A Competitive Upgrade is the act of purchasing an SSL Certificate from any of the RapidSSL, GeoTrust or Symantec brands when the domain already has an active SSL Certificate with time remaining from a competing SSL Vendor.

With Competitive Upgrade, when a customer purchases SSL from you, any remaining time on their current SSL certificate is rolled over as an extension to the newly purchased SSL Certificate (up to a maximum of 12 additional months).

A tool is provided to allow users to validate the eligibility of their domain and current SSL Certificate.

To get to it, navigate to Store > SSL Certificates > Switch to Us and you will see a page like the one pictured below.

Simply enter the domain name to lookup the current SSL certificate and validate competitive upgrade eligiblity.

Upon entering a domain, the system will confirm if the current SSL certificate is eligible or not, the current expiry date of the SSL Certificate and the free extension eligibility period for it.

Following validating a domain for Competitive Upgrade, users will see a Competitive Upgrade banner as pictured below.  Users can continue to choose any of the available DV, OV or EV SSL Certificates via the regular SSL landing pages.

Once a certificate is chosen and added to the cart, the shopping cart will indicate the Competitive Upgrade eligibility status as pictured below. The invoice issued for the order will also note the Competitive Upgrade Qualifying status.

Every SSL Order, regardless of whether it is initiated via the Switch to Us/Competitive Upgrade tool or not, will be validated for eligibility for competitive upgrade.

Therefore no special actions are required.  If the domain being provisioned for SSL has an existing SSL certificate from a qualifying vendor, competitive upgrade will be automatically applied for.

This means orders can be placed via the admin area and if eligible, will also receive the free months as part of Competitive Upgrade. Note however that neither the shopping cart nor invoices generated by any means other than using the client area Switch to Us validation tool will indicate Competitive Upgrade qualifying status.

Also note that credit will be determined by the number of months existing on the current certificate at the time of the certificate being provisioned. The amount of time to be carried over will be determined by DigiCert and can be subject to review if there are any discrepancies.