PocketMatrix

I am probably going to go with eSellerate for my alternate purchase system. I consider there two be two different categories of sales. There are the sales where people come to the DEXplor website directly because of DEXplor being reported on news sites, forums and word of mouth. Then there are sales that originate from someone finding the product on a site like Handago or PocketGear while looking for a solution in general. DEXplor is pretty cutting-edge, so it generates its own news and draws people to it of its own merit. 95% of my sales have been from people purchasing directly through my website using PayPal. Those sales are most important to me, and I do not want to send them to a place like Handago or PocketGear because they absolutely don't deserve any percentage of those sales. Now if I list it on Handago, and it sells hundreds of copies because a lot of people go there to look for software, than I feel there is justification for them to make some profit. I very well may have not got those sales in the first place because competitive products are available at Handago, and the customer would have been ignorant to DEXplor's existance. However, I won't send people to Handago from my website.

I have been in contact with eSellerate for a while now (they have been trying hard to get me to start selling my product through them ). They charge 10% to process an order. PayPal costs me only 5%, and it is still my first choice for that and other reasons. I would encourage other developers to follow suite, and have a purchasing system that allows them to keep a higher percentage of the profit for sales originating from their own website. When I think of products like Snails, which are big hits and generate a lot of news, I feel certain that a HUGE number of their sales at Handago originated at the snails website. They could have kept 90% of those sales using a company like eSellerate to process those orders.

Ha, I just thought of something else. Most Pocket PC products these days (like DEXplor) require that the purchaser install the "trial" version on their device first. The customer then has to go back to purchase the software using a Product ID provided by the software. Well, on the DEXplor "unregistered" screen I tell people to go the the DEXplor website to purchase. Thus even if a customer found DEXplor on a site like PocketGear or Handago, they are still very likely to trial it first, and may well follow the instructions provided within DEXplor to go to my site for the actual purchase. My plugins are only downloadable from my website, so they have to go there no matter what. Heh heh heh.

Here's eSellerate's site: http://www.esellerate.net

Dan East

I think the Snails team plans to release actual numbers, in order to keep people (developers) informed. This way, developers will know what to expect before diving in.

I recommended that we completely remove Snails from PocketGear. After denying them an EXCLUSIVE with Snails, they buried our game as far into their site as they could.

This has had ZERO effect on our sales- it only denied PocketGear a cut of the profit since it forced people to go elsewhere for the game.

I should mention that PocketGear offered to give us 2 weeks FREE, if we did an exclusive with them. That would have driven a large number of customers to their site during that period, hopefully translating into more sales of other games in order to make up for it.

We denied to do an exclusive with anyone. Handango recommended that we go through as many vendors as possible, and NOT do an exclusive with anyone.

We set up Snails to perform a certain way within the industry. So far we have achieved our goals. We rose to the top very quickly, nearly maxxing out our online sales in the first month. We have 3 seperate binaries in order to help us define how lucrative each CPU is. Of course everyone knows that ARMs lead the industry, but by how much? Is SH3/Mips worth supporting anymore- if so, how much longer?

We have quite a few answers.

There are a couple games that are ahead of Snails in online sales. Those titles have either been released for months or carry all three binaries in a single download. Keep in mind our ARM binary is pulling most of the weight here.

I have no idea why Handango would be charging DEXplor more than Snails, since DEX obviously doesn't have the coverage Snails does. Handango has been very good to us. Everything they have done is greatly appreciated and well worth the money- and they have more plans for the future.

Gameloftpocket.com has been great as well. It is a much smaller site than Handango, but they do everything they can to accomodate your project. We have had ZERO problems with Gameloft Pocket. If they are able to keep this kind of track record, they could easily maintain a strong online presence and grow rapidly.

Still, developers need to be held accountable for their actions as well. A handful of developers are just great- Dan East is one of them. DEXplor is worth way more than $13- to get the same funtionality with individual apps you would need to spend about $60.

A little bit of marketing would help drive his sales in a similar vein to Snails. Not all good apps have to be expensive, even with the huge cuts that the middlemen get.

Eventually this industry will mature so that cheesy clones can no longer prosper. Right now, there are only a few decent games floating around in a HUGE POOL OF CRAP. When the consumer has to wade through a bajillion tetris clones, there isn't alot of confidence that there is quality gaming out there.

Get rid of Joe Blough and his Bubbles clone that took him a year to create (thus justifying, in his mind, a $20 price tag) and we'll start seeing some real progress. We don't see wannabe-developers creating tetris clones for PC, with a price tag of $59 right next to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Why do we see this kind of tetris/bubbles-crap carrying a price tag up there with high quality titles like Chopper Alley and Nutcracker?

For the most part, marketing is justified with its cut of the profits. Unless you happen to have the resources to do the job of marketing, then paying someone else to do it makes good business sense. There are a few games that should be selling better, but the developer has taken it up on themselves to market it. That isn't the best [business] decision, considering alot of people spend years and thousands of dollars in school just to learn marketing.

I know a few programming languages. COULD I have made a game as good as Snails on my own? HELL NO! Sure, I would have gotten 100% of the profit, but the time and effort doesn't justify the end result. I sure wouldn't sell a fraction of what we have now.

So keep in mind that 99.9% of the US economy is driven by sheer volume of products. If your product is econmically priced, has value and good marketing, your product will prosper. Right now it appears that the PPC industry is going the opposite direction, with overpriced items, low value and no marketing- AND TARGETING LOW VOLUME AS WELL.

So don't hold the online retailers as soley responsible- at least 90% of the developers are to blame as well. Once those losers are out the door, DEXplor and other apps will rise to the top and start selling VOLUME.

I totally agree, Randall!
How about rising the price a bit and writing that people can get it for less by paying via paypal or something...?

good god, I just realized that I wrote a whole bunch of stuff there. lol.

And I just realized that you dont want to hear that fantastic story I wanted to tell you, as you are not on the messenger right now, but obviously active on the board

I can't log in for some reason.

Thanks Randall. That's some great info. I think anyone intending on selling a Pocket PC product should read this thread. I haven't started selling through Handago yet. I will probably within the next week.

You're right about my lack of advertising, etc. That is actually by design. DEXplor was a huge product (complexity and feature-wise) to release virgin onto the market. I have fantastic beta testers who have really done a lot of work, but no product is fully tested by fire until it hits the market. With the upcoming version 1.20 I am finally feeling a little "comfortable" with DEXplor (as far as where it is and where I want to go with it). In the mean time I have incorporated new features requested by users, polished and completed existing features, and found and corrected bugs that only appeared on hardware that I do not have access to. With this version I will begin to more agressively promote and list the product on multiple sites.

I'll throw out a few stats on DEXplor sales. I won't release exact numbers, because DEXplor must compete head-to-head against other products, and I don't want to give them any information.

Here are the percentages of device types for DEXplor sales:
<font face="courier new">
_ARM 83%
MIPS 11%
_SH3 06%</font>

Also, Germans easily represent the largest group of non-English Pocket PC DEXplor customers.

Dan East

Which is a great chance for me to remind you that you wanted to send me the text you want translated. We talked about that months ago!