What is the best way to approach a shop about selling my software?

[Phrogramer]

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?

[~Paul~]

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.

[Killer_Typo]

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?

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.

[Fungus1487]

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.

[f1 fan]

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?

[jbennet]

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

[f1 fan]

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)

[jbennet]

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

[Fungus1487]

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 ?]

[jbennet]

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

[Fungus1487]

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

that still doesnt stop 99% of people using it. as they realise they can get away with it. until a surefire way of allowing people to try a product for a period of time becomes available it will always be the same. and then people will still crack this software if it is useful. endless circle

[Killer_Typo]

have you thought of contacting webroot or other online licenses companies to see if they would be interested in selling your product.

if it sells good enough it could easily make it into stores in more locations than you could wing on your own and they would handle all of the legal overhead as they are the distributer.

[hbk619]

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

I was told it WAS free. Then a little message popped up "winzip isn't free software", that disappeared by clicking the close button...

[jwenting]

Assuming you have fully tested it

Never assume that, it's hubris ;)

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

I have, but I paid for it ;)
Not only is it immoral and illegal not to, but I couldn't be bothered trying to crack it myself and at the time I didn't have a modem to scour BBSs for cracks (if I could even find underground BBSs).

I was told it WAS free.

In that case the person telling you that was wrong.

[hbk619]

oh, well you don't have to crack it, just DL from download.com .....

[jbennet]

yeah it just nags you after the 30 days

i try to encourage people who do this to move to 7-zip (freeware forever). 7z also supports more formats

[hamada_1990]

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

I was told it WAS free. Then a little message popped up "winzip isn't free software", that disappeared by clicking the close button...

i do and still am hahaha

oh, well you don't have to crack it, just DL from download.com .....

really?

yeah it just nags you after the 30 days

i try to encourage people who do this to move to 7-zip (freeware forever). 7z also supports more formats

really??does it support .rar?

[jbennet]

i use 7.zip to do zip, cab,, tar, bzip, tar.gz so i reacon it would do rar, yeah.

[Rashakil Fol]

You can find out what it supports by reading 7zip's website.