Online payment fraud is rampant. Whether it is because it’s easier to steal anonymously, or because tracking down someone over the net and prosecuting them is difficult if not impossible, online fraud hits everyone who takes payments online.

The situation is even more problematic for digital products, in which case credit-card companies or Paypal refuse to provide any kind of seller protection. The reasoning behind it is that digital product fraud does not result in actual material loss, and it’s hard to prove delivery – both are false, but the situation stands as it is anyway.

As a marketplace for digital products, Binpress has been hit by its share of online fraud. We used to accept both Paypal and credit-card payments (through stripe), and both have been abused in various ways.

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Ruben Gamez, a web developer and founder of Bidsketch – a project proposal service, has written a very interesting post about the iterations he went through with Bidsketch pricing, what worked and what didn’t.

The pricing plan he talks about is very similar to the licensing system we use in Binpress, and it’s easy to see how much of his advice can be applied to Binpress components – especially on pricing and naming licenses for different audiences.

A must read for Binpress publishers – I suggest you hop over to his blog and read his post titled “What I Learned From Increasing My Prices“.

Keeping with the theme of our service, we came up with a way to reward our community for spreading the word about Binpress. We call this approach “open-source marketing”

Sharing Options on Binpress

We’ve set up a system that tracks links you share while you are logged-in, and gives you points based on the engagement of the visitors you bring in. The goal of this ranking system is to promote relevant traffic and avoid spamming, while rewarding the biggest contributors – the top 3 contributors each month will receive prizes totaling over $15k in value.

To get the lowdown on how to participate and some sharing tips, check out our community leaderboard. Some members already have a head start for actively sharing before we started running this event, but a couple new faces have already sneaked in to the top 7. You can always check your personal score by visiting the leaderboard section in your account.

Side note – if we see any exceptionally creative or effective marketing tactics being used, we will be offering a marketing position on our team. If you ever wanted to be in charge of marketing in a small up-and-coming Internet startup – this might be a good chance to prove you have it takes. Check the leaderboard page more details.

I’ve previously written extensively about taking an analytical approach to the pricing of software products. In this article,  I want to cover specifically the type of products we list on Binpress – libraries, SDKs and other source-code components for various development needs.

Knowing Your Audience

There are many types of software products – games, productivity software, security products and so forth. Libraries, SDKs and other source-code products are generally categorized as developer tools.

Each category of software products appeals to a different audience and serves different needs. Developer tools are aimed, naturally, at developers (or software companies) and are more often than not a type of productivity software -  they help developers achieve more in less time.

Lets examine some common characteristics of software developers:
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We’ve done a major push of new features to the service today, so if you noticed the site being offline just a while ago, now you know the reason why. Lets recap what has changed and added:

Component page overhaul

We’ve reworked the component page look-and-feel to match the new theme we’ve had in the homepage for a while now. In addition to visual changes, we’ve added several new features:

• Visitors can now create feature requests and engage in discussion about it with the developer and other visitors. We’ve noticed similar discussion going on in the comments and wanted to provide a better platform to do so.
• Issues can now be accessed directly from the component profile, in order to be access in context and to encourage using tickets instead of comments to report problems.
• User reviews have been expanded to show more information, including a breakdown of review scores.
• Publishers can now migrate comments to either issues or feature requests – use this option to clean up your comments.

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Note: this post is mainly targeted towards our Binpress publishers, but is relevant for anyone who publishes their own software product (or service).

The success of our components varies widely, from high-volume selling / downloaded components to relative unknowns. The amount of sales / downloads a component generates is a factor of both the traffic it gets and how well that traffic is being converted to a purchase / download.

We’ve previously covered several ways in which you can get your component noticed and generate additional traffic to it (and we’ll be revisiting it soon), and this time I’d like to attack the other part of the equation – converting your component traffic into goal completions (either a purchase or a download).

So what can you do to improve your components performance?
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