Simply set up a new incoming webhook for you Slack team, and enter the webhook’s URL in the Sellwire settings page on the services tab:

When you next get a purchase (or renewal), you will get a notification posted in the channel you selected for the webhook:

To solve this problem we have baked in support for automatic updates for WordPress themes and plugins right into Sellwire!

You can edit a file on Sellwire and in the advanced settings select if it is a WordPress plugin or theme:

This is where you can access the code to integrate into your plugin or theme, and help with setting it up.

If you are selling a plugin, you can let Sellwire use the readme.txt file (if your plugin has one) to tell WordPress all about your plugin and changelog, just like a free plugin on the repository.

When you upload a new version of a file you can add the changelog detail for themes and plugins without a readme.txt so Sellwire can build the changelog to be displayed in the user’s WordPress site when they click on ‘View details’:

The updater code integrates with plugins or themes sold on Sellwire with licensing activated, so the customer must have a valid license before updates are served.

We have also removed the previous integration with WP Updates as this is now obselete.

I won’t go into all the details of the new directives, you can read more about them here, and their impact on small business here. However, we are pleased to announce we have added support for this in Sellwire.

We have previously supported tax registered companies in the EU, including reverse charge EC sales to EU Businesses. Now when an EU customer goes to purchase a product, without a valid VAT number, they will be asked to confirm their billing address. We will match the billing country to the country of the IP address and if they don’t match ask the customer to declare they based in the country they provided. HMRC have made this not very clear, but based on other the implementation in other systems and advice from our accountants this seems the most acceptable approach for handling country discrepancies.

There will be a new Tax VAT MOSS report under the ‘Report’ menu that will allow you to view and export the EU purchases (excluding those from customer in your tax registered country) for any given period, or all time. This will allow you to submit your VAT MOSS return and stored your customer VAT data in order to be compliant with the new directive. We will be looking at improving the CSV export to match the VAT MOSS return format to make it even easier for submission when HMRC release the format.

If you are a tax registered company selling goods in a currency different to the one you will submit the tax return for, we now handle the conversions of PayPal transactions for the correct amounts to appear on the VAT reports. So for example, you are tax registered in the United Kingdom, but you sell goods in USD. The VAT MOSS report and EC Sales list will now show the converted GBP amount. If for any reason the conversion fails (because you know, PayPal) then we will alert you to this in the report screen so you can manually edit the order to add the conversion details.

If you have any suggestions, issues or we have missed anything please don’t hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or here.

We have been working hard to get this out so you can now sell your files integrated with Sellwire’s complete license key generation, activation, and renewal system. This makes Sellwire an even more powerful tool for selling your digital files. It is especially geared towards premium WordPress themes and plugins but can be used with any software that requires activation of a license.

Key features

• Files can be license enabled
• License key generation for orders of those files (license key and details added to the receipt)
• License key activation, deactivation and checking via Sellwire’s API
• Ability to limit the activation of the license per file and per file price variation
• License expiry functionality so licenses need to be renewed after expiry
• License renewal discount percentage and control over length of discount availability
• Automated email expiry reminders
• Full logs of the license activity and history

Setup

So let’s get started! You will now see in the settings screen a new section for licensing –

Here you can control some defaults for your files that will be licensed. Once you have checked ‘Enable Licensing’, configured your settings and saved them you will see a new menu option after ‘Orders’ for the licenses.

If you then go to add a new file, or edit an existing one you will now see a checkbox to enable licensing for that specific file.

Here you can override the default licensing expiry or leave it as it and set a license activation limit. If your file has price variations enabled you will be able to set a limit per variation.

Now once someone purchases that file, a license gets created for that order –

You have full control over that license after it has been generated. It can be disabled, the activation limit can be edited and it’s expiry changed.

The customers receipt now contains important information about the license, including the key to to activate in your software:

And once it is has expired the receipt is where they can renew the license:

Automated emails are sent once to customers when a license expires in 14 days, and once when it has expired with a link to the receipt so they can easily renew.

Sellwire API

The license system relies on the new Sellwire API. You will now see a new setting section below the file licensing with your Sellwire API key. At the moment the API’s endpoints are limited and we are working on expanding them and adding some proper documentation around it.

The API endpoints for the licensing are activate_license, deactivate_license and check_license. check_license is the only endpoint that requires you pass your Sellwire API key as the X-API-KEY header. All endpoints are only accessible via https and are located at:

https://app.sellwire.net/api/1/[endpoint]

Activate License

GET – /activate_license
Parameters:

• license – The license key entered by the customer and stored in your software
• file – the file id found in the edit file screen in Sellwire

https://app.sellwire.net/api/1/activate_license?license=9e5a17387612a3770554cd6f617a59d53d4adad3&file=XXX

Successful response:
{ "license": "activated" }

Unsuccessful responses:
{ "error": "License to be provided" }
{ "error": "File Id needs to be provided" }
{ "error": "File could not be found" }
{ "error": "Licensing not activated" }
{ "error": "License could not be found" }
{ "error": "License disabled" }
{ "error": "License expired" }
{ "error": "License activation limit reached" }

