I have a problem which I am sure some of you would be interested to discuss here. Here goes:
I and a couple of friends have been working on a small Windows Application which may be exactly what a niche market wants. We are in the final stages of releasing 1.0
We have been thinking of distribution arrangements and we have come up with two essential requirements:
a) We are not keen on buying a payment gateway. We were looking for a suitable website where we can present our product information and which can take care of sales and distribution – including payment arrangements and pay us our share later. Something like the Apple App store for Windows Applications.
b) We do not want to deliver a copy of our functional binaries to this distribution site. Instead, we want to host the binaries on our site only and serve them to customers who have been authenticated by the distribution site. (We are a little paranoid about hosting the binaries on a 3rd party site – this unfortunately is an immutable criterion.)
Does anybody know of a distribution site which would pass a) as well as b) ?
RegNow a.k.a. Digital River meets both of your criteria. However, they somewhat over-hype themselves, so you will probably not make life-changing amounts of money from their network of cookie-cutter shareware sites.
By the way, nobody is going to sell your software for you, especially if it’s for a narrow niche market, so you’re better off using something like PayPal which takes only a small percentage of the overall sale price. RegNow takes a much higher percentage, supposedly in return for their marketing services, but most of your sales will probably come from your own marketing efforts anyway.