I figured this could be a nice extra channel to sell our existing Android apps.
About a month ago, as a test, we created a special build of our CLZ Movies app and submitted it to the Amazon Appstore for review. Approval took 2 weeks, but it got approved in one go. So we quickly prepared builds of our other 4 apps and submitted them too, hoping to get them all live before the launch of the Kindle Fire on November 15. We just missed that deadline, but still, on November 17 we received the OK on the other 4 as well.

After which I proudly announced to my Facebook fans that our Android apps were now available for the new Kindle Fire. Some customers had been asking about apps for Kindle Fire, so I told our support guys that they could tell them the happy news.
In the meantime, we had already sold some copies of CLZ Movies through the Amazon Appstore, so things were looking good.

But then we started receiving questions from customers, why they could only find CLZ Movies in the Amazon Appstore on their Kindle Fire device. Huh? All five had been approved so where are the other 4? The Appstore Developer Portal shows no difference in status between the apps, they’re all listed as “Live”.
Andrey Butov, a fellow mobile app developer, had similar results: His app, designed for Kindle Fire only, had been approved but was not available on the Fire, apparently because it had not been specifically approved for Kindle Fire yet.

So I submitted a quick question to Amazon Support, from the Devportal:

All my five apps have been approved, but my customers tell me that only 1 of them (CLZ Movies, the first one that was approved) is available in the Kindle Fire Appstore.
I can’t figure out why my other apps don’t show up on Kindle Fire. I heard that there is a separate approval process for the Fire? Is there anyway I can see the status of that?

Their answer:

Thanks for contacting the Amazon Appstore.
I’ve asked our content team to review your app again for Kindle Fire. Please note, however, that we are considering each app on a case-by-case basis for Kindle Fire and not currently offering all apps in the Amazon Appstore on the device. I will follow up with you once I’ve heard from the content team. Thanks for your patience.

What? Does this mean my apps are not guaranteed to be selected for Kindle Fire? What’s that about? My only reason for submitting my apps to the Amazon Android Appstore is to make them available on Kindle Fire (and I suspect that it’s the same for most developers).

And why is this so unclear? Why not just list the Kindle Fire approval status separately in the Developer Portal. I thought the Android Market Developer admin was clunky, but this is even worse. iTunesConnect suddenly doesn’t look that bad…

Nowadays, to view your campaign performance (impression, clicks, conversions) by country, you can just go to the Dimensions tab in your Adwords online interface and select GeoGraphic from the View list on the top left. Make sure to select a date range long enough to have substantial data (say the past 3 months).

What’s up with movie fans in Italy?

I was looking at this report today for my Movie Collector campaign and I found that when sorting the report by Impressions, Italy was the 4th country in the list. This is strange, but doesn’t have to be a problem if the conversion numbers are similar. However, when sorting by Conversions (trial sign ups in my case), I found that Italy was at position 10. The conversion rate on those italian impressions was way lower than average. Looking at actual sales stats, the results were even worse: Italy was nowhere to be found in the top 20 countries.

It turns out that in my case, for this particular campaign, it doesn’t make sense to spend money advertising to Italy. So I removed Italy from the Country list in my Movie Collector campaign settings. Making my Adwords account a tiny bit more profitable again.

BTW: in my previous blog post about this topic I reported having removed Greece from my campaign settings. See the trend here?

Should you remove Italy from your campaigns too?

So do I have something against Italy? No of course not, on the contrary. I love Italy, italian people, italians cars, etc… And I love selling software to Italy and will continue to do so. But my stats just tell me that for my business, for this particular product, it does not make sense to spend my advertising money on Italy.

Am I suggesting you should remove Italy from your campaigns too? No, definitely not. My recommendation is just to take a look at your Adwords account, at the GeoGraphic reports for your campaigns and find out for yourself which countries you should be advertising to and which ones you should remove from your your campaign settings. As always: your mileage may vary.

The other solution

Of course, there’s a different action you could take after finding that ad impressions in a particular country don’t convert well. You could of course tweak your ads, tune your landing page, maybe even improve your product and try to increase your conversion rate there. And you should.
But still, while you’re doing all that, until your conversion rate has improved, I would still recommend lowering your ad spend in that country.

