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How did the project start?
CannyBill is a web based invoicing and billing solution for businesses and web designers. Easily create, send and manage invoices and accept payments online via credit card. You can also sell your products and services using order forms which your customers can signup to and even link to live API's such as Plesk, Geotrust, Enom, Basecamp and many more.
Plugins or APIs are one of the most powerful features of CannyBill. Link up with industry-standard applications such as Plesk to create automated hosting accounts on your server or Enom & Geotrust to sell domain names and SSL Certificates. You can also import people and time from Basecamp, export your email campaigns to Campaign Monitor and even export your data to SAGE & QuickBooks.
What options did you consider?
We considered many options for the APIs but they had to be simple for our customers to use and importantly for their customers also as our primary market are web design companies. We had to make every day talks simple and as affective as possible.
What help and expertise did you receive?
CannyBill was built by our team of developers and designers but we did also get help from the various 3rd party applications we were linking to.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
Some of the APIs developed were incredibly complex to setup and most notably the GeoTrust API which enables web design companies to sell SSL Certificates via web based order forms. GeoTrust currently do not offer sub-reseller accounts so to be able to provide the best prices to our resellers we had to custom built the entire solution.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
It’s improved our business (as we also use CannyBill) and our customers quite dramatically. Before a customer had to let us know what domain name or SSL they wanted and then this had to be registered with a 3rd party manually not to mention the renewals. Now with CannyBill, this whole process is automated.
By linking in with the GeoTrust and Enom API, CannyBill users can sell SSL Certificates and domain names all from within your admin panel. Create a web based order form which your customers can signup to and CannyBill takes care of the rest. All the invoicing, payments, registrations and renewals.
What are your plans for the future?
Many more APIs, in fact CannyBill in time will be integrating with every hosting control panel, SSL and domain name provider, project management software, accounting and CRM package on the market. We also have a few plans to link to stock photography websites as well as being able to provide snail mail options for invoices.