Deactivate License

GET – /deactivate_license
Parameters:

• license – The license key entered by the customer and stored in your software
• file – the file id found in the edit file screen in Sellwire

https://app.sellwire.net/api/1/deactivate_license?license=9e5a17387612a3770554cd6f617a59d53d4adad3&file=XXX

Successful response:
{ "license": "deactivated" }

Unsuccessful responses:
{ "error": "License to be provided" }
{ "error": "File Id needs to be provided" }
{ "error": "File could not be found" }
{ "error": "Licensing not activated" }
{ "error": "License could not be found" }
{ "error": "License disabled" }
{ "error": "License expired" }

Check License

GET – /check_license
Parameters:

• license – The license key entered by the customer and stored in your software
• file – the file id found in the edit file screen in Sellwire

https://app.sellwire.net/api/1/check_license?license=9e5a17387612a3770554cd6f617a59d53d4adad3&file=XXX

Successful response:
{ "license": "valid" }

Unsuccessful responses:
{ "error": "License to be provided" }
{ "error": "File Id needs to be provided" }
{ "error": "File could not be found" }
{ "error": "Licensing not activated" }
{ "error": "License could not be found" }
{ "error": "License disabled" }
{ "error": "License expired" }

WP Updates Integration

If you use WP Updates to manage the automatic updates of your themes and plugins, and you want to allow updates for only valid licenses, you can now integrate it with Sellwire’s license system. Check out this WP Updates blog post for more information.

Once we realised that our servers had been compromised we immediately started a migration of all of our (Dev7studios) sites to new servers. This took much longer than anticipated due to quite a large amount of data, which is the main reason for the length of the downtime. Thankfully however this won’t be an issue in the future as we have migrated all of our important file data over to Amazon S3. This means that the files you upload to our websites are securely stored and served from Amazon’s own network and not our servers, adding an extra layer of security and speed to our file storage. It also means if our servers are ever compromised in the future, we won’t need to migrate all of these files again.

So as of this morning we are back up and running, and as an added bonus we are now on a much faster setup. Again we appreciate your patience and understanding as we have worked through this issue and we apologise for any inconvenience it may have caused. We ask that you keep an eye out for any bugs or issues that might appear after the migration and let us know if you find anything.

The stats for the variations appear rolled up for the file on the Files screen but you can drill down on the variations by clicking the file names with arrows next to them.

The link to the main file’s purchase page now has options where your customers can choose the price, but the variations also have their own direct links to purchase them.

WP Updates Integration

Sellwire has a lot of customers who sell premium WordPress themes and plugins and a number of those customers also use our sister service WP Updates to provide automatic for those themes and plugins. This new integration allows you to connect the two services.

By adding your WP Updates API key to the Services tab in your Sellwire settings, you can select if a file is a theme or plugin and select the WP Updates item it corresponds to.

This means that new file versions added in Sellwire get automatically pushed to WP Updates. You will be able to add your version changes text when adding the version.

Campaign Monitor & MailChimp

Manually managing lists of your customers’ email addresses for your files? Let Sellwire take care of it for you!

Enter your API key for either of these email services and select the default list that the customer’s email address will be added to on purchase of a file.

You can also select a list on a per file basis. Just edit the file and select the list.

FreeAgent

FreeAgent is a great online accounting tool that connects nicely with PayPal. However, every sale on PayPal needs to be explained as a sale transaction in FreeAgent manually. Sellwire now does this for you! Simply connect your FreeAgent account with Sellwire securely via OAuth and check the auto explain setting.

Sellwire will automatically explain your transactions daily for you as sales. It also supports non EC and EC sales for tax registered companies.

Currently Stripe only supports USD and CAD currencies (which means you need to live in the US or Canada to use Stripe), however they are working hard on bringing Stripe to the rest of the world (with support for payments in the UK and Europe coming soon). We hope this new addition will allow even more people to get the benefit of using Sellwire.

If you haven’t already done so, why not sign up to Sellwire today and see what all the fuss is about. It’s completely free.

Why the change? Well there were several reasons which have become obvious over recent months as to why the credits system wasn’t working. First the credits system was very limiting, and expensive, for high volume customers. It meant that Sellwire just wasn’t financially viable if you have a high sales volume. Secondly the credits system was unpredictable, in the sense that it was hard to judge the cost of using Sellwire. If you have a sudden spike in sales all of sudden the cost of using Sellwire would shoot up. Not ideal.

So we’ve moved to a more traditional tiered pricing scheme to solve the issues mentioned above. We still want Sellwire to be affordable to everyone who wants to sell digital files online, but now it is also viable for high volume customers and has a simple and predictable cost. There is no longer any limit on orders so you can sell as much as you want without having to worry about the cost.

We hope you agree that this new pricing structure is the right way forward for Sellwire and if you have any feedback we would love to hear it in the comments.

This is great if you offer different product licenses or want to upsell your products. You no longer have to create a manual promotion with a coupon code. When customers go to purchase the “upgraded” file they will be presented with a dropdown which allows them to select a file to upgrade from, and a box to insert their transaction ID. If valid the price of the “upgrade from” file is discounted from the purchase price. Simple.