The Association of Shareware Professionals has renamed itself today to the Association of Software Professionals. I have written a guest post over on the ASP blog putting this name change into context. The article includes reactions from quite a few shareware industry veterans.
** Update **
The ASP dissolved itsself in 2021. But you can still find the article on the Wayback Machine here.
“No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients.” – Proverb
Software entrepreneur culture is full of stories of the products that succeeded. But what about the products that failed? We rarely hear much about them. This can lead to a very skewed perspective on what works and what doesn’t (survivor bias). But I believe that failure can teach us as much as success. So I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got 12 excellent responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small sample and biased by self selection, but I think it contains a lot of useful insights. It is an unashamedly a long post, as I didn’t want to lose any of these insights by editing it down.
DRAMA (Design RAtionale MAnagement) was a commercialization of a University prototype for recording the decision-making process during the design of complex and long-lived artefacts, for example nuclear reactors and chemical plants. By recording it in a structured database this information would still be available long after the original engineers had forgotten it, retired or been run over by buses. This information was believed to be incredibly valuable to later maintainers of the system, engineers creating similar designs and industry regulators. The development was part funded by 4 big process engineering companies.
Everyone told us what a great idea it was, but no-one bought it. despite some early funding from some big process engineering companies, none of them put it into use properly and we never sold any licences to anyone else.
At least 3 man years of work went into this product, with me doing most of it. Thankfully I was a salaried employee. But the lack of success of this product contributed to the demise of the part of the company I was in.
The product is long dead.
It was a fairly painful experience. I would rather have spent all that money, time and energy on something that someone actually used. But at least I learnt some expensive lessons without using my own money.
CleanChief was to be ‘The easy management solution for cleaning organisations’. Managing assets, employee schedules, ordering supplies, you name it CleanChief handled it. Essentially it was light weight accounting software for cleaning companies.
A small number of copies were sold. No one is actively using it at present. Once I realised that it wasn’t a complete product and that additional development was required I moved on to other product ideas. I had basically run out of enthusiasm for the product.
I worked on it at night and weekends for about 2 1/2 years. I paid for graphic design work, purchased stock icons and images. I probably spent a couple of thousand Australian dollars in total and an awful lot of time.
I moved on to other products that have gone much better. My newer products were released in months rather than years and I looked for real feedback from real users from day one. they are:
I do occasionally ponder returning to CleanChief and trying to raise it from the ashes.
No. Looking back I learned a few lessons from a huge amount of time and work, it was a very inefficient way to learn those lessons. But when you are new to something like starting a business or creating useful software being inefficient at learning lessons is the best you can do, it’s a thousand times better than not learning lessons at all.
I learned so much more in my two and a half years of trying to develop CleanChief than I did in the two and a half years prior to that, during which time I really wanted to start a software business but didn’t take any action.
Hearing or reading some piece of advice is totally different to living it. Here are some of the ideas that I always agreed were true but didn’t fully understand the implications of until I had lived them out:
ChimSoft – Software for Chimney Sweeps.
I believe this failed for two reasons:
I don’t consider it a complete failure because I sold two copies when it retailed for $2k, and maybe 10-15 more copies when I lowered the price to $200. Those sales proved that I wasn’t completely off base in thinking there was a market for the software, but the cost of customer acquisition and the size of the market were too small. Customers wanted to have a bunch of phone calls, face-to-face etc… the type of stuff you only see with much more expensive software. The problem was that for a niche this small we had to charge a lot of money to make it worthwhile for us, but the customers were small businesses where this is a major investment, so the fit was never right. The other issue was the people that did buy it were not super tech savvy, so there was a high cost of support that made even a $200 product not worth it.
I invested maybe a year of time and $3k into the company. I did not take any huge risks on it, so there were no big negative outcomes.
The company folded in 2007, I refocused my efforts on my existing companies (AUsedCar.com and BudgetSimple.com) and both have been doing well enough that I quit my day job.
I don’t regret it entirely, I think I learned several valuable lessons about working with other people, small business sales, trade-shows and software development.
PC Desktop Cleaner. Simple software that cleans your desktop and archives your files.
My goal was to sell 10 units per month. I’ve sold less than 1 unit per month.
I think I wasted near $500 in development tools and some freelancers. Not too much.
