Regnow : Java Glossary

They have a new program you can sign up for once all your products are fully described that works for 6% plus  .

They deal with collecting credit card info from buyers and dealing with the various credit card companies. They also have an affiliate plan for sellers.

You can deal with RegNow three different ways:

1. As a customer of software. You don’t have an account. You pay with a credit card each time you buy something from one of their affiliated vendors.
2. As a vendor, when you want to sell your own products.
3. As an affiliate. You advertise other people’s products on your website, and get a commission from sales.

You can submit your descriptions of shareware products to sell to RegNow using PAD XML (extensible Markup Language) format. This lets you create them offline. There is a simple third party utility called Pad Creator to create the files. This format is endorsed by ASP. You don’t need to include the Regnow-specific fields in your PAD (Portable Application Description) files. The new product wizard at Regnow will insert them.

You upload the PAD to describe your product, then fill in many additional fields to more fully describe it including icons, box shots and screen shots of standard sizes. You can create and format ad copy. This is what affiliates will link to, not your own website.

icon 32 × 32 *.png, *.gif or *.jpg, not *.ico

boxshot 200x200. Screenshot at least 200x200.

RegNow is not just a way to sell through your own website. Your products will appear in links on all manner of affiliates. That all happens without any effort on your part other than creating the original program descriptions. This is the big advantage of selling with RegNow over PayPal.

There is a mechanism for free trial downloads hosted by RegNow. It only works for *.exe files. You must add code to your trial download program when it starts to look for a certain registry key. It will give you an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to spawn in a browser if the user clicks some sort of BUY nag button in your app. Regnow wraps your exe (usually an installer) with code to poke the URL into the registry. They do this to make sure you nag people to buy through RegNow rather than a competitor or direct from you. To make this mechanism work for Java, you would need to create a self-extracting exe. The Java apps themselves would need to use native code to do the nag. Thus the mechanism is applicable only for Windows.

For rebranding, you have to write a hashing algorithm in C++, Java or Perl to crunch the user’s name and company into a serial number. You give Regnow the source which they run under Solaris. The key is automatically injected into the user’s trial copy on purchase. The end user does not actually see the key, so he can’t very well share it. I gather you have to buy the Silicon Realms Armadillo/SoftwarePassport Professional to prepare your app. It enforces the trialware time period and locks to a specific computer. I don’t know what happens if the system crashes and the user loses his injected exe file. I noticed Regnow offering insurance to allow a repeat download, just one more way to screw and infuriate your customers.