Merchants who sell digital goods online face challenges that most traditional e-tailers do not, such as high payment gateway costs and difficult-to-work-with affiliates programs. UpClick addresses those issues using a novel combination of a fully integrated secure checkout and an integrated affiliates program. The software is designed from the ground up to maximize the profitability of merchants selling digital goods.
An OverviewUpClick’s big selling point is its free payment gateway – the homepage screams zero percent transaction fees. The reality, as always, is a bit more complex. For transactions less than $40 it’s totally free. This compares very favorably with fees from digital-goods services like Clickbank and payment gateways like 2Checkout. For transactions more than $40 they charge 6.9 percent on the amount over $40, so if you’re dealing with high value, high volume sales you may do better looking elsewhere.
Of course, the biggest player in payment solutions for small businesses is PayPal. UpClick has a compelling value proposition for merchants who use PayPal – you can accept PayPal as a payment type, and UpClick will absorb the fees. That alone makes the company very appealing to lots of people.
UpClick is a bit confusing at first because it tries to be all things to all people. This in itself is admirable; however, it doesn’t clearly communicate the different offerings and the value in those offerings. As a result, the new user can easily become confused. However, persistence pays off.
Describe your products and their attributes on the UpClick set-up screen.
(Click for larger image).The Value in UpClick
The first step to selling your products with UpClick, of course, is to have your digital goods. The majority of current UpClick merchants sell software, presumably because the company offers good built-in functionality to support software e-tailers. For example, you can provide UpClick with a list of the software license keys, which they can issue to customers. This makes things simple for both the merchant and the customer.
Since the business model is based around up selling and cross selling, much of the product setup involves up selling and cross selling. As you setup your account, you are prompted with questions as to which category your product falls into. This lets UpClick provide the best complementary products and avoid competitive ones. There are also opportunities to manually select products you believe have the best up-sell opportunity.
TrackingAn impressive feature of the service is its openness. Rather than being a closed system, they are very open about integrating with other services. Built-in support for button-level tracking via Google or WebTrends encourages transparency and accountability.
Another feature that differentiates UpClick is its attitude toward affiliates. Affiliate networks often put up barriers up between the merchants and the affiliates. UpClick has taken the opposite approach by actively encouraging them to talk and to work together.
InternationalizationUpClick is headquartered in the bi-lingual city of Montreal. Multi-language and multi-currency capabilities are baked into the software from the ground up, not added as an after thought as is so often the case with such products.
Creating multi-language versions of product descriptions is very easy. More interesting, is being able to easily create multiple price points for different currencies.
For example, if your product is $29.95 (US), it will automatically convert it to other currencies – e.g. $37.66 Australian dollars (at time of writing). However, you can then override it and create a more locale-friendly pricing, such as $34.95 (AU) or $39.95 (AU). This should help boost international sales substantially – people always prefer to buy in their own currency.
AffiliatesThe affiliates offering forms a key component of the platform. This can be a great sales boost to merchants and a potentially lucrative income stream for motivated affiliates.
Rather than distinguishing between merchants and affiliates in a very clear cut way (although, confusingly, UpClick makes the distinction in the signup process), it seems all merchants are affiliates. This makes sense as up-selling other merchants’ products – basically, affiliate selling – is such a core part of the product.
This has a number of benefits to vendors:
Expands range of outlets for their products Great exposure to large cross-section of people Introduces their product to customers who may not otherwise have considered it Achieves all this without charging extra money – just offer a reasonable percentage to affiliates, and it’s all done. For affiliates, there’s an easy-to-use system and a well-optimized checkout process that should increase conversions.
UpClick offers opportunities for cross- and up-selling products. (Click for larger image).What’s the Drawback?
UpClick isn’t for everyone. High volume, high value digital goods sales vendors should look elsewhere. The 6.9 percent charge cuts in on sales of more than $40. While this isn’t a disaster for lower-volume players, for some it could eat profits. Also, despite having a well-optimized checkout process, opportunities for optimization are limited.
Overall, this is a strong competitor in the digital-goods market and well worth checking out.
Mark Baartse is founder of Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com , the leading shopping cart information site. He lives in Sydney, Australia where he works on e-commerce sites, helping to maxmize their profitability. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/markbaa .
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