Avangate Spring 2013 Release Extends Channel Sales to Mobile

It’s been 1.5 years since Avangate added a channel focus to its SkyCommerce Platform, and the company is now rolling out the next release of the platform to help partners grow their Avangate software and cloud services businesses — now even across the mobile market place.

SkyCommerce was designed as a suite that provides control over the sales and support processes while also providing a simple online ordering tool, and brandable reseller tools and portals. The Spring ’13 Release, as Avangate calls it, contains several new features — chief among them streamlined PayPal payment flows, enhanced upselling and cross-selling capabilities, extended APIs for embedded purchasing, and configurable mobile commerce capabilities.

Mobile is hardly anything new, and I can only guess at Avangate’s timing for the addition of new mobile features, but as cloud services continue to connect to devices in an “any time, anywhere” fashion, it’s going to become increasingly critical to be able to deal with customers, whether business or consumer, via the device of their choosing.

Retina-X Studios is an early adopter of the new Avangate release.

“With mobile being so fundamental to our customers, the control and customer experience tools Avangate provides in this release help us reach our goal: to continuously optimize the customer experience across all our channels. Thanks to the ability to customize the mobile cart, we increased sales conversions by over 20 percent,” said James Johns, CEO of monitoring software provider Retina-X Studios, in a prepared statement.

That’s an increase that isn’t easily ignored, but can Avangate’s channel partners pull off similar (or even better) sales conversion increases? Time will tell.

“With the rise of online and pay-as-you-go models, sellers need to be able to transact at every touchpoint to effectively service customers, whether they are ordering, requesting support, or signing up for a trial version,” said Michael Ni, CMO and senior vice president of marketing and products at Avangate, in a prepared statement.