Integrating license activation with an ecommerce system using RLM Activaiton Pro

Software vendors, especially those selling low-cost products that require little tech support, often want to know about integrating license activation with an Ecommerce system.

Here are 4 simple steps to integrate RLM Activation Pro with a typical Ecommerce system.

1. With RLM Activation Pro, interactively define your products in terms of the licenses that you want to issue. You will need to do this only once for each different license type that you plan to issue to enable your product. In this step you will decide the duration of the license (some number of days, a fixed date, or permanent), and license type (node-locked, single, etc), and any other licensing options.

2. With RLM Activation Pro, interactively generate a batch of activation keys that correspond to the product that you defined in step 1. You must specify how many activations are allowed for each activation key, usually “1”.  Optionally, you can set an expiration date for each key which will disable the key after that date. By default, RLM Activation Pro creates activation keys that look like 16-digit credit card numbers. If you wish to add some context to each key, you can provide a prefix for the batch which will result in each key being preceded by the prefix, as in the “prod1” sample set below. You can create up to 9,999 activation keys per batch.

3. Export the batch of keys you just created to a tab-delimited or comma-separated file.  Sample set of keys below:
prod1-1476-2776-7149-7375
prod1-6833-2036-9885-1367
prod1-2999-2628-3454-4241
prod1-2458-2111-8538-5795
prod1-4378-2364-9853-6285
prod1-1450-2375-1343-5042
prod1-5497-2406-2997-1344
prod1-0368-2850-5314-1102
prod1-1002-2842-9212-6194
prod1-7934-2775-5337-1621
prod1-7186-2429-8749-4935
prod1-4144-2480-8217-4854
prod1-4031-2545-7974-3075
prod1-7098-2775-1598-4809
prod1-6933-2775-3713-0116
prod1-6901-2923-2623-6592
prod1-5369-3956-5866-9024

4. Import the activation key list into your ECommerce system as a set of “external, pre-generated” serial numbers.

When your customer orders and downloads your software from the Ecommerce system, it will assign the next unused activation key to this transaction and send it to the customer in an email message.  When the customer runs your software for the first time, it will prompt for the user for this key.  The RLM api used to activate the application will take care of the rest by connecting to the RLM Activation Pro site to retrieve the right license, and store it locally for the user.

ECommerce systems will let you know by email when the count of unused activation keys is running low, at which point you will repeat steps 2-4 above.