Avangate clients from outside of Eastern Europe charged extra

Hi everyone,

I am an entrepreneur who has a legit online business. I have been selling my software through Avangate for the past 3 years. I can tell I have brought a considerable amount of profit to Avangate over these years. Also I can tell that their commission is not low.

But today I got really pissed off as a fellow Russian vendor told me that he got an e-mail from Avangate with a special offer of 2.9%+1$ per transaction to RUSSIAN VENDORS ONLY!!! When I have to pay 4.9%+2.5$! This is fundamentally unfair to give such privileges just because you come from a specific country. I feel discriminated and neglected, especially when being a loyal and profitable partner to them for the past years! And another question rises here, Avangate is based in Romania, giving Eastern European businesses special treatment, but fully exploiting the vendors from the West like me.
What I am going to do is ask them for the same pricing scheme. If they refuse me, I am going to take my business somewhere else. After all there are lots of other ecommerce providers who treat their customers with respect without differentiating them.
Just wanted to share this with all of you who uses Avangate, I don’t think that we should just sit and watch how they treat us like this. Anyway see the e-mail for yourselves:

Dear ….,
I hope your business is thriving!

I would like to inform you that we are releasing a new proposal on electronic commerce.

We plan to release a new package Avangate Base Edition with the commission4.5% + $ 1, but for Russian partners, we have a special offer:

Attractive commission: 2.9% + $ 1 (instead of 4.5% + $ 1)
Russian-speaking and Russian-speaking account manager technical support
Surely, the best platform for the software market (with features designed for large customers, like Kaspersky, DrWeb, Intel, Bitdefender, etc.)
Bilingual contract, certified by wet seal
Monthly Take-over software for your bank
20% discount for Managed Affiliates Services and / or Web MarketingCampaign



Please note that this proposal is confidential and is valid until December 15, 2011.

Please let me know if you are interested or not.

I wish you a nice day!


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@deepelectro,
Hi!
Mike Ni, SVP of Products and Marketing at Avangate, has already replied to this on other forums. For what it's worth, I'd like to post here as well for the benefit of this forum's audience.
Kind regards,
Delia @ Avangate marketing

First, let me apologize for any frustration the above private offer as that clearly was not the intent. Let me shed a little light on this promotion. The new package you mentioned is meant to help meet the needs of a segment of customers with a matching set of more focused functionality.

In fact, the promotional offer you saw pertains to a new package we are test marketing - the Avangate eCommerce Base Edition. It has a more focused set of functionality compared to the Standard Edition providing a smaller footprint solution for vendors who need simpler eCommerce capabilities, and have lower international and support requirements. While we are piloting this special promotion in Russia, we plan to extend the Base Edition to other geographies and markets as an entry point solution.

One last note - the 2.9%+$1 price break from the base edition price was only extended to a specific group of vendors exploring our solution and only applied for the startup period for those vendor covering a subset of the payment methods.

I hope this helps to clarify our intent. If anything, we live and breathe the interest of our customers and are constantly looking for better ways to serve them (new packages, for instance). I appreciate you bringing this up as it gives us a chance to answer a question that if you have, others will also have.

Certainly drop us a line. More than happy to share more info on the Base Edition, or even our recently announced SkyCommerce Suite. Just send us an email at info@avangate.com or contact us via the Control Panel.

Kind regards,
Mike Ni
SVP, Products and Marketing