Marketing - Friday, February 22, 2008 7:14 - 2 Comments

Sites of the Day might make your day.

Over the last few years the microISV industry has started seeing a new way to sell their software - deal of the day sites. These sites work basically the same: entice impulse shoppers with a hefty discount on one or two products a day.

But do these sites work? Are customers okay with one day sales? And should you as a microISV associate with a software discounter?

Judging by the first-hand reports posted by microISV founders at the Business of Software forum, the answers are yes, yes and yes:

“In the end I ended up with 40 sales, which included Text2Go, voice modules and CDs. I probably gained about 30 new customers. I was very, very happy with this.” - Mark Gladding.

“I’m so happy! We sold an obscene number of copies of StyleSpread on Bits Du Jour Today!” - Paul Young

I’m going to find out myself in a few days just how effective a discount of the day site can be for microISV: my new ebook, MicroISVs Sites that Sell, will be one of the two products featured at Bits du Jour Feb. 25.

In the rest of this post, I want to cover how Bits du Jour and three other discount of the day sites work:

Bits du Jour:

Bits du Jour (BDJ) generally focuses on Windows software and is best known within the microISV community. Let’s say your software normally sells for $30 USD. If accepted, BDJ will sell it on your special day steeply discounted (30% at least, 40% or more recommended). Let’s say you sell it discount for the BDJ price $15 USD - BDJ gets 30% of the sale or $5 and you get $10. Bits du Jour does not sell your software - you do, or your current ecommerce provider(s) do.

But there’s more to BDJ than one site and one day sale: BDJ partners with over 60 sites (although some are quite small) that get the word out: Iconico.com, Tech-Pro.net, FindFiles.com, UpdatePatrol.com, SoftwareADay.com, CamDevelopment.com, CamUnZip.com, Winability.com and Uconomix.com to name a few.

For that matter, you can add a BDJ store to your web site or blog and earn half (15%) of what BDJ makes on each sale, each day. This strikes me as being an interesting way of monitizing your blog if you are so inclined, and definitely interesting if you run a site not connected to your microISV business.

I’ve been dealing with BDJ’s owner, Nico Westerdale, and I’m impressed with how competently and fairly Nico does business. BDJ gets approximately 3,000 visitors a day according to Nico and sends out an email daily to about 65,000.
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