I’m still selling it. I’ve thought about others products, but not really decided yet.
No, it was a lot of fun and I learnt lot of things. In my “day job” I own a small firm that sells software for production scheduling. I’ve learn a lot of SEO and AdWords in the DesktopCleaner project that now I’m using with great results.
Go for it, maybe you win, maybe you fail, but you will grow and get tons of useful knowledge on the way.
It sells and the profits cover current investments in the product, but there is little left over on top of that.
If I had a chance to do anything differently:
Up to this point, I have spent 13 years on Smart Diary Suite and a lot of money went into buying hardware, software, hosting, marketing, etc… All of that money came from my day job, but at this point SDS has recovered all of that back and is now making a small profit. The actual amount is hard to calculate (over the 13 year span), but we would be talking in tens of thousands of US dollars.
For a while it may have seemed like SDS is not going to be successful, but that’s probably my fault – I stopped believing for a little while. Now I am back, starting again and this time I’ll make sure it doesn’t fail.
I do not regret doing it. I regret allowing myself to stop working on it, basically bailing out on it for a while – that is my biggest mistake.
If you want a successful product – believe in it and let others know that you believe in it.
Highlighter. A utility to print neatly formatted, syntax highlighted source code listings.
I earnt a grand total of £442.52 (about $700 in todays money) in just over two years, so I guess it paid for itself if you exclude my time.
Since it was my first product and I was very green about both marketing and product development. I would suggest the following would have made things better:
I figure it failed simply because it was a product nobody wanted. Actually, more importantly than that,, it was a product *I* didn’t want to use, but it developed from a larger product I was working on, on the assumption I could earn some money on the side from part of the code. Since then I’ve stuck to products which I’ve actually wanted to use myself. There’s a lot to be said for dogfooding, not just for debugging, but for knowing where the pain points are and what extra features could be added.
I would guess a couple of months of evening/weekend development time. Financially there was little spent, except that I offered the option of a printed manual and CD for an extra charge. One customer took me up on the offer, so I had to get 100 manuals printed and 99 of them went in the bin.
I moved on to another product which has sold over £50,000 and a third which has earnt even more than that. Not enough to retire on but considering I only do this part time it must work out at a great hourly rate. There’s a lot to be said for not giving up…
Nope. I figure every failure in life teaches you valuable lessons. Of course if I’d made a large financial investment I may feel differently, but that’s one of the big advantages of software over physical product sales.
Just to reiterate – develop something which you find useful, instead of second guessing others.
R10Clean. A data cleaning and manipulation tool.
In the 18 months or so it’s been on the market I have sold 6. It has been £199, £99 and £19 – with no effect on sales !
Not sure what I did wrong ? The product is maybe too techie ?
No effect financially as at the time I was in a strong financial position.
I still have it for sale but do not market it at all. I have other products.
I don’t regret it as it saved me a ton of time when I was working with legacy databases a lot, as a commercial product it has been raved about (once!) and received a good review from the Kleper report, but has failed totally.
Advice to others ? Just because you need it personally, don’t assume the rest of the world does too. :-)
nBinder, packs multiple files into a stand alone executable with over 50 advanced output and file unpack options, conditional run and commands.
It was the first product I began selling. It sold to 300+ customers in 4 years. But for about a year the sales began to go down and have finally stopped completely.
I invested almost no money (except for hosting costs). Time invested I can’t really say exactly, but not too much as I only worked on nBinder in short bursts like 6 hours a day for a week or so before releases.
Still for sale. My other products are:
It’s not a total failure as I did make some money out of it with no investment, so I don’t regret starting it, but it could have been much better.
Words of advice for others trying to make money from software development:
Net-Herald – a monitoring application for water supply companies. It was a complex client server application that would receive monitoring data from specialized hardware and store that data inside a SQL database. The client displays that data in different graphs, provides printable reports or sends alarm messages via SMS if a monitored value is not within its specified limits.
I developed Net-Herald as a perfect fit for that specialized hardware that is provided by a local manufacturer. That way, so I hoped, I could profit from their sales leads and would find a smoother way into these water supply companies. The downside of course, was that my software would only work with their hardware.
I sold a first license fairly soon after I had a sellable product, although it took the customer nearly a year until they finally bought. But since then I sold only one more license within the last 4 years or so.
