I just want to explain why I said the above, as it’s a little harsh.
We signed up with eSellerate back in 2004 because of their plugin and we used them all the way until 2014, once Digital River bought eSellerate, they slowly gutted the resources and replaced the human employees with machines pre-programmed to say “No” to every request.
It took us years to move away, because we were tied into eSellerate’s serial number & activation system. The problem is that the only way to verify the eSellerate serial numbers is via their plugin, or to upload every single serial number issued to a server and have it verify there. It also means that we’d need to either use or build a solution that uses a similar format going forwards.
In the end we built our own solution in Xojo and used 1701 solutions to host our Xojo application, because we’re now in control of our own serial number/activation system we can do what we want going forwards.
On top of that we now have a centralized database of every sale, regardless of where the application is sold (except the app store, where we get squat). Basically every vendor has a unique SKU, when they make a sale, they hit our system suppling transaction information and our system returns them a serial number.
For most of our vendors we’re able to return a link which gets embedded into the customer’s receipt e-mail, meaning all the customer needs to do is to click the link in the e-mail to activate the product.
We only did this for new applications, this solution alone was a tremendous amount of work, but to change when a product is already established is even more work.
I understand the need to ship ASAP, but in my opinion, you’re much better off taking the time to invest in your own serial number/activation system now, rather than beating the dead horse that is eSellerate, costing you much much more time down the road (always when you don’t have the time too).