| AliCommerce wrote
Can anybody also share his experience how to successfully market a commercial module?
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As a heavy consumer of DNN modules I can give you some pointers from this end of the money. You will succeed with me if you are communicative and responsive. The more open, professional and customer-focused you are, the more people will recommend your product. Your market is seldom if ever the store owner and instead is the person who builds sites based on DNN for store owners... they are the people who frequent these forums, Snowcovered and optionally the DNN marketplace. Make sure that your module is the "one to have" and it will be the one people recommend any time anyone asks which store to get. Continue to be active in the DNN forums as you already are. Make sure you remarket major releases - delete the old one off Snowcovered and add it again new. Make use of the reviews and testimonials - have a clean demo site running, and respond honestly to queries. The way a developer responds to the first question tells me everything I need to know.
You should run your own public forum for product support and never leave unanswered threads sitting there for weeks or months. A ticketed support system is optional but the forum should not suffer as a result. You should be clear about the scope of the module and where it is going. This helps people decide whether it is safe to buy, install, and wait for upcoming features and fixes.
I personally avoid products that require activation as that has twice stung me very badly now and it is simply too risky in the long term unless the activation is with a major corporation such as Microsoft. I prefer modules that are licensed for a single DNN instance plus one development instance or at least localhost. I'd expect this module to be sold as a PA for betweeen $70 and $120, and as an enterprise version for use on more thna one instance for perhaps double that, and then a source version for those who need it. I am only now finally getting the time to review it myself and will then be able to assess it more accurately.
DNN stores have to compete not just with other DNN stores, but also with other ecommerce systems altogether. I've checked out all the DNN stores over the last three years and have found none of them worth giving up the completely free Zen Cart for. The only DNN store that can even compete with its featurelist is the new ASP Storefront, but that is priced completely out of reach of any of my clients and is also well beyond the capabilities of the module being discussed here. I would only purchase and install Storefront if a client required some other specific DNN functionality - otherwise I'd stick with Zen Cart - which is of course free, and in very active and productive development.
I dont have a problem with the idea of selling perhaps two levels of the module with different features. A $50 version to get people started and a $100 version with all the cool bits. Exactly which bits are cool and which are basic requirements would take some thought. Certainly, a basic PayPal cart with a hundred products or so could be the starter module. Add more payment providers and more products for the big version. I'm sure everyone would have different ideas on that.
Now there's a feature I'd like to see - to be able to determine at admin-level how many products can be added to a store. If that and perhaps other features could also be enabled or disabled, that would help make the on-sell pricing of the module a lttle more granular.
More about pricing - Subscriptions are good if you have several products in active development - not so good if it's just one product and you're bascially just limiting the time that people can get updates. Subscriptions should cover buyers for major point releases whilst one-off purchases should still cover all minor point releases. I don't mind a subscription for a major module if it is under about $100 per year witha discount incentive to renew. But there has to be some real development activity during the year - I've paid for subscriptions and then had to delete the set of modules at the end of the period because it was too risky to carry on with them. Quite a few developers start up with a lot of enthusiasm and activity and then go stale and die a few months down the track, leaving support forums full of unanswered threads by unhappy purchasers.
Offer freebies or discounts or specials every now and then. If you haven't got your own products to bundle then work in with another developer and do a package or discount deal. there are a lot of skin developers who would probably enjoy working with you to create skins tailored for the store... then you could do a package of module plus skin for a discount for one week only! and so on...
More about comms.. contribute to the core forums and use your signature to market your wares. Obviously it comes across bad if you're only looking to respond to store-related threads. More useful and ultimately even easier is to respond to anything you can help with and buld your rep on that. Keep your sig tidy and up to date with developments - there are a lot of stale sigs in the forums.
Enough blabbing from me for now,
Regards
Rob