The development time for the first sellable version was maybe about 9 months. I didn’t have a job income at that time, but got funding due to government support for small start-up businesses. So I didn’t drain our family’s personal finances. But I did of course invest a great deal of time and sweat.
Now, I have drawn a line and stopped active development of Net-Herald. I still do some custom extensions for my first clients. But I no longer market the software. I have instead focused on my consulting services. I also try to learn developing and selling software with my cross-platform drag and drop product Simidude.
I didn’t succeed yet selling my own software (which is still my goal) but I do not regret doing it. I developed Net-Herald using (Java) technologies that now give me leverage at my consulting gigs. All in all it was a heavy ride. But it was fun and I would do it again.
Adriano Ferrari.
HabitShaper – set and track daily targets for your goals (weight loss, quit smoking, jogging, writing, etc…).
I sold a few copies, but not enough to make back the time I invested in it and my conversion numbers and traffic are below average.
I worked on it two years, part-time, while doing Masters/PhD in Physics. It had no impact on my finances (very little money invested) or circumstances.
I am relaunching as a web-based product this summer.
Not in the least! I learned about as much from making HabitShaper as I have from my MSc thesis and PhD work.
BPL – Batch Programming Language Interpreter.
I sold about 10 copies.
I only spent a few weeks coding and documenting it in my spare time. Support issues sometimes took a whole evening, but nothing major. It did not have any impact on my finances as I had invested nothing but my time.
I will still address support issues with this product for registered users, but I don’t actively sell it. I’ve open-sourced the program and it still really isn’t seeing heavy use.
I was more successful with other products. I have a few retired products that saw some good bulk-purchase deals ( command-line DUN HangUp, command-line scheduler ) and I still sell the following (for Windows):
All of the above still bring in a modest passive income.
Not at all. “Nothing ventured,…”.
Had I not attempted to bring the BPL product to life, I might still be sitting here wondering “what if?” I think it was very beneficial for me to invest the time to try out this idea.
Anonymous.
A time tracker.
Because it is not my primary income. I have about 150 customers in one year.
In my defense, the reason I do not spend much time on it is that the market became saturated with ‘me toos’ right after I released, which was quite expected. In fact, as I was looking for users, I got an email from a competitor suggesting that I don’t enter the market because they are working on the same thing! I don’t know what I would do differently. Maybe spend more time on it? I think the law of diminishing returns applies quite early in this space so I am not sure.
Since inception (Nov 2008), I’ve spent close to 250 hours total. Total cash outlay was something like $500.
I never tried to make it succeed, to be honest. It was only a learning experience for me. What I probably need now is to go all in. Quite frankly, if I double the sales for this product, I can quit all consulting work. But I really do not think it is a good idea to work on this app full time as it is too simple.
Definitely not.
Once the product was complete and we started learning SEO it became all too apparent that organic search traffic for related keywords was going to be insufficient. Research into PPC then revealed that the price point was too low to support purchasing medical terms. Planned features for ScreenRest have been put on hold and no further marketing is planned. We continue to support new and existing ScreenRest customers and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. Rather than create another software product we chose to use what we had learned about marketing, copywriting and SEO to create a series of websites targeting a range of topics (often known as niche sites). The most successful of these sites we are expanding in value and functionality to fill gaps not serviced by the competition.
No. ScreenRest succeeded in every way intended, other than commercially. Creating it was a rewarding learning exercise that started us down a path to finding the intersection of our skills, experience and market opportunities.
Analysing the above (admittedly small and self-selected sample) it is clear that by far the commonest cause of failure were:
With the benefitof 20/20 hindsight it seems blindingly obvious that we should:
Yet, by my count, a whopping 6 out of 13 of us admitted to failing to do each of these adequately. Probably we were too busy obsessing over the features and technical issues so beloved of developers, which actually contributed to far fewer failures.
It is also noticeable that, despite the failure of these products, there are few regrets. Important lessons were learned and no-one lost their house. Many of us have gone on to develop successful products and the others will be in a much stronger position if they do decide to try again.
A big thank you to everyone who ate a large slice of humble pie and submitted the above. I hope we can prevent other budding software entrepreneurs making the same mistakes. Even if you don’t succeed, you will learn a lot.
