All changes I have planned for Dev4Press website are coming along nicely, and new set of changes is now live. This include more improvements to all major website areas, changes to RSS feeds, many more styling changes and special cross-selling available during checkout.
Improved Styling
Styling change continue with this latest update. Website uses less images than before, and all the button images are gone, and replaces by much better looking CSS styled buttons. Old and no longer used templates are gone, and some of the existing ones updated to better take advantage of xScape Framework layout engine (Documentation).
Twitter Accounts
Dev4Press has a new Twitter account: @dev4press. This account will be used to automatically posts updates to the website, release news, discounts and promotions and everything else relevant to Dev4Press and Dev4Press products. My personal account @milangd is remaining in use, and will be used as usual. Link to both accounts are added to the sidebars and into the footer links map. You can follow both account, or if you want only Dev4Press related info, follow @dev4press.
Comment Subscriptions
Up until now we were using old Subscribe to Comments plugin. But, this plugin is no longer updated, and it generates PHP warnings and it is not that easy to customize. Now, we are using Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin. All old subscriptions are still in use, so you will not loose that. But, new plugin offers many more interesting things: subscribe without commenting, confirm subscriptions (mandatory on Dev4Press), subscript to full thread or only replies to your comments. And next xScape Theme Framework will have a template for this plugin (in use on Dev4Press already) for subscription management.
Price changes and Cross-Selling offers
Prices for some products are adjusted, so we now have more evenly distributed price ranges. Don’t worry, this adjustment means, that prices are actually lowered. Some products were unaffected by this, but most are, including: plugins pack and theme club membership, lifetime licenses for individual products and more.
Shopping cart makes easier to purchase more than one of our products. But, to make things even better, once you get to ShareIt checkout page you will get some additional special offers for cross selling. Depending on the products in your cart, you will get a list of additional products you can add to the cart with a special discount. Since there are a lot of products and combinations, I can’t give the list of what is offered for cross-selling in advance. But, discounts for these cross selling products go up to 30%.
Shopping Cart & F.o.t.D.
Shopping Cart is covered in much more details in it’s own post last night, so check it out here. And Feature of the Day also has it’s own post here.
Coming soon
Next round of changes will include full rework of the plugins and themes pages, improvements to archives, forums and few other things. Another major improvement will be new formats for newsletters and digest emails. More on that to follow.
With regard to pricing, I never understood why you don’t sell lifetime memberships for the plugins pack and the theme club, it seems to be a missed opportunity.
Also, why not offer a combined pack + club deal? Surely that would result in many more impulse purchases?
Well, I am still thinking about it, since price would have to be high. I hope to find some middle ground in regard of pricing soon, so that pack and club will be offered as lifetime also. As for the pack + club, that will get it’s deal, but it already is a deal through cross-selling: if someone want to buy plugin pack, in the cart will get a 30% discount offer for the theme club and vice versa.
Yes, getting pricing right is always very hard.
My instinct is that having a very high top price is okay as long as you provide a lot of intermediate steps to slowly entice the potential customer up the chain.
For instance: iPhone 3GS $0, iPhone 4 $99, iPhone 4S $199, $299, $399.
You already have great free plugins to attract potential customers, then individual plugins and themes, then lifetime individual purchases, then the pack and club, lifetime dev pack or club would be just another jump up the chain. I have no idea how many customers would make that extra jump but not at least having it as an option is a missed opportunity.
For individual plugins, lifetime seems to be initial cost x 2 (i.e. €60 / €120) and one year developer is standard + 33%. It would make sense to create a lifetime developer for individual plugins at standard initial cost x 2 + 33% (so, around €160) and use exactly the same formulation (standard x 2 +33%) to set a logical base price of around €320 for a lifetime developer plugin pack, or €299 if you want to use psychologically clever pricing.
Using the same formula (standard x 2 + 33%), a lifetime dev license for the theme club should be in the region of €372.40, or €349 for pricing effect.
On the assumption that plugin and theme customers are often separate or, at least, that a strong motivation to buy both the entire plugin pack and the entire theme club is not common, I would offer a fairly heavy discount on both together. I also presume that people who buy both will not create much additional support burden relating to the impulse part of their purchase – someone primarily buying the plugin pack but willing to pay a smaller extra amount for the themes will probably end up not using them very much, certainly not as much as the plugins he came for.
I think that cross-selling can be a clever tactic in retail but when selling something that people research quite heavily before buying, such as plugins and themes, it makes more sense to present any available discounts out in the open. 99% of the people who view your pricing page will never continue on to make a purchase and, therefore, they will never know about the possible cross-selling discounts. To use Apple as an example once again, they know that there customers will spend a lot of time considering their purchase before pressing “Buy” and, therefore, they feature promotions (usually time-limited offers such as “Back to School”) right at the start. They never, ever wait until the shopping cart to offer discounts because they know that, for big purchases, the discounts must lead.
A final thought on pricing – it may be the case that most of your customers are European but the larger international market, not only the US, tends to think in dollars. Pricing in dollars and, indeed, setting those dollar prices at psychologically attractive levels (for instance, $449 instead of €349) may result in more sales because more potential customers are comfortable with dollars, especially as the future of the Euro seems so unpredictable these days – how relaxed will someone in Kansas be with signing up to a subscription in Euros when Fox News is telling them that the Euro is about to explode? Obviously, thinking in terms of Euros is more convenient for you – like me, your bank account is probably denominated in Euros – but a little inconvenience could result in much higher sales and, well, it is always convenient to have more money 🙂
I hope you don’t mind me suggesting this, I always find it fascinating to think about pricing.
Thanks for the comment, it is always appreciated. I added a box to convert prices into USD and GBP, but all prices are still based in EUR and than converted to other two. ShareIt can set up different pricing for all 3 currencies, but I need to change my system on the website to handle that. And many news media are blowing stories about Euro out of proportions, especially in US, so that is not helping anyone. We in Europe all think in Euros most of the time, but you are right about the psychology of pricing, and I will take some time to make independent pricing for USD at least soon.
I have few things in the works for the next 2-3 weeks to make sure I can cover the different offer models and make sure that best deals with combination of products can be presented, including mix of plugins and themes. Unfortunately, due to constant lack of time, there is one opportunity I still can’t work on: targeted theme+plugin(s) bundles. All my plugins are integrated into themes (styling and/or features), so they are easy to connect. But making package that is attractive to end users where they get sort of all-set-up environment takes a lot of time. Hopefully, when I finish my current major development I will be able to focus on such configured solutions also.