Question for Boonex about Market listings

Developers can voice their opinion on this too.

The question is this: Is it feasible to automatically create a support thread for market listings, when a product is posted, and then automatically subscribe the seller to the support thread?

A few of the better developers, that care about their customers, and care about supporting their products, create support threads already.  On an increasing basis however, it seems as though many mod purveyors can't be bothered to do this.  It is my opinion, that if you are going to have the privilege of selling to the captive audience on this site, the least you could do, is offer a certain degree of support on this site.  The only reason for a developer to NOT create a support thread, is that they don't want support issues, or technical issues to be made public.... perhaps a fear of negative comments in those areas.  With all that said, kudos to all the developers that create support threads and openly discuss issues concerning your products.  It is the way true professionals do it.

I'm not suggesting that a support thread be automatically created for every single product.  Perhaps, only products over a certain price would be subject to this.  It shouldn't be hard to, create a forum thread, subscribe the mod author, and place a support thread link button in the listing.

Another thing  I would like to see in every single market listing, is the date the developer was last online here at unity.  It's an indication of how available the dev is for Q&A..

I think this is a reasonable idea.  If anyone likes the idea, speak up.  If you hate the idea, and despise me for proposing it, just go hack my site or something.

We like the idea :)

In addition, can the developer also have sales statistics for FREE products that the developer has posted in the market. This would really help the developer know how many real users are using that mod and then provide more updates based on that...

Agreed, more information is better.  Automatically updating the support thread with product update notifications would be a nice feature.  Some of the devs don't even bother to put an update notification in the market listing itself.  I have several mods installed, that I have no way of knowing whether or not I have the latest version.... other than downloading the product again and checking it.

True..

Another big issue we faced with the updates was there was no-way to provide a fee-based update structure to an existing product. For e.g. we wanted  to do this:

v1.0 - $40 for new customers [First release of our product]

v2.0 - $10 for existing customers, $40 for new customers. [Major update to our release]

So we started looking at our options -

1. One option was to control it using licensing but that would require a lot of overhead for customers and for us...

2. Second option was to create a new thread but then we were losing all the old reviews from v1.0 and so eventually we decided to just give v2.0 for FREE to existing customers. But now we are stuck again with v3.0 ...

I wasn't going to complain about free updates for all eternity, but the concept is a bit unusual in the software world.

These are great ideas. I provide support forums for most of my products. And actually prefer they be used rather than personal messages so the questions and answers will benefit others.

But i also believe there must be other features as well.

After yesterdays chargeback of a purchase of one of my mods with no attempt whatsoever to contact me. Just purchase, most likely download, then chargeback. I call this fraud. And something has to be in place to help the sellers with this. Because Paypal does not care.

1) Downloads must be tracked with IP address logged.

2) Buyers must be allowed to contact the seller regardless of unity membership level.

3) Sellers should be able to place a temporary block on any downloads of existing purchase without actually removing it. Just in case it is a temporary issue cause by paypal screwing with the buyers account. Which i guess has happened.

4) Sellers must be able to block buyers from any further purchases.

5) Sellers must be able to flag buyers as possible fraudsters to warn other sellers. Perhaps by delaying the download until seller decides to take the risk and allow it.

If this continues i will be forced to put some kind of encrypted licencing system in all my mods that will allow me to invalidate any purchased license preventing the mod from working if a buyer issues a charge back. I should not have to be forced into doing these kinds of things.

I also agree there should be an update system as mods4dolphin suggested. I am also faced with how to deal with my next update for my facebook connect. With the number of new features and total rewrite of the upcoming version 4 i will want to increase the price but feel that those that have previously purchased it should have to pay an upgrade price. The difference between the cost of the old version vers the new version.

All good suggestions. BoonEx needs to seriously overhaul the market.

Yes it's a good idea! I'm tired of creating topic in hand

This is another thing I would like to see in the market:

Right now there's no way to put my mod on-hold. Let's say there are some bugs in  mod and the developer wants to take it offline to get them fixed, but there's no option whatsoever. The only option is "Stop Selling" and when you  click it, the whole post gets deleted. I never used that option again, can somebody please confirm if this happened to them as well.

I think it would make more sense to add an access level permissions to market posts as well e.g. public, private etc for better control and visibility.

And the other thing is if by mistake I click that "Stop Selling" it just deletes the post without even prompting. What if I have 100 reviews on my market thread? Delete should always be a 2-step process and not a 1-step process. I say this because it's easier to click the wrong items on smaller screens like ihpone, blackberry etc.....

I have used the stop selling link many times. It has never deleted my posts. Your suppose to be able to resume selling later.

I have not had that problem with it.

But i have also not used it recently, so perhaps it's a more recent problem.