Feel free to add your own hard-won lessons from failure in the comments below.
“No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients.” – Hindu proverb
I did some consulting a few months back for James Wang of SQL Pretty Printer, concentrating mainly on marketing and usability. James was kind enough to send me an update on his progress and allow me to reproduce it here:
I launched my product SQL Pretty Printer several years ago, but I wasn’t satisfied with sales. So I contacted Andy to do some consulting about my product and website.
After several rounds of questions, Andy looked at my product and website and did some research. Andy’s final report is easy to read and understand, and lists about 100 actionable points about my product and website. After that, it took me about 3-4 weeks to apply this advice with the help of Andy. 3 months later, I’m really satisfied with the result: the downloads have increased 36%, and the sales increased 25%.
So my conclusion is if you have a product, and want to sell more, Andy is the person you need to approach.
SQL Pretty Printer is a good example of focussing on a single, well-defined problem and really nailing it, allowing you to turn this:
Into this:
SQL Pretty Printer has a wide range of formatting options and comes as a standalone Windows app, Visual Studio add-in, SSMS add-in and even an API for integration into your own app. If you have to work with less than beautiful SQL I recommend you try it.
Mike Dulin has just uploaded an MP3 of an interview we did at SIC 2009 for Sharewareradio.com. In the 15 minutes we discuss marketing, how I got started with PerfectTablePlan, ads, the wedding industry, newsletters, the ASP, this blog and more. There are some problems with the recording levels, but hopefully that doesn’t detract too much.
I have put together a page of categorised links to blog posts and articles that I think might be useful to developers and marketers of commercial software in general, and microISVs/indie developers in particular. I intend to add more links from time-to-time. My rules for inclusion are secret, arbitrary and capricious, so please don’t ask to have your link added.
Every time I write a post for this blog I carefully check it for typos. I then get my wife to proof-read it. She always finds at least one typo. Often there will be whole words missing that my brain must have interpolated when I checked it. I read what I thought I had written. She is unencumbered by such preconceptions.
Similarly, it isn’t sufficient to do all your own testing on software you wrote, no matter how hard you try. You will tend to see what you intended to program, not what you actually programmed. Furthermore your users have different experiences, assumptions, and patterns of usage to you. Even in the unlikely event that you manage 100% code coverage in your testing, those pesky users won’t execute those lines of code in the same order you did. I have spent hours testing a program without finding a bug, only to see someone else break it within minutes or even seconds.
So it is essential to involve people other than the original programmer in testing, in addition to (but not instead of) the testing programmers do on their own code. This poses something of a challenge to one-man-bands such as my own. I don’t have other programmers, let alone QA staff, to call on. I can, and do, use volunteer customers for beta testing. But, in my experience, beta testing is not an effective substitute for professional testing:
Consequently I like to pay third party testers to test my own PerfectTablePlan product after I have finished my own testing and before I do any beta testing. Previously I have used softwareexaminer.com, but they are no longer in business. So I decided to try a couple of other offshore testing companies I had heard about:
 |
testlab2.com |
 |
qsgsoft.com |
The problem with paying a testing company is that it is hard to assess the quality of their work until it is too late. If they report few bugs it could because there are few bugs or because they didn’t do a very good job of testing. By using 2 companies to test the same software release I was also testing the testers (I didn’t tell them this).
I paid each company to do approximately 3 days testing on the Windows and Mac versions of PerfectTablePlan. I was very pleased with the results. Both companies found a useful number of bugs in the software. They were also able to test on platforms that I didn’t have access to at the time (64 bit Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6). I didn’t keep an exact score, but I would say that QSG found more bugs, while TestLab2 was more responsive.
QSG found some quite obscure bugs. They were even able to tell me how to reproduce a very rare and obscure bug that I had been trying to track down for months without success. Communications were sometimes a little slow (at least partly due to us being in different time zones) but it wasn’t a huge issue. My only real grumble is their billing. Despite several reminder emails from me I am still waiting to be invoiced for the work several months later. I like to pay my bills promptly and then forget about them.
TestLab2 didn’t find quite as many bugs, but I was impressed with their responsiveness. They installed Mac OS X 10.6 within a few days of it being released, so they could test PerfectTablePlan on it. When I emailed them on a Saturday about a last minute bug fix for Mac OS X 10.6 they tested the fix the same day. That is great service.
