TrustRadius Insights for FastSpring are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
FastSpring has been a trusted solution for businesses across various industries for over 10 years. Users have relied on FastSpring to automate their product sales, including order details, fulfillment, payment of taxes, and fraud prevention. The platform has proven invaluable for selling desktop software, macOS automation software, and CMS extensions. It has simplified the process of building and maintaining a payment processing stack, allowing users to focus on product development. FastSpring's ability to handle European Union VAT and its support in handling taxation for different countries have taken the load off businesses, reducing administrative work. Customers appreciate the convenience of FastSpring's simple popup payment window and secure link to products, making purchases effortless. The platform's seamless integration with internal licensing systems and its ability to accept multiple forms of e-payment such as Amazon and PayPal have made it an excellent choice for many users. FastSpring's reliability, quality, and flexibility have garnered positive experiences from users who recommend the service to others seeking a trustworthy and reliable eCommerce platform.
We tried a lot of Payment Processors for the last few years, but we are sticking with FastSpring for more than 3 years. Their support is one of the best, and we receive responses mostly in a few hours. Onboarding will take some time, however, the support is faster in resolving issues. We process monthly and yearly subscription payments, and FastSpring works well for us. But the integration requires a developer to work on it, so the integration is a little complicated. Without this integration, we can only use a direct link to process payments. They process all the payouts on time. Also having Apple Pay, Google and Amazon pay are working great for us.
Pros
Popup Stores and Embedded Stores
Payment Integrations
Easy Refund Process
All the info about the payment and the user
Cons
They should work on integrations, just like other providers offering a script needs to be installed on the site, then the payment forms can be integrated easily
Interface seems old, maybe they can work on it
Sometimes, we saw duplicate payments on recurring payments
WordPress Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
FastSpring is better option for small business and enterprises as well. But if you're a single person managing a person, or don't have a developer on your team, you may need to hire one to integrate the platform on your site, otherwise, it works great on all the parts. Have integrations with Apple, Google and Amazon Pay and accept most of the cards. And handles and tax automatically, which is a plus.
FastSpring solves our problem to accept electronic payments in our in-app purchases.
We integrated the FastSpring Checkout process with our internal Licensing system: such an integration has been extremely easy thanks to the already built-in connectors of FastSpring towards the major Licensing platforms.
Moreover, the ability to accept multiple for of e-payment other than the credit card (e.g. Amazon, PayPal, etc.) made FastSpring an excellent choice for us.
Pros
Integration with other licensing platforms.
Multiple forms of electronic payment accepted.
Easy, effective and nice UI for the final user.
Cons
A sandbox to try payment system other than credit cards.
A direct integration in native apps, not only web pages.
A more powerful debugging system to understand exactly the flow of the user while paying.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any kind of web app is perfectly suited for FastSpring, but also native apps can be arranged as well (as we did) with a little bit more effort.
There is an extensive portfolio of solutions and customizations that help to deal with almost every scenario.
The integration with a lot of Licensing platforms, finally, is awesome and extremely easy.
FastSpring is used at our company as a payment service provider. We sell software licenses and our customers go through the payment system which FastSpring handles. All of the payments are handled by them. Every time someone purchases a product from our store, FastSpring takes care of the payments as well as fraud detection. Once the sale is complete, FastSpring automation sends out the fulfillment emails to all of our customers. The fulfillment email includes a download link for our software and a license key.
The problems that FastSpring truly solves for us is localized pricing, language, taxes, currencies as well as payment methods that global consumers expect.
Pros
FastSpring builds and maintains a global payment system that provides secure transactions.
For a small company like ours, FastSpring removes the worry about the e-commerce process and all that it entails.
FastSpring provides an easy, localized purchasing experience for every customer, everywhere.
It seems like a cost-effective solution that could be up and running within a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
Cons
FastSpring keeps growing and handles much bigger companies now. They don't show the same interest to small companies as they have in the beginning. As a result, the support and feature requests are not fulfilled.
The dashboard is outdated. They need to improve on the customization section of the dashboard to provide more options and make it much easier to understand.
Affiliate system in FastSpring is used via a 3rd party – impact radius. And we find this extremely complicated. I wish they can go back to keeping Affiliate solutions inside FastSpring as they had in the past.
Likelihood to Recommend
FastSpring will be well suited for a company that needs simple checkout solution. As a bonus, you'll get a nice checkout flow. If you're a company that doesn't have the time to concentrate and becomes an expert in data security, currency conversion, global tax management, or fraud detection – this will be a great fit. It's appropriate for anyone who doesn't want to waste time on managing support for their e-commerce business.
FastSpring is used for all online purchases of .com Solutions software products and consulting services. FastSpring also calls my online license key generator software (an in-house developed solution).
Pros
Online Store Management
Online Payment Processing
Licence Key Generator API
Cons
FastSpring uses 2 separate GUIs for store owners. Some features work with one GUI implementation and not the other one.
