eCommerce Tycoon

**nanimo** · 02-29-2008, 07:16 PM

If you would set a reasonable price for a set of scripts which prices you would set?
I know this question is a bit confusing when it takes to php because its mostly a language directed to free stuff not implying money.
Since i wouldn't find anybody ready to pay for something they could get free even if they had to tweak it to death i find myself forced to set the lowest prices for my products, lets say 10 bucks, 10 bucks is something people would pay for what? a generous hot dog? A Mac**ald's Meal? Yet you will find tons of people not willing to pay 10 bucks for a full feature product even if their computer would punch them to death saying (pay this misery you bastard).

Or is this a general idea to web scripts?
I have a good product to sell at the lowest price yet since i don't have a generous traffic i cant expect the amount of people willing to pay to be high, actually traffic seems to be the key for everything in Internet, if you have billions of traffic even you make a crappy thing people will use it and think its good even if its not...
Well, with all this drift you don't remember the original topic anymore.

$10 bucks: will anyone pay it for a full featured product?
Personally i think people would pay $10 bucks for a Hello world page and not for a full feature core portal.

**ADAM Web Design** · 02-29-2008, 07:35 PM

I'm not a PHP coder by any stretch; I know a bit about it but I don't use it often and I really don't like it much.

Having said all of that...I'd say $0, and I'll draw a similar parallel to illustrate the point from something I had to do yesterday. I was given the choice between converting a PDF to Excel for eventual database work, or I could build a custom spider to traverse the client's site, filter out the bad data, and insert it into the database.

The spider took me about 3 hours to make. The minimum cost of a PDF to Excel converter was $39, and it may or may not have worked. With the spider, I control it from start to finish. With someone else's stuff, I don't know what I'm getting into. That...and I built it myself.

So I'd say $0, because most scripts are worthless to me.

**CSS4Life** · 02-29-2008, 07:40 PM

I have to disagree with Adam on this one.

PHP scripts, as long as they are well coded and ultimately useful to the end user and/or webmaster can be worth a reasonable amount of money. Cheapskates who demand that you give them everything for free do not seem to appreciate the time and effort that goes into coding some scripts. If you coded these yourself (i.e. not reselling them), they are well coded and efficient and you are selling a set, then they are worth far more than $10.

However, since you haven't actually explained what scripts you are selling and how complex they are, I can't really say how much they are actually worth. But I'd definitely say more than $10.

**nanimo** · 02-29-2008, 07:41 PM

So follow my line: Is the best choice to set if free, trust on its quality and have ads on product's page?

**Moxxnixx** · 02-29-2008, 07:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanimo

$10 bucks: will anyone pay it for a full featured product?
Personally i think people would pay $10 bucks for a Hello world page and not for a full feature core portal.

I guess a lot depends on the amount of competition that particular product has and if that
product has a specific feature they want/need. As whym just said, it's hard to say without
knowing what type of product you're referring to.

There are many people that are happy with free products like phpBB, joomla, and ZenCart,
while other people prefer to pay big $$ for products like vBulletin, Subdreamer, and X-Cart.

If your script is new and you need to get word out of its existence, you might want to initially
distribute it for free. Get some feedback on it > add to it > tweak it and then eventually start
charging, based on user feedback.

**nanimo** · 07:58 PM

The product im willing to sell (and im currently developing) is a category manager, yes a category. You can call it a CMS or a Portal, but its a category manager.
What does it have? What features does it include?

- Each Category (or subcategory) can have built-in (no plugins) images, topics (similar to threads) and articles.
- User Control Panel (Inbox, Sentbx, Compose, Profile Editor, Options, News Manager, Support Ticket Manager, Live Notifications related with your stuff)
- Admin Control Panel (Settings, Category Manager, User Manager, UserGroup Manager, BBCode Manager, Language & Templates Manager, Admin Control Panel Demo Mode)
- Clean Urls with keywords.
- Login with Cookies.
- Multi-User (Sessions)
- Search.
- Guestbook.
- Polls, Attachments.
- Independent Template files (Html only Templates and subtemplates), language files
- Full Permission options (Includes Global Exceptions and Category Local Exceptions)
- Topic Message Signatures/Quotes/Avatars/Smillies.
- News.
- Comments.
- Rss.
- Built-In Shoutbox
- Public User Profiles (Includes personal Guestbook)
- Extremely user friendly
...

**CSS4Life** · 02-29-2008, 07:59 PM

Wow sounds a lot like something I'm working on (whether I'll ever finish it is something else...)

Depending on the quality of the product, you could sell it for well over $10 each but there is quite a lot of competition in this area from free PHP forum software or content management systems etc.

