Reseller motivations

Are resellers solely motivated by margins?

Webroot Software sees an opportunity pitching to resellers who find themselves cut out of vendor's renewal programs. Basically what they are saying is we can make more money out of their renewals than, say, the nothing we get from Norton or McAfee.

To me, this misunderstands why we recommend products. The money we can make is a factor, but a much more important factor is how good the product is. We don't want to foist crook products on our customers, they pay us for good advice.

We can make good margins on products like Norton AntiVirus, the reason we don't recommend it is because we see too many computers screwed up by this product, the money is irrelevant.

Webroot would be much better off making sure their software is well written and effective. Pricing their product slightly cheaper than Symantec's equivalent and giving us a decent margin will help. But the most important thing is to deliver software that works and doesn't mess up the customer's system.