How does Digital River help software developers?
Digital River aggressive purchase of its competitors ought to be good news for Digital Rivers shareholders. For example, during the last two years, the other two payment solutions we used - ShareIT and SWREG (Digital River purchases SWREG) - have both been purchased by Digital River. If you are selling software, there are very few non-Digital River solutions left out there.
By reducing the competition, Digital River should be able to keep up the fees, i.e. part of the sale that Digital River gets. The fees currently range from 7% to 27% of the purchase value, so for each sale of SpreadsheetConverter, Digital River gets $7 to $25. The creditcard companies gets 2-4% of the total amount, but there is money left for Digital River.
From our point of view, Digital River seems to have a very good business.
Pros and cons for us as a software developer:
+ The advantage of outsourcing ordering incl payment for us, is that we can focus on our core business: software development and support of our customers. +Regnow has a large amount of affiliates, for example shareware sites, which advertises our programs. This increases our sales, and thus compensates the high fees. +Handles fraud, taxes etc which is a big problem if you sell all over the world. +Digital River knows about online sales of software. -The fees. If we would use a payment service directly or something like PayPal, we would pay 2-4%.