**joder** · 02-29-2008, 08:06 PM

I think you would have to make it easy to use meaning a good admin interface where the components can be fit together easily. Like Dan said, there are free CMS out there such as Joomla and Drupal. So you have to set yourself apart.

IMO, it would be best to build a portfolio and network. Get in with some businesses that want someone to maintain and support your product.

**nanimo** · 08:12 PM

Joder iam i wrong when i say scripts like joomla and drupal in cms terms they use plugins for third-party products in order to fill their forum, gallery, article or other main feture needs?
Iam i not improving by offering it bult-in? Im not really concerned about releasing it free if the traffic justifies it...but getting the traffic is another story...since the internet traffic's already occupied with the "biggies"

**joder** · 02-29-2008, 08:22 PM

You can get a lot of free plugins for the free CMS.

If you have a good product, it still pays to work with customers who you work closely with who are paying. I am sure that near where you live there are many small businesses that have poor web sites. Showing them your product may generate business that will keep making you money. But, that is just a suggestion. You can always still have a site with ads on the page. I don't know how much revenue that will generate until you get a lot of traffic.

When you say they are "built-in", can they be easily turned on/off, moved around via the admin page? I haven't tried the "big" CMS, but they look like a pain.

Do you have a demo?

**nanimo** · 02-29-2008, 08:35 PM

I dont have a demo yet. In those categories currently there are 3 elements or subsections: Images, Articles and Topics, you can choose to start a category with 1, 2 or all of those sections, you may also disable existing elements for each category, moving a section between categories is also possible. Its up to your imagination. I calculate i may have a demo in about 1,2 months after i kill all bugs.

**joder** · 02-29-2008, 08:42 PM

I hope you come back here to let us see it. It sounds very interesting.

What programming languages are you using?

**nanimo** · 02-29-2008, 08:52 PM

Its mainly PHP/MYsql/Css/Ajax. The name is Gnifi, the website is the ".com"

**vangogh** · 02-29-2008, 11:12 PM

The money you can or can't charge isn't so much about the specific language you're using. It's about the value you're creating. People sell PHP scripts all the time and other people buy them.

If you can create something other people want (which it sounds like you're doing given the responses above) then you can sell it to them. It's really about there being a market for your product.

On the other hand there could be more value in it for you if you give it away. If you provide a download page and the script proves popular you could attract a lot of links to the page, you could build a name for yourself, you could have a ready made audience for your next product that you do sell.

**Capt Quirk** · 02-29-2008, 11:42 PM

I'd gladly pay you $10 for a PHP poll script, if you could make one with the features I need. Maybe $20

**ForrestCroce** · 02-29-2008, 11:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanimo

I have a good product to sell at the lowest price yet since i don't have a generous traffic i cant expect the amount of people willing to pay to be high, actually traffic seems to be the key for everything in Internet, if you have billions of traffic even you make a crappy thing people will use it and think its good even if its not...

Traffic, price, and quality aren't so well correlated. Quality really should float to the top, but traffic comes from marketing. You can write the best code in the world, but then you have to get it in front of people who'll think it's interesting. That can be fellow php devs who think your code is beautiful and elegant, or people who need what your cms does. That can eventually spread through word of mouth, but the official frontpage site got more visits per second than mine probably gets in a year. Which tells you nothing about quality.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanimo

So follow my line: Is the best choice to set if free, trust on its quality and have ads on product's page?

Giving it away guarantees no one will pay for it, but it doesn't necessarily turn into useful traffic. It could go unnoticed, or you could get a lot of people who download the file and leave. It could build a reputation, but that's unlikely; if you're already getting a lot of traffic some frrware can help, since you already have an audience to go rave ( or rant ) about your software.

I tend to make code free or open source when it's small, and didn't take much work.

**nanimo** · 12:08 PM

If you can see my dilemma: $10 dollars are only €6 (my currency), so unless the sales are high its more like selling candies

Its really a dead-end: selling low your coding effort wont be worth, selling high nobody will pay for it, giving it free its like shooting ducks in the dark (you never know if you hit any and if you do you wont see them) lol

**Capt Quirk** · 03-04-2008, 05:27 PM

Alright, let's counter-offer then... How much to code and install a custom poll script?

**nanimo** · 07:27 PM

Lol, i never said i would code a poll script, but if we make a comparative, if according you a poll script worths $10-20, the whole package im developing (which includes polls) may be worth $100-200..of course nobody who loves cheap hot-dogs would ever pay that

BTW, ever happened to you getting lost while naming variables and functions? Its so many i'am handling that im starting to give nonsense names to the things.

**Capt Quirk** · 03-04-2008, 10:52 PM

I don't want a standard poll, but I thought I'd ask anyways.

And I use cheap hot dogs for hiding the dog's pills...