RELEASE: DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM 2.6.2 NOW AVAILABLE
The 2.6.2 Accelize Distribution Platform has been deployed. Highlights of this release include automatic tax management, a new checkout flow, finer-grained pricing for metered plans, and more flexible entitlement management.
1. AUTOMATIC TAX MANAGEMENT
The platform now automatically handles Sales Tax / VAT / GST on your behalf. The correct tax rate is automatically calculated in real-time for every transaction, taking into account the customer billing address, payment method and geolocation (IP address). Invoices we generate on your behalf are now tax compliant. With over 100 tax zones supported, you can sell tax-compliant around the globe. We even support tax exemptions to apply custom rates to specific buyers, such as corporations with tax exemption certificates.
Your vendor portal has two new menus: one for Tax Configuration (tax/registration IDs, tax regions), and one for Tax Exemptions (user, custom tax rate).
2. NEW CHECKOUT FLOW
We simplified the display of pricing plans by refactoring the 3 attributes tags:
- Duration: N-Days, Monthly, Perpetual
- Model: Pay-per-Use, Subscription, Floating License, Nodelocked License
- Metric: Node, Hour, Usage-Unit
The checkout flow has been refactored to enhance the user experience. The single checkout page now contains 4 sections:
- Product Information
- Customer Information
- Payment Method
- Purchase Summary
1. Product Information
The product information displays all attributes of the pricing plan. This is also the place where the customer selects the desired quantity.
2. Customer Information
Customer can use the billing address on record, or specify a different billing address. Billing address dynamically triggers real-time calculation of the sales tax.
3. Payment Method
Customer can use the payment method on record, or specify a new payment method, wether credit-card or bank transfers.
4. Purchase Summary
Purchase summary displays the total amount calculated with the selected quantity and applicables sales taxes.
3. FINE-GRAINED METERING PRICING
The pricing precision has been increased to 12 decimals in order to accommodate for fine-grained metering and coarse-grained billing.
For example, your application meters the number of bytes, which means 1 usage-unit = 1 byte. Yet your marketing folks want to display a price of $2 per GB. The math is simple, the corresponding usage-unit price is $2/10^9 = $0.000000002
You see why we increased the pricing precision to 12 decimals!
4. MISCELLANEOUS ENHANCEMENTS
- The entitlement management policy is now more flexible; all plans can be canceled with the exception of the perpetual node locked one.
- Enhancement of the IP Activator key management in order to facilitate the key management and storage but the user