Some other providers do provide lower credit card processing fees, compared with FastSpring. But I have been very happy dealing with FastSpring overall in terms of support and overall usability - so I am happy to continue using FastSpring. If I was selling 10x or 100x my current sales volume, I might consider a change, but I have no plans to change at the present time.
Likelihood to Recommend
<ul><li>Technical support has been very responsive.</li><li>The overall store management and customization features implemented by FastSpring make it easy for me to update my product listings and add new products.</li><li>The ability to have FastSpring call my license generator at the completion of the order processing is also very important to my business.</li></ul>
I own and run a small publishing business, White Knight Press, which publishes guide books for advanced compact cameras. I publish the books in paperback and ebook versions and sell them through various resellers. I use FastSpring to carry out the sales of ebook versions of the books directly from my website. FastSpring provides an ordering page that my site links to for each book title. Customers go to the FastSpring ordering page, and FastSpring takes care of all ordering and fulfillment details, including processing of payments through credit cards and other methods, payment of any applicable taxes, fraud prevention, providing the ebook files to the purchaser, and technical support in the event a problem arises with the ordering process.
Pros
FastSpring makes the process of selling ebooks from my website quite painless and virtually invisible for me. I let FastSpring handle all details of the transactions, and I rarely have to get involved directly with the customers who purchase the books.
FastSpring is very responsive with respect to technical and customer support. I have had a few occasions when a customer was having difficulty completing a purchase transaction, and FastSpring has always been responsive and helpful in resolving such problems quickly and efficiently.
FastSpring offers a flexible set of options for customizing ordering pages that can be included in my website. There are many options, such as promotional coupons, discounts, multiple file downloads, and others.
Cons
One issue I have had is when a customer enters his or her email address incorrectly, and consequently does not receive the downloadable files for the book her or she ordered. It would be helpful if FastSpring revised the ordering system to require that the email address be entered twice, or somehow verified, so this issue does not arise in the future.
Some of the options offered by FastSpring can be tricky to set up, such as setting up a system whereby a customer can order multiple file downloads. It would be helpful if FastSpring could provide "wizards" for setting up ordering pages, rather than just having users choose from options that are not completely user-friendly.
Likelihood to Recommend
FastSpring is very well suited for handling the sales of ebooks from a website, because it takes care of all details of ordering, payment processing, and file delivery, with minimal need for intervention by the owner of the website. FastSpring is especially well suited for the sales of digital products that are sold internationally because FastSpring customizes ordering pages for various countries with respect to factors such as language, currency, and taxes.
FastSpring is no longer used by my company. I liked the fact that FastSpring only requires a percentage cut of sales and not an additional service fee, but as of 2023 that has now changed. They now required a $150 "Risk Assement Fee." And if you fail to pay it, your store will be shut down and all pending payments will be held for "90 days."
Pros
Cover All Bases - FastSpring not only complies with the GDPR, but also VAT taxes, ALL Currencies and Languages, Multiple Payment Options, 5TB of file storage per product (allowing for almost an unlimited file storage limit storewide), custom storefront and custom email fulfillments and so much more!
Cons
The sudden addition of a mandatory "Risk Assessment Fee." We are to pay by 29th or they threaten to shut down our store and keep all earnings for 90 days. Their notice of this fee was also short notice. In addition to this, they are now using AI as the judge of whether or not we can continue to use FastSpring even after we pay the $150 fee. The AI can improperly process your documents and the human support team will not help you. So not only will your store possibly be shut down despite having the proper documentation, but the support team will not help you leaving you at the mercy of the AI.
Likelihood to Recommend
We love the fact that FastSpring only requires a percentage cut of sales and not an additional service fee. Our previous e-Commerce platform charged a hefty cut of sales and a service fee on top of that. The revenue we made went right back into paying the service fees. So I am very thankful that FastSpring does not charge us out of pocket for their incredible services! We also love the complete control of order fulfillment. Our previous e-Commerce platform allowed for zero customization of the order completion email. FastSpring however, allows for customization of the text-only email as well as the HTML version and even Web page order completion so that the customer doesn't even have to go to their email. They can complete an order and download their order in the same window!
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They also fully cover VAT tax collection. Once again, our previous e-Commerce platform didn't cover VAT at all and they even assured us that VAT only mattered to sellers in the EU, not buyers. This is incorrect. EU laws require e-Commerce sellers to charge VAT Tax on purchases of electronically delivered products for buyers based in the European Union. In the EU law before 2015, VAT was based on the location of the business, but it is now based on the location of the customer. So the fact that FastSpring abides by EU laws is great! And I have had many EU based happy customers thanks to FastSpring's VAT coverage! Also, they are now fully compliant with the new GDPR regulation!</div>
And how can we forget? Unlimited storage! Unlimited storage meaning that you can host as many files total on your store. So you could have a store with 10TB of files total. Individual product file size limits are 5TB however.
Lastly, the ability to see your customer's IP address and how many times they have downloaded your product is an amazing feature! This helps us in particular with unfortunate cases with fraudulent customers when they claim they never received or downloaded their order and they ask for a refund. FastSpring allows us to see how many times they've downloaded. On our previous e-Commerce platform, this was not possible.
