Welcome to the New Year!
2007 was a banner year for the Plimus vendor community, with more sales completed than any time in our history, new features built, released and used to grow e-commerce revenues, and an infrastructure improvement program that helped us to support millions of shoppers with great service.

But we're not done yet! 2008 already promises to be an extraordinary year! Even with the holiday period now disappearing into the rear-view mirror, we're seeing more shopper activity than ever, and the vendor community is constantly expanding. We've welcomed new vendors who have made an immediate impact, and seen development by long-time vendors who are experiencing fantastic growth.

This month we're taking a quick look at the marketplace, as well as the tools and resources we're working on to help you continue to reap the benefits of the Plimus e-commerce platform. As ever, if there's something we're missing, let us know - we're here to serve you!

* The E-Commerce Marketplace
* The Mac Market
* The Learning Center
* Growing Support Team!
* PayPal Outage

There will be tons to tell you about in February and March: we have some very cool stuff up our sleeves

Happy New Year!

The E-Commerce Marketplace(top)

Like any other marketplace, e-commerce waits for no person! The growth in online transactions continues to explode, and the fears consumers once felt about paying online seem to be receding, as merchants (and their providers, like Plimus) become ever-more sophisticated about protecting against fraud and protecting personal information.

Meanwhile, the e-commerce services marketplace continues to evolve. In the last year, Plimus cemented its position as the number one independent provider: take out the various Digital River brands, and we are leading the way, based on pretty much any metric you choose to use. We're proud of this position, and are committed to doing everything we can to continue to earn your business.

At the same time, a lot of the players seem determined to re-draw the market's expectations. Digital River, for instance, are increasingly committed to moving away from being a service provider to independent software developers, and becoming a retailer: they charge apparently low fees (though you'll need at least a slide rule to work out the real cost!), while retaining the rights to cross-sell anything they like during the postpurchase process; and they have made selling Extended Download Warranty and CD-on-Demand mandatory, while retaining the rights to set price and vendor margin.

Plimus remains committed to our core proposition: helping you, the vendor, to grow your e-business revenues. We never use your customers' information for marketing purposes; never add 3rd party cross-sells to your postpurchase pages; and continue to use our simple, graduated fee schedule. We'll be delivering ever more features and resources this year to underscore that we are, and always will be, your service provider - and not just a retail outlet.

The Mac Market (top)

We took the opportunity this January to visit with the Mac developer community, who were out in full force at Macworld in San Francisco. Now that Apple has increased its market share to nearly 9% of all personal computers - becoming the United States' third largest seller of computers! - the frothiness in the Mac market knows no boundaries!

If you can make your products available for the Mac, now may be the time to start doing so: there is lots of demand, and the market still has plenty of room for crossover entrants...at least for now.

Meanwhile, we'll be spending more time talking to Mac developers. It turns out that many of them have been taken in by some of the more...ahem...creative...approaches to e-commerce service pricing lately. Some signed up with a provider offering a flat 10% fee - not noticing that that 10% goes to 15% after just $15,000 of annual sales. Others bought into a setup that looks like the fees are 2.5% - not noticing that they then have to factor in another fee for the financial institution at the other end that can be as high as 4.8%, as well as a series of dollar-based charges that can easily top $5 per invoice.

If you've any friends developing in the Mac world, let them know about Plimus. We know we aren't perfect for absolutely everyone, but our experience in San Francisco taught us that there are a lot of independents out there overpaying terribly!

The Learning Center(top)

One of our quiet successes for 2007 was the addition of the Learning Center. Though still in its infancy, it has been a source of some valuable tips and tricks for vendors for several months now, and you can expect to see some accelerated growth here over the next few months.

An element we're adding right away - it's currently in beta, and we'd love your thoughts! - is Visual FAQ. This will use short, simple Flash movies to show you how to do some of the basic tasks that we have learned people most commonly can't find. An example would be changing payment methods, or the email to which PayPal revenues are delivered. Let us know what you think - and some suggestions for items that should be there!

Growing Support Team!(top)

The growth in business has meant a growing need to support both you and your shoppers. Not only have we worked to improve communications on an automated basis (hopefully you're finding the refund request functionality helpful), we're physically putting people in seats to ensure we respond to your needs quickly!

At the time of writing, we have added four new heads to the team, of which one will be leading a whole new charge, bringing years of experience running teams for other software companies you've definitely heard of! We're confident you're going to find support growing by leaps and bounds in 2008 - and if you don't, we sure hope you'll let us know direct!

If you ever need any backup in getting your issues resolved, don't be shy about sending an email to the team that sends out these newsletters - we're here to help too!

PayPal Outage (top)

Many of you noticed recently that the PayPal payment option was removed from BuyNow pages for a day or two, prompting a few people to wonder what was going on. Although we've communicated with a lot of you directly, and have posted some information around the Web, it seemed worthwhile to reiterate what happened here.

PayPal periodically take down their system for maintenance. For the most part, this lasts maybe a couple of hours, so has relatively little effect on Plimus vendors' business: a few extra orders have to go through manual processing (which we try to do quietly in the background for everyone's convenience), but that's about it. However, on this occasion, PayPal ran into some trouble, and the outage ended up lasting some 40 hours. In order to avoid a slew of unclosable orders, we took the difficult decision to remove PayPal as an option until they were able to actually process orders.