Hi all , just a little background, I been working as a freelancer for the past 3 years, planning to launch some WordPress plugin this year, but as a nobody in the market, shall I host up a site and sell it my own or selling it through market place like code canyon ?
This is just from my limited perspective, but I’m a WP developer, and I never buy plugins from marketplaces like Code Canyon. All the good ones I use are sold directly by the developers, or through a larger plugin’s marketplace (e.g. extensions for WooCommerce, etc. sold by Woo).
@bradt might have some insight into this.
Like @bradt, I too sell WP plugins (AWPCP and BusinessDirectory). I don’t like CodeCanyon’s model for several reasons:
- Crowded space. If I list something in there, chances are competitors can too. When you have too many choices, it’s harder for a customer to pick
- CC gets their cut of every deal, less profit to you
- They set the prices to a certain level (IIRC–maybe this has changed) making it hard to sell things like single/multi site licenses (I think you can do “user” and “developer” now)
I’d rather have full control over the sales process and drive customers from the repository to my site. It’s been a much better experience IMO.
Just to throw in my 2 cents, I have purchased many things from code canyon and will not do that again.
- Low quality
- Some were broken
So now when I see stuff on Code Canyon I just think low quality code. Probably cause the better developers know they can charge more.
I prefer finding stuff through google, blogs, or on the developer’s site (like Redactor) because it tends to contain much higher quality content and am willing to pay the price.
I feel like is compare between “cut of every deal” vs “effort bring the customer to buy on your site” ?
and is a bit extreme hard when you are just nobody.
perhaps selling a lite version on the market place and a pro version on my own site will help ?
Produce a free version (lite) and put in WP.org. That’s going to be your #1 marketplace over all others, honestly. Use that lite version to get folks to upgrade to Pro.
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What @daverodenbaugh said! : )
The WP.org repo is a great way to test an idea. Put a basic plugin together that solves a part of a problem area and see how it does. Then add a survey to the sidebar asking if people would be willing to buy a Pro version with features x, y, z and collect emails. This is exactly what I did for WP Migrate DB. I gave a talk about a year ago on all the steps I took: https://deliciousbrains.com/bostonwp-meetup-presentation-video/. There’s some other tips in there on how I built my launch list.
We use WooCommerce to power our site, but I’d choose Easy Digital Downloads if I was starting from scratch today.