PocketGear Sales

[Guest]

charegebacks [fraudulent orders] are the REAL problem not returns. Recently just in one discoverd instance there was over 5 milions credit card numbers compromised...

[Bradskey]

[Dan East]

[BurningScrappy]

I have had the same experience with Tezlo over at pocketgear.com. Lame letters with lame excuses, justifying why they won't send checks to me. It's annoying, the amounts are small, but it's still my friggin money.

[fzammetti]

I had some trouble with that initially too. They set the threshold to $50 initially. My sales from PG rarely exceed $50 a month (by contrast, it's generally a couple hundred a month from Handango). Anyway, I complained a bit and they were nice enough to set the threshold to $0, so now I still get whatever I have coming to me each month. If any of you haven't already, I suggest contacting them and having the same thing done on your accounts. I've also noticed that the download-to-sales ratio on PG seems to run much higher than Handango (Handango seems to be about 2 downloads to every purchase, PG is more like 10 downloads to every purchase). I'm not sure why this is, but it does seem to be the trend.

[TechMage]

[Dave H]

[Guest]

[refractor]

[Dan East]

[sp660]

[sp660]

[BurningScrappy]

[BurningScrappy]

[Bobby Kolev]

Hi Folks,
this is Bobby Kolev from Beiks (). As you can figure out we are developers too.

Unlike you, I do not find anything unusual in what Pocket Gear's recent actions. The problem, I think, comes from the fact that you may not realize the difference between your sales volume and the one they face. Serving 4,000+ developers is an effort that can't be easily ignored.

In fact, I'm surprised they've been holding on for so long; I guess the reason was that for one, they could have afforded it as there were less developers to process initially and two, they wanted to grab more audience.

Anyway, back to the topic, all major distributors do what they do. In fact, the bigger the distributor is, the worse is the payment situation. It gets at its meanest in retail stores. Without going in details I can readily say we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the retail chain and, ahem, empty pockets. And the worst part is we are surely not an exception. About two months ago I talked to the VP of engineering of a very popular publisher for Palm and Pocket PC and he told me they have over a million dollars in the reatail and can't get it paid. I believe him 100%.

So, like it or not, that's the game. PocketGear grows us, the rules of their own business change and they reflect that. Some developers will grow with them; some will prefer to switch to differnt distribution; some they will find because of the changes they are in process of implementing. And that's the way it goes.

Just my .02!

- bobby