[Note: This is another in a series of posts by vendors I've invited to write a guest post here because they have something to offer of value to microISVs. EC Suite is a family-owned, 12 year veteran e-commerce processing comany. If you have a product or service that helps microISVs succeed and would like to do a guest post here, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com.]

By Russell Nyland
Account Executive for EC Suite

Bob wanted to give us the chance to introduce ourselves to the community; some of you may already be familiar with the company name from trade shows or have seen me posting on BoS over the last few months. I work with the Business Development division of http://www.ecsuite.com, an e-commerce platform for digital content including software, media, and information.

I’ve seen a lot of concern about new processors being small, fly-by-night operations or just waiting to be acquired by larger competitors, so I think the best place to start would be a brief explanation of where we came from.

EC Suite was originally founded to help local companies sell digital products online; we quickly expanded to establish an international presence providing payment processing, merchant account and gateway services to North America and Europe. We currently have about 300 employees at our headquarters, data center, and support center buildings in Tempe, AZ as well as branch offices in Boston, MA, and Malta, EU. The EC Suite family includes our web hosting division (which also provides IP transit and CDN) as well as DRM Networks, an authorized Microsoft DRM Service Provider. This makes us the first fully-integrated DRM solution with a billing system.

Each new area of the company was developed to meet a need from online businesses that the market could not yet meet, and after 12 years, we now support over 22,000 websites.

EC Suite is a private, family-owned company. You’ll never see us getting bought out or buying up smaller companies and cheapening their name in order to satisfy a stockholder’s bottom line. Our revenue dollars have always gone back into new development, and helping new/small businesses sell their products online has become our expertise. As such, we have added a few interesting features to the normal e-commerce toolbox of a third party processor that will distinguish our focus on new technology and innovation.

Recurring Billing

We’re one of the largest online subscription processors in the US. Our Recurring Billing and License Revocation features specifically pertain to software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Recurring Billing allows companies to license their software on a timed basis rather than selling lifetime access to the program. Recurring subscriptions are typically done in 30, 60, or 90 day intervals, but 180 day and year-long intervals are also possible. When each period expires, our billing system will automatically process another charge using the payment information provided by the consumer. Upon completion of a successful rebill transaction, the consumer will be able to acquire a new license that is valid for the next subscription period. Additionally, consumers can utilize our support page to update their payment information if needed; for example, they can change credit card information, or update the expiration date on an existing card.

License Revocation ensures that, in the event a consumer’s transaction is returned or charged back for any reason, they lose the use of the software immediately rather than when the current license expires. A grace period can be implemented to allow for end users who may not be online each time they launch the program to revalidate their license. This process happens transparently to the user; no input is required from them unless the license is revoked or cannot be verified.

Regional Billing

EC Suite clients can target their product pricing directly to each consumer’s location and currency in an effort to maximize revenue when exchange markets fluctuate. This feature was created to address our clients’ concern about how the declining dollar has created a revenue drain or a price discount, specifically when it relates to the exchange with the euro and their European sales.

Currently the Regional Billing feature allows prices to be displayed in U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, euros, pounds sterling and yen. It will allow consumers to take advantage of the weak U.S. dollar and maintain current pricing for their U.S. consumers.

This is a feature we started implementing just a few months ago. With the declining value of the US dollar and the online consumer base expanding and becoming more stable in the EU and Asia, we believe this will become a standard requirement for online businesses as it has been in retail/brick and mortar businesses for quite some time. The Big Mac Index is one example of this.

Here’s an example of how Regional Billing works:

With normal billing:

Person in US buys a piece of software for 30 USD.

Person in EU buys the same software for 20 euros.

With Regional Billing:

Person in US buys a piece of software for 30 USD.

Person in EU buys the same software for 30 euros.

These numbers will vary from client to client depending where their sales come from and how much the U.S. dollar fluctuates, but we’ve seen zero drop in sales and an average overall revenue increase of 20% among our clients who have implemented this feature.

SecuredApp

SecuredApp is a product we developed in conjunction with VI Labs, and it isn’t just another license scheme advertised as DRM. SecuredApp is a security post-processor that creates self-protecting applications to prevent piracy, malicious tampering, and access to sensitive intellectual property embedded within the software application.

SecuredApp provides copy protection by using a highly unique user authentication system, ensuring only legitimate users are able to run the application. SecuredApp prevents tampering by encrypting the entire application and only decrypting functions when they’re called; once a function is finished running, it is re-encrypted and removed from memory. This way, dormant functions cannot be called by malicious third party software. File integrity is also checked at run-time to ensure each function executes as originally intended; this will detect any changes that have been made to the compiled program.

DLL files associated with the application can also be protected. SecuredApp can take an existing executable and associated DLLs as input and create a protected version of the same application as output. SecuredApp uses 128-bit encryption and memory obfuscation to protect the application. This memory obfuscation adds extraneous code to each function so that if a hacker attempts to copy code contained in memory, they will be unable to tell what code is real.

Developers are also given complete licensing control so that any pricing model can be used. This allows for promotions, trials, subscriptions, recurring billing, single purchase, and any other licensing model you choose.

If you’re interested in trying SecuredApp out on a trial basis, we’re always looking for live testers. Just email me at russell@ecsuite.com or learn more about how we can help grow your business at http://www.ecsuite.com/.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Bob for giving us this chance to introduce ourselves.

Russ

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EC Suite is an online payment processor providing a set of marketing, reporting and site building tools to help sell your software online. Check us out at http://www.ecsuite.com.