Benefits of Selling Software

When you sell a piece of software it’s almost pure profit.   

This is especially true when you sell to an existing customer – at that point there aren’t any marketing costs involved to acquire the customer, as she is already on your life.  So when you make a repeat sale to an existing customer, generally the only fees are from your credit card processor.

As you are probably starting to notice, selling downloadable software online can be an extremely lucrative venture!

Another benefit of selling software is that there isn’t as much of the frustration as you might find selling other downloadable products like ebooks.  For example, it’s very easy for someone to buy an ebook from you, read and absorb all the information, and then ask for a refund.  Indeed, there is a certain percentage of serial refunders online who buy ebooks with the intention to ask for a refund immediately.  And why not?  If they do that they essentially get the information for free.

Even if you “lock down” their ebook after the refund so that they no longer have access to the information, it doesn’t matter.  Unless you run over to their house

and erase their memory, they can benefit from the information any time they want because it’s all still up in their head.

In other words, they’ve stolen your intellectual property …and that can get awfully frustrating for someone struggling to make a living online.

Worse yet, some individuals will take it one step further and actually share your ebook with others!  They’ll put them on file-sharing networks so that everyone and their brother can download the ebook.  They’ll post them on forums, blogs, and websites.  They’ll pass them through the email to friends every chance they get.

As if that’s not frustrating enough, then you have to deal with the pirates who not only share your work, they profit from it too.  Go ahead and sell an ebook, and then watch eBay – it won’t be long before someone has stolen it and is selling it on eBay or even on their own website.

Clearing they’ve stolen your intellectual property and infringed on your copyright

– but tracking down these offenders is costly, time-consuming and exhausting. And if you even think of taking them to court, you better have deep pockets to defend your copyright and win your case.

As you might imagine, it’s for these reasons that ebook thieves and pirates engage in these nasty practices – they know there’s very little chance that someone is going to take them to court.  Sure, they may get their webhosting account shut down, but no biggy – they’ll just start up somewhere else.

That’s why selling software can be a whole lot less frustrating a whole lot more lucrative.  You can program your software so that it only works on one computer or one web server.  You can also program the software to stop working when someone asks for a refund.

What does that mean to you?  It means you don’t have to deal with the serial refunders whose intention is to ask for a refund and then keep the product. When you protect your software as described above, it becomes useless to the serial refunder because it no longer works.

No worrying about having to track down people sharing your software if you program it to only work on one computer or server.  No having to defend your copyright in court, track down thieves and pirates, or other similar activities.

That means you can focus on your honest customers and focus on building your business …which means more money in your pocket.