Background
A while ago, I read a message on one of the ASP (Association
of Shareware Professionals) private newsgroups announcing a new "Special
of the Day" type website. It was to be called Bits du Jour -
BDJ for short.
BDJ would work along similar lines to Woot!, but would only feature
software products. I thought “Wow,
great idea... that's a fantastic way to promote a software product.”
Of course, the software vendor has to discount the product
and provide a cut for BDJ, so the total revenue for each license would be much
smaller than usual, but there is potential to reach a new crowd of people. It
provides a way to promote the product at a lower price point, as a loss leader.
The Wait
I contacted Ellen Craw from BDJ and we exchanged a few
emails. That was back in March 2006,
and Automise 1.0 was still a month away from release. When you release a brand
new product, how do you get the word out?
Bits du Jour sounded like a great way to make a splash and build up a
user base.
Automise retails for $195 US, and Ellen suggested that
products priced over $20 don't sell so well on BDJ. It's all about impulse buys, and it sounds like twenty bucks is
about the threshold. At the time we thought that $20 was just too cheap for a
$200 product… no sale!
Time passed.
Automise generated some sales and some interest, including some positive
reviews, but we still didn’t have the widespread market penetration that we
wanted.
So, in early November 2006, I thought we'd approach BDJ
again. 90% discount off any product is
sure to generate a lot of new sales. We
also figured that BDJ should have gained in popularity since it's launch
earlier in the year, and there should be a reasonable number of people now
subscribed to it's RSS feeds and emails.
[As a side note, I bought Bar Genie through BDJ a few months
back... it was a good deal and a nice reference for mixing cocktails!]
Preparation
We set a date - Wednesday 29th November 2006. Nothing special about it, but we chose a day
in the middle of the week so that it wouldn’t overlap with a weekend or public
holiday in any timezone.
Recently, Paul has done a considerable amount of work on our
website store. This made it easy for us to set up a new coupon code that would
last 24 hours. A few simple tests and
we were ready.
Ellen drafted the BDJ article on Automise, and she also ran
through the whole process to verify that everything held together.
D-Day
The special went live at midnight in the US (Central
Standard Time). It was 5 in the
afternoon here. I checked the BDJ site
and Automise was on the home page. 90%
discount was highlighted with red stars on either side - there's no question
that this was a big discount. :)
I sent out some emails to some of our existing customers,
users that we maintain a good relationship with. The email notified them of the special on BDJ for Automise, and
encouraged them to spread the news. :)
The first sale came through 17 minutes after the special
went live. Bloody Great! :)
The next sale came in at 22 minutes past, then another at
31, and another at 38. “Wow... this is
awesome.” In the first hour we made
seven sales. Seven new customers.
Excellent!
Then it went a bit quiet.
Over the next six or seven hours there were between about two and six
sales an hour. Still great though, and
by this time it was late evening in Australia.
Now, I want to give you some background on our order
process. To place an order for Automise
or FinalBuilder, you need to be a registered user on our website. New registrations need to have their email
addresses confirmed (via a link in an email.)
After you’re registered, you can add items to your shopping cart and go
through the checkout process. During
checkout, there is a coupon field. This is where the BitsDuJour coupon needed
to be added in order to grant the 90% discount.
After checkout, our store redirects to the WorldPay payment
gateway. WorldPay handles all of the credit card processing. We receive a Web Services callback with the
status of the order, and send an automated email to the customer. The order then goes into a “pending” state
so that we can review the order (eg. to check for fraud) and then we click a
button to process it. FinalBuilder and
Automise aren't high turnover products, so this process works great and we
catch 99.9% of fraud before the license key is sent out.
Anyhow...I woke up the next morning and checked the pending
orders. “Wow...” over 80 orders had come
in during the night! Now someone had to
process them. And guess what, that
someone was me… It was a case of mixed
emotions: heaps of sales, but a boring job manually checking and processing
each one!
Sales continued to come in for the rest of the day. All up,
the final count was 226 sales. We were
all stoked, and a bit tired too. The
sale had generated quite a bit of extra support work, and also there were also
some bugs that showed up in the order process.