TestLab2 and QSG are based in Ukraine and India, respectively. At around $15/hour they are about a third the price of equivalent US/European companies I contacted (who might also outsource the work to Eastern Europe and India, for all I know). Some people believe outsourcing work to countries with lower costs of living is evil. I’m not one of them. I sell my software worldwide and I am also happy to buy my services worldwide, especially if I can get significantly better value for money by doing so. While there are rational arguments to be made about problems caused by differences in culture, language and time zone caused by outsourcing to other countries, I didn’t find any of these to be a major issue in this case. Most of the other arguments I have heard boil down to the simple ugly fact that some westerners feel they are entitled to a disproportionate share of the global pie. But I don’t see any reason why someone in Europe or North America is any more deserving of a job than someone in Ukraine or India.
With the help of these two companies I was able to put out a really solid PerfectTablePlan v4.1.0 release, despite the large number of new features. In fact, I am only just putting out a v4.1.1 with some bugs fixes several months later. I plan to use both companies again. I hope readers of this blog will give them some additional work to ensure they stay in business. But not so much that they don’t have time to do my next round of testing!
Below are the video and slides of the “Marketing for microISVS – embracing the ‘dark side’?” talk I gave at ESWC 2009 in Berlin. This is a high-speed ramble through a vast subject. In the 45 minutes available I do my best to dispel some of the myths software developers have about marketing and discuss some marketing concepts, including: branding; positioning; pricing; and segmentation. Taking in Harley Davidsons, tinned tomatoes, Coca Cola and food blenders on the way. The first couple of minutes, where I dispel the myth that good software sells itself without marketing, are missing from the video due to a dead camera battery. But you knew that anyway, so I don’t think this detracts much overall.
Video:
Slides (which might not make much sense without the video):
NB/ When I said 47Signals, I meant 37Signals (brand inflation?). Thanks to Tarek for the correction.
Links to some of the things mentioned in the talk:
A big thank you to Alwin and Sytske of collectorz.com for hot-footing it from Alwin’s talk to do the video (you can see Alwin’s excellent talk on web app pros and cons here). And also to David and Panagiota for all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes organizing ESWC.
If you found this talk useful you might also like 10 mistakes microISVS make.
I have added a microISV reading list page to this blog. Please feel free to add your own comments to the page on the books listed or any other books you feel are relevant.
I will be off to ESWC 2009 in Berlin in a few days. I am doing a talk “Marketing for microISVs – embracing the dark side?” on the Saturday morning. It is going to be tough to tackle as huge a subject as marketing in 45 minutes including questions, but I like a challenge!
I am also looking forwarding to touching base with old acquaintances and meeting some new people. If you are going to there, do come and say hello.
The choice of ecommerce provider is probably one of the more important ones you make as a software vendor. It isn’t too hard to compare providers by feature set or price. But what about other vital attributes, such as support, reliability, ease of set-up and how they treat your customers? It isn’t realistic to try every provider, so this major decision is often made on the basis of haphazard anecdotal evidence from forums. I created a survey in an attempt to gather some systematic data on the ecommerce providers most commonly used by small software vendors. I present the results below without fear or favour. Skip ahead to ‘Overall ranking’ if you are in a hurry.
I posted a request for survey responses on this blog and on a few forums frequented by microISVs and small software companies. Any vendor of software (desktop or web based) not directly affiliated with an ecommerce provider was eligible to take part. Software vendors were invited to fill out a survey form on wufoo.com for each ecommerce provider they had used in the last 2 years. They had to supply their product URL and an email address from the same domain so that I could verify their identity. They also had to check a box proclaiming:
I am a software vendor and I have used this Ecommerce provider in the last 2 years. I have no commercial interest beyond being a customer. (If you have affiliate links to the Ecommerce provider, that isn’t a problem.)
They then had to reply to an automated email from wufoo to the email supplied confirming it was them that had completed the form. If they didn’t reply to the automated email I followed up with a few more emails. Although tedious for me, I felt this was an important safeguard to avoid any possibility of fraudulent entries. I also checked for duplicate entries, duplicate IP addresses and other suspicious patterns. The survey was open from the 5th to the 8th October. Any responses not validated by 10th October were removed from the data.
