Software Promotion & SEOThis blog covers a range of topics concerning the SoftTester Shareware/ Software Download site. Topics include software product releases as well as SEO and software development information and tips.

This posting was originally from our forum.

motherswan

How do you figure out what to charge for your products?

I have experimented with pricing but have not reached any level of confidence that my prices make sense. There is such a wide range of competing products on the market with varying prices, including free, and functions, I don’t know how consumers make a decision. Right now I have one program at regular price of 60 and the other at a new release introductory price of 9.95 (regular price has been 50). The only thing I haven’t tried is charging what I think is an unreasonably high price, which has actually been suggested casually. I haven’t found anything that affects downloads or sales.
Another recent change was replacing a limited-time, limited-function trial version with a free limited-function version.

Forum Admin

I was quite disappointed when I didn’t initially get lots of downloads (still am) but I consoled myself saying, well this was only a test product.

I decided that the reason it wasn’t doing well was because there was a million similar products which were much better, more features and cheaper.

However, listening to your story makes me think otherwise.

Although I haven’t got the answer / success story, I do have some suggestions, where I’d like some feedback.

I’ve been most successful with my MDBSecure and HTMLSquueze products. I’ve had around 30 downloads for each. I believe this was solely due to the ProgrammersHeaven site, which sends out a new products email. I think I had 10 downloads from them a day or so after. However, they remain my best site so far.

From this, it seems that advertising is the answer.
Finding your correct market place and pushing your goods there.

Sadly, I think it’s also got a lot do with the amount of competition, in hindsight I believe I should researched the market a bit more first before writing Ideaspad, if I’d known there were millions of similar products I may have written something different.

axsaxs

I have a feeling the the price is not the main problem.

The main problem seems to be that people usually DOES NOT PAY for software.

In Italy, for instance, only big companies actually buy software - they may face serious legal problems if they don’t do so.

The open source movement can be another reason (why pay for something I can have for free).

The casual user cannot reach our products because he is not able to search the Internet for what he needs (often he is not sure of what he needs, too).

The advanced user knows that with some more effort he will get for free whatever he wants (either from piracy or from the open source).

I’d like to see what would happen in charging, let’s say, 0,10 Euro per product. I think that nothing significant would change.

mindwarpltd

Sorry to be the person replying straight away again

Well, I’ve tried different pricing variations in the past.
And not 100% sure I agree.

I used to have my Ideaspad program priced at around $29 and wasn’t successful. Then I improved my program and thought that the cost / quality factor was a problem. So I increased my price to $50 and wasn’t that successful either.

Yesterday I improved my webpage, just the English page but I modified the price on both German and English pages to $25.

I’d discovered that competitor programs were around $30.

This morning I had a German sale.
I know you can’t read anything into one sale, however it’s highly probable that as that was the only thing that changed on the German page (and looking at the hit log, the customer didn’t visit the English page) that this was the cause.

There again, seeing the program at half the price of a couple of days ago may have been the cause.

I guess I’ll have to wait a while longer to know for definite.

I agree, that users don’t know what they want (and pros can find it for free) .

Also, that around $20 to $25 is about the maximum price people will pay for shareware.

Today, someone who submitted to this site, had a site selling REALLY cheap shareware. This got me thinking.
I visited the site, then went back later to see if there was anything good.

I think CHEAP prices may be the key with certain software.

crybaby

I make about 1500USD$ a month, my price ranges from 60 to 200$ and the key to any reasonable sales is to make non-trivial applications. Don’t just throw together some little utility and sell it, if you do you won’t make any headway. In other words make an application people are willing to pay 50$ and above for to get

Ideaspad - An Award winning information manager for home and professional use

by JM