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Selling Software Online

Below find links to various resources that I accumulated in the process of starting a web-site to sell some software -- Software Mosaic. At present the only product is a simple and easy-to-use to-do list manager called Listy that allows tagging of to-do items for powerful categorization and display filtering.

Articles

Standout articles from various sites or blogs regarding the business of selling software mostly focused on shareware or micro ISV software sales.

Resources

Blogs and Forums

Check out these sites for interesting articles on the business of selling software or for discussions or to post questions.

  • Business of Software forum at JoelOnSoftware : A wonderful place to ask questions, bounce ideas of off and get some expert opinion.
  • MicroISV.com : Bills itself as a community for independent software developers. Has a lot of information and links to information.
  • SuccessfulSoftware.net : A very informative blog by someone who runs a micro ISV.

Product Activation

This section has links to sites providing services or software related to product activation, generating license or registration keys.

  • SoftWorkz : This site has an interesting service called "software_DNA" where their services act as a license server across the Internet for software that you sell.

PAD File Generation

Beta Software Announcement

This section has links to sites or services that allow you to post information about your software in it's beta stages either for testing or to get some pre-publicity.

Icon Editor

Icon Sites

For stock and custom icons, check out these sites

Accepting Credit Cards

You could go the whole hog and get an expensive merchant account with the bank of your choice, and integrate accepting a credit-card with some expsensive shopping cart software.

Or you could use a payment processor. Payment processors resell the software on your behalf taking care of accepting credit-cards and dealing with taxes and then give you the money made less some commission. They provide shopping cart services that you can integrate with your web-site. They also have software catalog stores where they sell   your software. Some of them have setup fees. Some also provide additional services like international sales, dealing with PO's, accepting credit-cards over the phone and fax, etc. regsw.com has a comparison of various services.

If you still want to accept credit-cards directly, you could use:

  • Google Checkout : Check this out if you want to accept credit-cards at a low-cost.
  • Paypal : Various levels of services including micropayments

To avoid having to do the programming to accept the credit-cards themselves via Paypal or Google Checkout, you could use integration services from:

  • e-junkie : Has a low fixed-cost based service using which if you have a paypal account (including a personal account), you can accept credit-cards (no transaction fee from e-junkie though Paypal will have a transaction fee). Possibility of using Google Checkout with their service.
  • Payloadz : Has various levels of services that accept credit-cards (they even have a free level called Payloadz Express) via your Paypal or Google Checkout account. Also will list your product in their e-bay store and a catalog on their web-site.
  • DLGuard : Provides a script that you run on your web-site to integrate with various payment processors and manages downloads providing an admin interface for the same.

Product Databases

Online Stores

For a price, you can open stores at the sites of these online marketplaces. Fast way to get a product out to market without having to setup your e-commerce own web-site.

 

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