Selling software without having to roll out your own e-commerce web site

Question

Ok so here's the story..

I have a friend who in his spare time wanted to learn a new language (F#). So what he did was he grabbed a book and wrote a tool which he then released to his teammates. He got plenty of good feedback and encouragement from it. Eventually he released it as an open source. And it was well received. It is now on its 9th month and it has been downloaded around ~6000 times (at an average of 21 downloads per day!). I know that he's been very happy that a lot people found it useful and that he was able to help many of his fellow devs. I also knew that he wasnt expecting to make money out of it (which is why he released the tool as open source). Later on though, he added a Donate link because he wanted to buy a new laptop. Naively, he thought people would actually donate money just because they found the tool useful. Its been 9 months already and he hasn't received any donation so far. (I wish people he'd helped would donate because there are rumors of job cuts in his workplace due to the economic crisis and they might let go even the good deelopers like him)

Now I'm in the same position as him. I also have a tool that I've created on my spare time which my teammates have found useful. I would like to share this tool with everyone but I also want to make a little money on the side. The extra income will go to my graduate studies fund. But going by my friends experience, I cant release it as open source and expect donations. So what i'd like to do is sell the tool at a very affordable price (I'm thinking $10-$15, or lower)

So my question is, does anyone here know of any reputable sites that can sell the tool on my behalf? I feel that rolling out a new e-commerce site just to sell a single, low-priced tool is overkill.

Thanks for any response. :)

EDIT: Stackoverflow, your response has been awesome! Thank you very much

Answer 1

Your model is shareware. I suggest you have a FULLY functional download that people can try before you ask them for money, otherwise you're likely to have no money and noone using your software rather than just no money!

Paypal is brilliant for this. Sign up for an account and then you can create a paypal button to put on your site that will redirect customers to a page on paypal where they can pay. You can then transfer the money to your bank account whenever you want.

Answer 2

Kagi is a decent payment processing intermediary that many shareware authors use. If you choose to you can embed the purchasing interface directly in the application using the Registration Module for Windows, OS X, and Java.

Answer 3

Personally I use Avangate for selling my program. They have great support. I am satisfied user.

Few more links:

• E-Commerce Fee Comparison
• How does it work? Licenses, Payment Processors
• How to Process Online Payments

Btw, good luck :-)

Answer 4

Paypal works, but requires a bit more implementation work on your website. Also, in some countries Paypal does not offer the possibility of checking out without signing up with Paypal, so people in those countries have to create a paypal account (which might take a while, depending on the method of authentication used there) to buy from you.

Apart from Paypal, you can also go with one of the many payment processors specialized on the shareware business. Some of these (in no particular order): Avangate, ShareIt, Plimus, RegNow, RegNet, Esellerate, Kagi.

There is a huge difference in terms of features and pricing. Some take fixed fees, some only charge on a per cent basis and some do both, so there is usually no cheapest service for every price point. Also, some are doing a good job covering both Europe AND the US (in terms of languages, currencies and local payment methods like wire transfer in Germany), while others only work well in the US. I'd recommend having a look at most of these to see which one works best for your software's price point and the market you are going for.

If you have a large volume, you can negotiate about pricing with most of them, but no matter what you negotiate, the percentage is significantly higher than at PayPal. But apart from much better service and fraud screening, you also get a huge amount of features not available at Paypal.

Some (like RegNow, Esellerate, Avangate) also have affiliate networks you can use to further promote your software. The degree to which this can lead to increased sales depends on your type of software and your software's pricing. Some shareware authors get a very significant part of their sales through affiliates.

At our website we use both a shareware registration service (Avangate) and a Paypal to make it as easy as possible for people to buy our software.

Answer 5

I don't have any first hand experience with this, but you may want to look into fairsoftware.net

Answer 6

Rolling out an ecommerce site isn't too complicated really, there are plenty of free open source solutions like osCommerce for example, and lots of cheaper commercial ones like ekmPowershop. You could even use the free PayPal cart thing which is just a simple http link. Why give some 3rd party a percentage of your money if you don't need to?

Answer 7

Definitely look into Software Droid, it's an eCommerce CMS made specifically for selling software:

http://www.softwaredroid.com/

It works with PayPal and support multi currency, we use it on 2 of our websites and it's perfect. Comes with a support desk system, license system, and you can sell other products like installation service and more.