Say I have some software and I have it all finished and everything, how do I go about getting it into shops? How do I go in a and talk to them? I don't mean shops like PC World (yet anyway) I mean my local PC shop. How do I get bar codes sorted? How do they work? What do I say to the people in the shop, do I let them look at the product? Do I give them x number as a free trial? How many should I produce at a time? Help?

Well you will need to do a lot of testing before releasing it. There would be other issues involved like system requirements, and deployment issues. As for bar codes that is entirely the stores problem. You would just need to provide the software.

mistake number one. assuming it is finished.

i can guarentee that for every 100 users 99 of them are going to find a way to break it that you didnt think possible.

you just need to provide the product.

and your best bet of selling it, walk in cold sale or build a relationship with the owner.

depends if its an exhisting product (ie similiar are on the market) or not

if there are then try to build up a client base. offer trials of your software to businesses and companies and get FEEDBACK.

if there are no exhisting products (are you sure) well. get some interviews with large software wholesalers, they do this type of thing all the time and you may just sway them to purchase the rights if its good enough. (then this goes back to testing) 90% of a software project nowadays should be testing and its continous. so long as humans exhist there will always be errors. good luck.

Assuming you have fully tested it (and that means using qualified testers (more than 1) and automated tools) then you could use some online places firstly such as CNET downloads, windows marketplace, component source, digital river etc. to sell it for you.

What about licensing? How will you stop people making copies?

Best way is to use an existing licence so that you know that you wont fall into any legal pitfalls.

Test, test then test again.

Best thing to do is setup a site and a credit card payment service.

Do not offer free trials, they will be abused

I++

We use existing license software. Everything has to have a license. There are no automatic free trials. Free trials give people ways to abuse it, hack it or your competitors a chance to see what you have for free.

If someone wants a free trial of our software I will generate a one time one use license key for them to use - that gives me full control and cannot be abused (well everything can be abused or hacked at some point in time but this gives us much tighter control)

i hate free trials - i mean, how many of us have used winzip/winrar past the 30 days eh?

thats what makes them great ? [no fee ?]

its against the licence to use them after the 30 day trial period