202 survey responses were received from 166 different software vendors. 9 responses were rejected as I could not verify their identity (they didn’t respond to several emails). 1 response was rejected due to a possible conflict of interest raised by the software vendor (they had done paid work for one of the providers). This left 192 valid responses. I saw no evidence of any attempt to rig the results.
You can download the raw data. It has been stripped of any personal identifying information. Feel free to do your own analysis or check my results.
The survey listed 14 of the major ecommerce providers, plus an ‘other’ box for providers not listed. Valid responses were received for 25 different ecommerce providers, as shown below:
Note that ‘e-junkie+PayPal/GoogleCheckout/2Checkout’ has been shortened to ‘e-junkie’ for brevity.
Below I show the average (mean) score per ecommerce provider by survey question. The providers are sorted by score. Providers with less than 3 responses weren’t considered statistically valid and are not shown here (see the raw data for all responses).
“How do you rate the range of features offered, e.g. coupons, support for multiple currencies, CD shipping, affiliate tracking, handling of tax etc.”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“How easy is their system to set-up, manage and modify?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“How reliable is their service? Does their server ever go down?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“How good is their support? Do they respond in a timely manner? Are their staff helpful and knowledgeable?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“How well do they protect you from chargebacks and false positives (i.e. valid cards declined)?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“Does this service disrespect you (e.g. by paying you late) or your customer (e.g. by spamming them, adding unwanted items into their cart or making hidden charges)?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“How do you rate their service compared to the cost?”
5=”Excellent”, 4=”Good”, 3=”Satisfactory”, 2= “Unsatisfactory”, 1=”Dismal”
“What is the probability you will still be using this service in 12 months time?”
5= “>95%”, 4= “>75%”, 3= “>50%”, 2= “>25%”, 1= “<25%”
The average score and standard deviation for each question across all providers is shown below:
From the averages software vendors are most happy with reliability and least happy with ease of use. From the standard deviation the least variation is in fraud protection and the greatest variation is in support.
The correlation (R squared) between the likelihood of staying with a provider and the answers to the other 6 questions is shown below:
Perhaps providers should be concentrating more on ease of use and support to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Below I show the average (mean) score per question by ecommerce provider. The providers are shown in alphabetical order. The standard deviation is also shown to give an idea of how consistent the responses were (the larger the standard deviation the more variation there was in responses). Providers with less than 3 responses weren’t considered statistically valid and are not shown here (see the raw data for all responses).
The average (mean) score and overall ranking for providers with at least 3 responses is shown below.
The chart below shows the score broken down by question (click to enlarge):
The chart below compares the 4 top performers by question:
Avangate, Fastspring, BMT Micro and e-junkie all did well. The difference between the Avangate and Fastspring score (approx 0.3%) is probably too small to be statistically significant, but the survey shows significant differences between the best and worst providers. SWREG trails in last place by quite a margin, managing to place last or second to last in an impressive 7 out of 8 questions. It is also noticeable that the providers owned by industry heavyweight Digital River fill 4 out of the bottom 5 places in the ranking. This rather begs the question of how they got to be the industry heavyweight in the first place.
Note that the ranking does not show who the ‘best’ ecommerce provider is, for the following reasons:
That said, the ranking does correlate fairly well with the many comments I see about ecommerce providers on various forums. I don’t think I would want to use any of the providers in the bottom half of the ranking.
While one shouldn’t take the overall ranking too seriously, it is clear that there are major differences in the performance of ecommerce providers in important areas other than pricing and features. I hope these results will allow software vendors (myself included) to make a better informed choice of ecommerce provider. Hopefully this will, in turn, improve ecommerce services overall by rewarding the good companies at the expense of the poorer performers. It would be interesting to run this survey in another year or two and find out what has changed. Thank you to everyone that took part.
Disclosure: I use e-junkie+PayPal/GoogleCheckout/2Checkout as my payment provider for my Perfect Table Plan software. I have an affiliate link to them in another article on this blog which brings me a few dollars a month. I have no other commercial relationship with any of the other ecommerce providers.
| BMT Micro |
| e-junkie |
| eSellerate |
| Fastspring |
| Kagi |
| PayPal |
| Plimus |
| RegNow |
| ShareIt |
| SWREG |
Successful Software 