Selling web components and web site scripts
Since 2004 I am selling web components and web scripts online. In this article I will cover some of my experience during these years.
Back in 2004 I started with Adobe Flash (or Macromedia Flash) components (flash menus, flash buttons, photo galleries, templates, etc), these sold well because it helped people develop better looking (and functional) sites much faster and with less coding, and also because Flash player was installed on most web browsing capable devices.
Later, flash became less popular, mostly because Apple devices don't support flash player; so because not all web site visitors have flash player installed, web developers focused more on dynamic html, html5, JavaScript, designing more... compatible web sites.
While flash components are not that popular anymore, other scripts like PHP scripts still sell well; people buy rating system scripts, poll systems, photo galleries, forum scripts, auction scripts, and many more.
If you are familiar with php coding and you can code any of these kind of scripts, you could register a domain name, upload demos of your scripts, then register with PayPal (to process incoming payments) and you are good to go.
While selling flash components, there were individual products that were sold in hundreds of copies, of over 20 000 $ so you can generate a nice income if you know what kind of product to sell, how to present it to clients and also how to promote it.
You should look for products/scripts/functionality that exist on most websites, like a contact form or a photo gallery is more likely to exist on most websites than an auction script for example. So this kind of scripts have much better chances to sell.
Scripts that are less personalized (but easy customizable) sell better, use simple colors, styles and other things that client can edit himself, because not everyone might have same tastes that you do when it comes to colors, shapes, etc.
Scripts should be easy to use and should be deployed in client website without too many problems, remember that people that buy web components most probably do not have the skills to code these themselves, so the products should be as easy to use/install as possible.
After you are done coding and publishing the products on your site, you should also submit your scripts to be posted in scripts directories like HotScripts, Adobe Exchange, etc.
Since more and more people starting selling web components, some certain type of sites shown up, the kind of sites where people can not only list their web components but they can also sell them directly on these websites, this allows you to start selling even without having your own website, just code your scripts, post them on these websites and they will do the selling, promoting, etc. This allows the web developers to focus more on the actual work for developing new components.
These sites that are ready to sell your components, take a commission; believe it or not, some sites take even 70% of each sale and only 30% goes to the actual author of the script, but not all are the same, these commissions range from 30% to 70% depending on the web site.
If you are interested in selling web site components, visit our web site mmfiles.com.