Good ecommerce platforms for plugin sales?

[buddard]

Although this doesn't have anything to do with DSP directly, many of us do want to sell our plugins somehow, so it's hopefully still relevant to this forum.

Up until now we've been using Selz, but they are shutting down for good a month from now, so we need to find something else. I was curious about what you are using and the experiences you have had with different platforms?

Must-haves (for us):
- Easy integration with Wordpress
- Some kind of license key management (preferably using an API to retrieve license keys from our server, but reading lists of license keys is acceptable)
- Payment both via credit card and Paypal
- Automatic handling of EU VAT (i e keeping track of which country each customer is from and applying the correct rate)

Good-to-have:
- File hosting
- Integration with Mailchimp, Zapier, etc
- Handling different currencies, so we can have separate pricing in EUR and USD

We'd really appreciate any suggestions and stories you would like to share!

[FabienTDR]

That's the point, such services go bust every two years, none of them ever profitable or sustainable. Such third parties primarily promote and develop their own biz, not yours: Nothing ever compounds.

You now ended up with far higher expenses than expected (not to mention the opportunity costs). As someone professionally messing with the web since new economy I can tell you this is the norm. Avoid such type of outsourcing, it's not worth it.

The customer/license database is the centre of your business, i.e. your most important "treasure chest". I wouldn't ever outsource this part. The EU doesn't really permit sharing data with third parties easily anyway, at least without annoying the customer with complex dynamic terms and conditions. Costs are always much greater than indicated due to the inherent risk of bankruptcy of such startup services.

The correct way is to develop your own web estate, a database, your own license and e-commerce and reseller mechanics, your own newsletter system, your own everything. In doubt with the help of a web developer. In my experience it's not that difficult, but permits acting and adapting much quicker and smoother than the competition - and most of all, it compounds heavily (= with life becoming much easier and more predictable).

End prices can be lower, returning equal profit. And it permits offering far more comfort to your potential customers say, custom library managers/installers, bug reporting, a beta testing platform, a download code hub for resellers, etc. Without full access to the actual database, in dependence of a third party, such nice things will be difficult, costly, if not even impossible to offer.

[Youlean]

Check Fastspring or Paddle

[buddard]

Thanks a lot for your feedback, I really appreciate it! We're evaluating a couple of different options right now. I'll report back once we've got something up and running.

[adammonroe]

I would second just selling plugins on your own website and hosting everything through something like Amazon S3: Keep 100% of your profits, deal directly with customers, ect. The music software industry is too tiny for a 3rd-party, centralized marketplace to be swallowing 20-30% of your sales: it works well for video games, music, and things were you might be selling tens of thousands of copies, but in this kind of low-volume business, the margins really start to count, every customer counts.

Besides that, no developer, creator, ect. ever makes their money because the marketplace makes their sales for them. If you are going to be spending time and energy doing serious marketing and promotion, you want to be capturing those sales for yourself.

[buddard]

In the end we decided to go with Fastspring. They have great infrastructure and features (automatic handling of taxes, integration with our license generator etc), and they only charge 6-8% on each transaction. We handle all marketing, customer support and so on, and they manage the checkout process (payment, file delivery, taxes, ...).

We were seriously considering running everything ourselves, but we came to the conclusion that it wasn't a realistic option for us, at least not right now.

[Richard_Synapse]

Two questions to those who do everything themselves...

1) How do you handle things like sales tax in like 50+ different countries?
2) What do you do if there's a payment processing issue during the night, weekend, let alone your vacation?

Richard

[FabienTDR]

1) depends where your biz is registered and operating exactly. In case of EU businesses, you "only" have to collect taxes for the EU member countries (it's really a bureaucracy stimulus really. Securing EU jobs. It multiplied the book keeping work by 20 or so, from one day to another in 2015). They introduced "EU one stop shop" shortly after as a central platform for VAT declarations.

When people buy from outside the EU, it's in their responsibility to go to customs office and declare whatever has been imported - paying local VAT if it applies.

I highly recommend to work with pro tax attorney/consultant to make sure you don't take any risk. It's rather relaxed with services and software. But beware about physical products, they have a whole different level of complication.

2) Since I largely build and maintain the system myself, it's easy to find out what went wrong and fix it. Without any technical insight or access to the important system, good luck at waiting for customer support to fix it for you. Especially at night or over holiday season.

I'm self employed, no holidays, sleep or weekends