Reseller Gateway Project

The Reseller Project was created to accommodate one of our major business needs, which was to create an additional revenue source that could continue to sustain us as a company for years to come. The goal was to provide a framework with a fast set-up process so that we could easily and quickly continue to recruit these resellers and boost our revenue. Once the project was completed, a reseller could be set up within 48 hours, and the reseller would have a fully sellable product; a customized web meeting platform under their own name and domain, with integrated support, and a built-in web-based customer management system.

There were 3 main objectives that were involved with this project. The first objective was to create a platform for resellers to be able to manage their customers; the Reseller Gateway. The second objective was to create a brand-less account management environment for our reseller’s customers to use. The third and ongoing objective was to continue to provide top-quality support to our reseller’s customers so that the reseller could focus on sales and marketing.

The Reseller Gateway was the first and largest in scope of those objectives. From a business standpoint, the Reseller Gateway was essentially a subset of our already fully-functioning Administrator Gateway. The Reseller Gateway needed to have the following major features:

• Customer management
  • Viewing contact information
  • Viewing customer usage of meeting application
  • Adding new customers or deactivating customers
  • Searching/sorting by customer
• Subscription management for individual customers
  • Adding subscriptions
  • Editing subscriptions
  • Removing subscriptions
• Reporting features
  • Average customer usage
  • Customer charges by billing period
  • Customers with pre-paid usage
  • Upcoming meetings by customer

The second objective was to create a brand-less account management environment that could be experienced by each reseller customer upon log-in. This involved a modification to our existing framework. We needed to allow for a quick and easy way to determine that a customer was a reseller customer and not an InstantPresenter customer. Once this had been achieved, it was simply a matter of changing the theme (CSS styles) and then removing all the “InstantPresenter” branding from our website. The end result was essentially an on/off switch that could be toggled at will. When the switch was on, the Account Manager was “InstantPresenter” themed. When it was off, it was “Generic Reseller” themed.

The Reseller Project was a huge success for InstantPresenter. We were able to charge a nominal start-up fee and collect a percentage of the profit made for each subscription created from a reseller sales plan. The reseller project became such a huge success that at one point in 2008, half our revenue was generated from reseller sign-ups and reseller customers.

Reseller Gateway Home page

Reports page

Active Billable Subscriptions Report

Sample login page for Reseller

Search / Sort through all the customers

Generated different reports for each

A sample report that can be generated. These are the customers that can be billed right now

This is a sample login page which I've created for a reseller.

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Reseller Gateway Home page

Search / Sort through all the customers