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[Archibald]

also, another benefit of e-commerce services is that you can automatically split the profit between multiple team members: you can set up fastspring, for instance, to give 50% of the money to one person and 50% of it to another person (say, the artist and the programmer), or whatever other percents you like. that makes things a lot simpler than having to figure out the percentages to give to someone if you have lots of tiny amounts of sales to add up and count, and avoids paypal feels for the multiple transfers involved

Does portals (Steam/Desura/Indievania) provide similar service? I mean, it would be pointless if you can split the profits from direct sales but can't do the same from the portal sales. Or maybe you don't use portals for distribution?

- Ability to accept more payment methods than just PayPal (credit cards, Google, Amazon). According to my stats, they make for almost half of the sales.

Interesting... Almost half, that's more than I expected...

- Affiliate networks!

Can you elaborate a bit? I tried to affiliate once and the results were not impressive at all (but it's possible that I used a wrong one).

Take a look at my store. Just a single "Checkout with PayPal" button. No forms unless you switch payment method to credit card. And the store looks and works like a part of my website, which is nice too.

Now, that one indeed looks decent Completely unlike the ones I came across in the past.

[moi]

It shuold be pointed out that out of these e-commerce services, Plimus is not a good option, most people advise again using it nowadays for many reasons.

[TeeGee]

- Ability to accept more payment methods than just PayPal (credit cards, Google, Amazon). According to my stats, they make for almost half of the sales.

Interesting... Almost half, that's more than I expected...

I think it would be even higher if I didn't provide PayPal as the default option.

- Affiliate networks!

Can you elaborate a bit? I tried to affiliate once and the results were not impressive at all (but it's possible that I used a wrong one).

Affiliate network means someone can sell your game from their website for some percent of the profit (and vice versa). Depending on what you do, it may be a very important feature. For example: we're making a visual novel now. It's our first visual novel -- we don't have an established audience of VN fans, and we are not (yet ) a household name in the genre.
However, there are other indies who sit in this niche since forever and have gathered a huge following. With affiliation, they can sell my game to their fans and newsletter subscribers for a small cut (usually around 30%), which may be crucial to our business in the beginning. All it takes is to mark a little "make this game available for affiliation" checkbox.

Some indies also like to use affiliation to sell games similar to theirs, essentially turning their websites into mini-portals.

[moi]

For example: we're making a visual novel now. It's our first visual novel -- we don't have an established audience of VN fans, and we are not (yet ) a household name in the genre.
However, there are other indies who sit in this niche since forever and have gathered a huge following. With affiliation, they can sell my game to their fans and newsletter subscribers for a small cut (usually around 30%), which may be crucial to our business in the beginning. All it takes is to mark a little "make this game available for affiliation" checkbox.

Some indies also like to use affiliation to sell games similar to theirs, essentially turning their websites into mini-portals.

in fact, apart from hiddon objects and visual novels, is there any other genres where affiliate sales are important lol ?

[TeeGee]

I don't think it's important for Hidden Objects. Those are casual portals fare, so direct/affiliate sales don't really matter. It gets more important the more niche the game is. In such cases, being able to cross-sell with someone who does similar stuff can be a good idea.

[Paul Eres]

affiliate sales are important for every genre. many indies make most of their sales through affiliate networks. you could even say affiliation was one of the basis of the indie game shareware revolution in the late 90s / early 00s

here's an example. from what i gather, the owner of the servers tigsource is hosted on, flashbang studios, got their start by making a casual affiliate portal-site

most of the legendary developers from that era used affiliates pretty heavily: amaranthia, positech, hanako games, etc. -- go to their sites, you'll see their games and their affiliate games, often mixed together

i never achieved any *great* success with affiliate networks, but i've had some. i've made a few hundred dollars sending out a single email about a single game once. basically what you do is you find a game that is on an affiliate network that you personally love, and think your audience would love. then you ask them to try it out. if some of them buy the game, you get like 30% of the sales. and this goes in reverse, sometimes people recommend your game to others and you give them 30% of the sales.

[moi]

you just proved my point that there are only two real "niches" where affiliate sales are important: casual/HO (with a lot of BFG affiliate sellers) and VN/jrpg (with papillon and hanako).
I can't think of any other genre where you'll find a lot of affiliate resellers to help you sell your game

[Paul Eres]

it's also important in "adventure" games -- the dave gilbert style point and click graphical adventures

and yeah there are genres where it's more seen and genres where it's less seen, but that has to do with the organization and tight-knit-ness of developers in those niches more than anything

[Archibald]

Can you write something about direct sales (via eCommerce) and portal sales relationship? I mean, if you use portals a lot of these benefits of eCommerces become void (like no database of users who bought it, no emails to them, and generally everything is inconsistent with your eCommerce system, plus ANtY said in Desura topic that they ignore VAT so the whole advantage of them handling the taxes becomes void)...
In short, does eCommerce makes sense only if you don't use portals?

What you thing about that one: http://www.digitaldeliveryapp.com/ (EJunkie alternative, in short you pay flat $9/month and the rest is just PayPal fees, you get a lot of bonuses you described but basicly without costs)?

[TeeGee]

Selling directly is a completely separate part of business from selling through portals. By selling directly, you keep most of the profits, get customers names and emails, generally build a fanbase and passive income. Selling through a portal means forgoing all that, but putting the game in front of many more gamers and earning some good money (not through the likes of Desura though).

Typically you want to do both, maybe keep the game direct-only for some time to maximize profits. You sign a separate agreement with each portal, and yeah, it gets annoying to manage income from all the sources.

[mihai]

I realize this topic is old but still I want to contribute with some information:

If you publish through Indievania, they get to host the files and deliver them, same with updates, and so on, but you are in charge with game's page information, change log, pricing, promotions and so on.

The selling part goes like this: when someone clicks buy, the payment goes through paypal and you get to keep all the money as a developer because they money goes directly from the buyer to your account. The buyer has the option of paying extra money for your game which will be considered a donation and split between you and the Indievania team.

I consider this some kind of hybrid solution between PayPal direct selling and full store distribution (like Desura).