Sell Software Online – The Distribution Options.

Software applications (a.k.a. apps) have become increasing popular with the proliferation of applications for smart phones. Parallel to this, an industry has grown up around the ways of distributing digital products. The following guide details the main options currently in widespread use. Each approach has benefits and constraints relating to security, control, and cost that will either suit or not suit software authors and publishers.

Third Party Vendors

This is a scenario that should be familiar to most people who have seen online sites listing thousands of applications (freeware/shareware/commercial purchase).

For software creators, you upload your software to the vendor’s site who then takes control of the promotion and selling of your product in return for a commission. This option is preferable for iPhone app developers as they are leveraging the branding and sales monopoly that Apple has for their apps. But developers of other applications (e.g. for PCs/Macs) may wish to be less dependent on selling via the vendor.

The shopping cart/payment processing of these applications is completely taken care of by the vendor. On the downside, you have little or no control over the marketing of your product on their site (how the product looks/branding/etc.).

When a customer buys the software, the download link security is controlled by the distributor to the extent that the link can have a time limit placed on it along with restrictions on the number of download attempts that are possible.

Given that you have no access to the purchaser’s details; you cannot build up a membership listing of purchasers. As a result, you miss out on potential loyalty purchases. This could affect you if you intend publishing several software applications and therefore benefit from a listing of loyal customers.

Sales/Download Management And Distribution Software

This approach provides a more independent approach that will suit many software creators. In this scenario, the software creator installs the software to manage sales and downloads on their own server. This lets them administer their own online shopping cart, secure download links and mailing list data. There are many open source and commercial available that can provide this functionality.

As the software publisher, you retain access to the customer mailing lists and can control how long the download links are to be available for.

After the cost of the sales application, your only cost on each software sale is the commission to the payment processor (e.g. Paypal), and the only operational overhead is the installation and ongoing administration of the sales tool.

In Conclusion

If you create applications (e.g. iPhone Apps) that can leverage the network effects of a large distributor or company then you should go with the 3rd party vendor model. You will have a smaller piece of a bigger pie!

If you sell software online and want to keep control of the product’s marketing and customer base data then setting up your own sales management and distribution solution will give you the control you seek.

If you are starting out selling your software online and only have one app to sell then using an online distributor would be the prudent option for you to test the waters with your software and establish what the market potential is.

Writing ebooks or software and want to sell them online? Read Tony’s DLGuard review and get your software or ebook business online today.