I emailed Ellen to let her know how we went, and got the
following reply:
"That's GREAT - you just broke all my records. Thank
YOU!"
Also, traffic on the BDJ site was about 40% higher than
usual. We tried to promote the special
as much as we could. Some fairly high
profile bloggers mentioned the deal, eg. Roy Osherove (ISerializable) and Troy
Magennis (LINQed IN). I'm sure a lot of
traffic came to the site because of this.
Here's a graph of our sales volume over the 24 hour period:
And here's our daily website traffic. Because of our timezone the traffic is
spread over both the Wednesday and Thursday.
There's a pretty obvious spike!
So, there you have it.
Overall it's been a great opportunity to feature Automise on Bits du
Jour. If you're thinking about
featuring your product on BDJ, and the software has a fairly general audience,
then I reckon you should go for it!
Thanks heaps to Ellen and Bits du Jour, the people who helped us promote
the special, and especially to all our new customers. :)
Problems
Over the course of the sale, we experience a few minor
problems that we hadn’t noticed before.
1. One of the main problems was that the store would allow
you to enter the coupon code (and validate it) with an extra space character
"BitsDuJour ". But then when
the Process Order button was pressed, the coupon would be rejected. Many people
reported that they couldn't get the coupon code to work, and it wasn't until
about 18 hours into the special that we figured out why and fixed the bug. We lost sales because of this - people emailed
us and told us so.
2. Another weird problem was that some people (normally from
Germany) had problems with the store redirected to WorldPay. This was caused by the regional settings
using a comma in the total amount instead of a decimal point. We fixed the bug but also had to process
some of these orders manually before we had figured out the reason why.
3. We accidentally had heaps of references to FinalBuilder
in the automated emails sent out for the store. This was more of an
embarrassment than a problem, and we fixed it during the day as well.
What we've learnt
1. Bits du Jour was great idea. The customer base for Automise has grown, and there are a lot of
happy people. The price was low enough
to create impulse purchases, and will hopefully act as a loss leader to make
Automise better known.
2. There were some bugs in the store that we should have
known about. More testing required!
3. The order process is too difficult. A lot of people got a bit peeved at the
entire process, and I'm sure some people gave up. There was a short thread on the Joel on Software forums with some
criticism of the process:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.421152.9
4. Promotion is very important. See below for mentions of the Automise special which appeared on
various blogs. I posted the deal on a
couple of mailing lists as well. This
made a huge difference.
Links from the Blogosphere, and other coverage of the BDJ
Automise special
http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/11/components.html
"Coincidentally, his post today is
offering Automise for $19 (down from $199) for 24 hours in Bits du Jour, a site, much like Woot, offering new discounted software
daily."
http://aspiring-technology.com/blogs/troym/archive/2006/11/29/63.aspx
"Todays deal caught my eye - its 90% off. Automise - a
general purpose automation tool (think GUI based scripting and debugging)."
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/11/28/cool-promotion-automise-for-20-for-24h-window.aspx
"A little bird tells me that in a few hours you'll be
able to get Automise
(that's the system admin's version of FinalBuilder - my favorite build
automation tool) over here for a 90%
discount - less than $20 instead of $195 for a 24 hour window."
http://mortonfox.livejournal.com/465710.html
"Got a copy of Automise at a 90%
discount, thanks to Bits du Jour. When
I have more time, I'll dig deeper into the software to see if it's really that
much better than AutoHotkey. I have
Bits du Jour in my del.icio.us bookmarks,
but I'd forgotten all about it until IanH. mentioned
the deal on the Joel on Software discussion forum."
http://midspot.wordpress.com/2006/11/29/automise-at-a-great-deal/
"Automise does it for you. I downloaded the trial last night and it is pretty slick and
powerful. Try it for free, and today only you can get a huge discount on the product."
Some other user comments
"Holy discount, Batman! I almost feel duty bound to buy this 'cos of
the 90% off! Nice job BDJ and
Automise!"
"Thank you very much for this generous rebate!"
"Very cool tool!
I have tested many automation tools and Automise is one of the best.
When I saw this promotion this morning I just bought it - thank you!"
"I've heard good things about it, and at 90% off, you can't really go
wrong, can you?"