A fair percentage of our customers want a CD copy. My wife handles the admin side of the operation and is ending up spending a couple of evenings a week burning CDs, printing address labels and packing items for mailing the next day. It’s getting to be too much of a burden. At one point we almost decided to stop offering CDs as the money we made wasn’t worth the time and effort involved. We carried on though because we felt a percentage of people might not buy if they couldn’t get a CD.
We currently use an inkjet CD printer that takes a fair time to print a CD. We burn the CD contents using a normal CD writer on my wife’s PC. Any ideas on a cheap way of offloading CD production and mailing OR a way we can carry on doing the work ourselves but speed up the process?
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting advice and comments from different people about the pricing strategy for my software. The thrust of both sets of comments is that I should charge more. Dipsy has made a similar comment to me on this blog before.
I’m not getting the same advice from everybody.
One person, who I’ve hired to help with link-building and a potential site revamp, says I should triple my price. His argument is that, in business, people don’t care whether they pay £20 or £75 for a software package as long as it does the job they want. I have some sympathy with this argument since the feedback I get from customers is that they love the ease of use. The alternative view though is that I charge a similar amount (more in some cases) to most of my competitors. whatever people say, I think a lot of the initial interest in a purchase is based on cost.
Someone else, one of my oldest customers, has said he thinks the product is good and the support excellent and he wants us to be around in the next few years to keep on supplying support. He’s recommended we start charging a yearly subscription for support.
The thing I like about both these ideas is the chance of more money 
My preference really is for a yearly subscription-based strategy. Any thoughts?
Lately, I’ve been working towards a forms designer that can be used with a new version of my main software.
The idea is to let people freely edit their own invoice templates to suit their own business. A fair percentage of people seem to want modifications, e.g. in the colour of text, or they want to add new images and fixed text. This new forms designer should let customers do all these kinds of things very easily. I’m also going to let people adjust the widths of columns as well as add new columns. We do use a version of the template editor in-house to do custom modifications for people for a fee. This brings in a little bit of income but we think that if people could edit their own templates we’d probably get a lot more customers. The thinking is that if 1 in 10 customers asks us if templates can be modified, a lot more must simply reject the package and choose a competitor’s without getting in touch at all.
The forms designer itself isn’t specific to my main package and could be used to design forms for any purpose. It could even be used as the data output (print/ email) engine for other data sources. Any ideas on a possible use for it outside my main product line?
This might be a strange post since we have a German contributor but I’d like to see if anyone has expxerience of providing support to people in non-English speaking countries.
At the moment, I sell software in English only via a .co.uk site. This allows me to target the UK, US, Australia, India etc. but there is an untapped market in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and so on. The thing that’s put me off for now is providing support or even answering simple queries. My wife was (once) fluent in German and lived in Germany for a couple of years. The trouble is that her German is now rusty and neither of us speak anything else but English.
Does anyone have experience of providing support in this way? How do you cope? Is it a problem or are customers happy to switch to English?
by ML
It would be interesting to find out what factors people think have been successful in gaining or growing sales for their products. One factor might be time, another advertising and so on.
For me, my sales have grown almost directly in line with the number of visitors I get via search engines. I usually find there is a step change in the number of visitors and a corresponding rise in the number of sales every 3 months at around the time Google exports its PR values.
In the early days I used Google Adwords. This did attract traffic and some sales but only enough to break even - organic traffic has proved much more profitable.
In more recent months - say the last 3 - I have also begun to see a rise in repeat sales, i.e. people wanting more than one copy, and also word of mouth sales. I’ve put this down to achieving a certain critical mass of sales, i.e. enough sales for personal recommendations to be sufficient to encourage a few more sales.
One thing that did slightly dent the rise in sales was the UK school summer holidays, particularly the last 3 weeks before children went back to school. During this period, website traffic was slightly down, though it seems to have recovered this week.
by ML
A few days ago I said I wanted to code a backend/ customer management interface for my site. I’ve decided I need to do this fairly quickly as I’m getting more and more customer requests for lock codes, custom templates etc. I also need to quickly find out who’s purchased when I get a query. I get lots of similar questions that could potentially be answered by a semi-automated reply. Also, some questions would be better answered by a website than a more personal email.
The key to this is keeping a database of purchasers on the site. I did do this in the early days but it mysteriously broke after a few weeks and I simply by-passed it since someone wanted to purchase ASAP. I need to resurrect the database and redo the sales page and Paypal IPN to register attempts at purchasing as well as successful purchases. I’ll also want a protected admin area and also a user area where they can log in and ask for new codes etc.
I’ve decided I simply don’t have the time to code this myself so I’m going to put together a spec. and place a project on RAC as you’ve suggested in the past.
by ML
Ideaspad is a sort of personal information manager, it has a lot of different uses and have comprehensive functionality. Unlike other similar programs Ideaspad allows you to create your own structure for your information by using HTML forms.
Therefore, you could design your own data entry system over night.
Ideaspad - An Award winning information manager for home and professional use
by JM
