Hello,
I have
recently moved from a recurring subscription service on Smart-Thinker to selling
a non-recurring product suite package with updates for x amount of time. In addition to this, I now plan
on introducing individual product sales (for the customers who don't want all modules - albeit cheaper for the Product Suite) – ironically I remember discussing this
over a year ago, but it’s time to offer both.
How do most
module vendors handle upgrades for new versions? From what I have seen, some
offer the product for life (the products life, that is), some offer minor version
upgrades for free, and some make you pay for each upgrade. I personally did not
want to do individual sales because of the admin maintenance to manage this
task.
Basically I
would like to leave out Snowcovered – what is the best approach for
implementing this? I have 10 products roughly, so I was thinking the store
module might be overkill. I was thinking of making a role for each product (+
major version) and then using either PayPal Buy Now buttons (which would
require me to add customers to roles manually) or something like Scott’s
Subscription Tools which does not look as nice but would handle the IPN and
role. Then if I charged for upgrades I would make a new role for the new
version…. Hmm getting complicated already…
So there are 2 questions here:
- how do
vendors handle individual module sales wrt upgrades (or what do customers
expect when they buy a product wrt upgrades?)
- how to
setup Smart-Thinker.com to handle this process with the least amount of work
for giving the customer access and upgrades (And is there a store module that
could make this easier – the core store does not handle PayPal IPNs yet)
I’d appreciate your
comments (from vendors and customers)