Monday, November 16, 2009

Adventures in Selling Software

I have been looking for a way to sell figPro on the internet, but it seems the exact setup I want would need to be custom made. It's hard for me to believe that I can't find a service or system that can do the following:
  • Sell multiple licenses of the same product
  • Provide a members area to download updates
  • Tracks how many licenses of a product a member owns
aMember Pro is the closest solution, but some coding has to be done to allow multiple purchases of the same product. I did find a promising product called webber, but it is no longer actively supported.

I have decided to sign up with fastspring and will have to figure out something from there. They do not have subscriptions for memberships, so my thought is to offer a coupon discount (50% off?) to past purchasers when an update comes out. I'm not even sure that can be done.

After my disappointing search for the right solution, I did think about making a custom solution using PayPal IPN and a basic membership management area with MySQL and PHP. Given my lack of time, that would have been a longer process than I would like and there are always unforeseen problems. There would also be a need for more features like another gateway besides PayPal. And then there is the fact that I have no idea how many sales that might be done. If I only get two sales, then all my time would be for squat anyway. I'm better off using a service like fastspring to start and seeing what happens.

So, figPro should be up for purchase/download sometime this week if my fastspring account gets setup any time soon.

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