urgent things to do). However, this autumn we finally implemented the feed and now your scripts, plugins or programs can easily understand the content of our marketplace.
User interface
Initial interface was very good looking, however it was quite slow due to the quantity of images used. We removed images from main menu, replacing them with simple text phrases. This allowed users to browse Click2Sell system in a much faster way.
Modifications of separate pages
Some pages (like "Tracking channels") were redesigned according to our users feedback. Just once again: we listen to our users, so don’t hesitate to tell us your opinion about anything. Such communication helps us and you to create a better system!
Anti-fraud techniques
A lot of tools, methods and techniques were implemented to make sure that cheaters wouldn’t be paid or that fraudulent transactions wouldn’t happen at all. We keep staying alert in watching for potential fraud incidents as scammers never stop improving their methods.

Tweaks

Direct linking to product’s checkout page
A nice change which allows affiliates to refer their traffic directly to product’s checkout page. So affiliates can create their own products’ sales-pages or promotional campaigns if they feel that vendors of their promoted products are not persuasive enough in their made product websites.
Make affiliate link yourself
A quick tweak that allows affiliates directly "sign up" for promoting any product in Click2Sell system. They are no longer required to pick the product by logging in to Click2Sell system and then browsing towards the product. A great time-saver for affiliates.
Click2Sell checkout skip
Another wonderful time-saver which is already copied by some companies in our niche. It eliminates one step in your buyers purchase way. If you provide only one payment option (e.g., PayPal), then why stop your customers at Click2Sell checkout page just for clicking "Continue"?. This tweak can automatically direct your customers right into your used payment gateway. Thus there are less steps that your customers have to do in order to buy your product. Isn’t that great?
CC duplicate transactions protection
The reality showed us that under certain circumstances people can accidentally buy the same product twice or thrice. We implemented this tweak to save them from such trouble.

New features

Moneybookers support
Every additional supported payment gateway allows you to offer more payment options to your customers. Or simply start using Click2Sell, if you don’t have any account of our other supported payment gateways.
So we added Moneybookers into Click2Sell supported payment gateways. Besides Moneybookers, Click2Sell also supports PayPal, Worldpay, Authorize.net and Google Checkout.
Subscription based products via regular PayPal account
Before this feature only people who had PayPal PRO, Authorize.net or Worldpay account were able to sell subscription based products. Now you can have just ordinary PayPal account if you want to sell memberships, month-to-month courses and so on.
C2S API – instant notifications
This one feature adds extremely a lot of flexibility in businesses for Click2Sell users. Want to be able to create accounts in your system on-the-fly just after successful sales? Send a specific message to your customer just after a successful sale? Collect in-depth information of transactions? All of these and much more can be automated by Click2Sell API service!

Pheew… Well, I don’t know if that seems a lot to you or not, but that was a full year of work. I’ve mentioned only those ones which are directly related to users. There were also some additional modifications made for our own sake to make our work more effective.

That list gives me a lot of confidence that now we have really stable, fast, reliable and friendly system. We have found a very solid base for future growth and I’m very happy to see that we spend more and more time on new features development – making Click2Sell.EU even a better system for both merchants and affiliates. In 2009 we will present you with new features of a much larger scale than those in the list. That’s for sure.

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