Kagi Frequently Asked Question

Question:

What do you email to my customer when they pay?

Answer:

Blurb Contents

When someone pays for your software we send an email reply to them. We look at the software they have purchased, grab all the standard text for those programs, compile them into one email, and send it to the payer. We call these sets of text "blurbs".

We need you to create your blurb(s) and send them to admin@kagi.com and tell us which products you want the blurbs assigned to.

What information should your blurb(s) contain?

You have products that people pay for. When they pay, we send them a reply via email. The first part contains their payment info, the next section contains info about Kagi and that is followed with a section concerning your product(s). It would be really helpful if you could provide us with a paragraph(s) that has the following information:

* If you provide them with a registration key, please tell them that you (and please define who you are so that they know it is you and not Kagi) will be providing them with the key and give them an estimate of the delay that might be involved. If you envision that sometime this year a long weekend would cause a multiple day delay, tell them that if they don't receive their key within that number of days that they should contact you. If you tell them 4 days and it only takes 1 they will be happy. If you tell them 1 and it takes 2 they will be unhappy. Estimate high.

* Please tell them the names and latest version numbers of all your software products. Give them a short description of each software package so that they can consider obtaining that also. Providing the version numbers lets them see if a new and improved version is available. It amazes me how frequently old software gets registered.

* Please list all the places where you post your most recent software versions. This way, if they have an old version, they'll know where to obtain the most recent versions. Saying it's on XYZ server is not good enough. Give explicit addresses and instructions for those folks who have never heard of XYZ server. If you can provide URLs to the various FTP directories that contain your software that would be very good.

* If you operate a mail list or a web site that might be of interest to them, you might want to include that information.

* If you keep getting the same questions asked over and over, you might want to include the answers to those questions.

* Finally, if would be good if you provided them with contact information, all the various ways you would like for them to contact you.

It's not much information and you can probably just answer these questions in a minute or two. Please send your blurbs back to admin@kagi.com and note how you want them to be organized and we'll make sure that the paybot sends them in the replies to your registered users.

Please don't do fancy indenting and such. We reformat stuff back to this style format so that the word wrapping is consistent and so that the email we send to them looks like it came from one place.

Blurb Strategies

The most common approach is for each author to have a single blurb that answers questions about all their software (for example MyProg-A and MyProg-B would have a blurb named MyProg). Just having one blurb to keep up to date is easier for most authors.

Program = MyProg-A, Blurb = MyProg
Program = MyProg-B, Blurb = MyProg

Some authors have a separate blurb for each of their software titles (for example blurb MyProgA for program MyProg-A and MyProgB for MyProg-B). This lets them relay registration codes for MyProg-B without relaying the same information to people who only purchase MyProg-A, and visa versa.

Program = MyProg-A, Blurb = MyProgA
Program = MyProg-B, Blurb = MyProgB

Some authors have one generic blurb for all of their software with addendum blurbs for each separate program. For example, MyProgsAll, MyProga, MyProgB. When someone pays for MyProg-B they would get two blurbs, MyProgsAll and MyProgB. They do this one overall and several specific blurbs so that they can have a unique blurb for each program and so that they do not repeat the same generic information when someone purchases one or more of their programs. We only send on copy of a blurb for example the second MyProgsAll in (MyProgsAll, MyProgA, MyProgsAll, MyProgB) would be eliminated as a duplicate before we sent the email to the payer.

Program = MyProg-A, Blurb = MyProgsAll,MyProgA
Program = MyProg-B, Blurb = MyProgsAll,MyProgB

We need you to create your blurb(s) and tell them how you want us admin@kagi.com how to use them.

Modification Date: Saturday, March 22, 1997