Nelson Ford - Shareware Order Processing

Shareware Order Processing

In the 1980s and early 1990s, virtually no shareware authors had the ability to accept credit card orders at all, much less via live operators at toll-free numbers, the way most people are accustomed to making such orders. Authors could only accept cash or checks mailed directly to them. Naturally, this had a major impact on the number of people willing to pay for the software.

In the late 1980s, PsL initiated an order processing service for shareware authors in which live operators took orders over the phone at toll-free numbers. This was not an easy service to provide as banks were very, very reluctant to give credit card merchant accounts to mail order or phone order businesses. PsL had to change banks several times and one time lost money when a bank went bankrupt. But eventually things settled down, and some programmers began receiving from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month in orders—clearly many, many times what they would have received accepting payment only by cash or check.

Originally, PsL provided its service to programmers at its cost, but as many hundreds of programmers signed up, economies of scale actually made the service profitable. With the eventual spread of the Internet, PsL added Internet order processing to its services.

With the growth of the Internet, by 1998, the distribution of shareware by disk and CD-ROM was beginning to wane while order processing was booming, and with 13+ years of 100-hour work weeks taking their toll on Nelson and Kay Ford, they sold PsL to Digital River, Inc., a major (NYSE listed) online order processing company, and retired.