For instance, I am now investigating why Movie Collector doesn’t sell well in Italy. Maybe the Italian translation sucks, maybe I am missing some important Italian payment methods, maybe it’s just that the coverage of italian movies in our online movie database isn’t too great. All things that can be fixed., but that will take time. In the meantime, google.it isn’t getting my money.

10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.

However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution.

The App Store Attitude

Let’s call this behavior the “App Store Attitude“, because it’s most apparent for mobile apps, where users, instead of contacting Support, immediately jump to “warning other users” by posting a review in the App Store or Android Market.
I must say though, that I am finding that this attitude is spreading beyond the App Store and is also starting to happen for desktop tools and for web applications.

The Collectorz.com situation

Before I discuss how we’re trying to fight the App Store Attitude, let me explain the Collectorz.com situation and our mobile apps a bit more.

You see, we’re not selling 99 cents apps, discardable gimmicks or even games. For that category of apps, I can kind of understand the App Store Attitude. If you buy an app like that, and it crashes, has some kind of problem or even just sucks, then yes… I can accept that the user just moves on, finds an alternative or just forgets about it. For 99 cents, it’s not worth doing the conversation with those pesky programmers.

However, at Collectorz.com we are selling seriously expensive software solutions. Our mobile apps cost $9.99 and on top of that, these apps can only be used by people who already own our Windows or Mac software (a $49.95 purchase). So our mobile app users have spent at least 60 bucks with us, but most users own multiple $49.95 products and one of our barcode scanners (ranging from $19.95 to $144.95). They have a serious amount of money invested in our stuff, not something to discard easily.

Which also means that users who buy our mobile apps already know who we are, know how to find our website, and most importantly, they know that we can easily be contacted through our Support Page, in our Forum, on our Facebook page (17,500 fans) or via Twitter (2,500 followers).

So in short: our app buyers have spent serious money with us, they have all reasons to get their problems fixed, and they know how to contact us.
But still, as soon as a problem occurs with their mobile app, most of them immediately resort to the reviews section and just “state” their problem, anonymously.

Fighting the App Store Attitude – first attempt

In the comments on my previous post about this, some commenters (Rico, Jerry) suggested that the App Store and Android Market were to blame for this, because both only provide a standardized way to post reviews and do not offer a similarly standardized way of contacting the developer for support. And I agree, it would be great if it was more easy for users to get in contact with the developers.

But other commenters (Steven, Geoff) suggested that as long as the App Store does not provide an easy way to contact Support, why not build that into your app yourself. Provide a feedback button that makes it dead-easy to contact you and start that conversation.

Great idea, so today we did just that, we added a new Help button in the toolbar of our 5 iPhone apps.
The Help button pops up a little message that says “Looking for help?” with 2 buttons: “Check the FAQ” and “Contact Support”. The FAQ button opens Safari on the correct FAQ page, the Contact button opens the user’s Mail app on a new email, with our support email address and Subject already filled in, ready to fire away.

Let’s see if this helps. I hope the ease of contacting us will prevent most users from posting their problem in the reviews section. Of course, this solution won’t work if the app immediately crashes on start-up (no way to reach the Help button). Oh well…

I will of course report back with our findings.

My company Collectorz.com will sponsor the pre-event meeting on November 18 in BAR92 at the conference hotel. So if you will be attending the ESWC come say hi and have a couple of drinks on me.

BTW: I will also be speaking on the first conference day, at 1:15 PM. My topic:

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you there!

However, here’s what we’re seeing more and more nowadays, especially for our mobile apps, but it’s becoming more common for our desktop apps too:

A user runs into a problem, and instead of asking for help, immediately jumps to complaining about it in a public place like the App Store, the Android Market, Facebook or Twitter. Just stating the problem… no request for help, no conversation and therefore in most cases: no solution.

No conversation, no solution

Of course, getting bad reviews of your software is annoying. But the real issue here is the lack of conversation. Without a conversation:

• There is no way to help the user to actually solve his problem, simply because you can’t contact him.
• There is no way to fix actual bugs in your software, because you can’t learn what the problem is exactly, what might be causing it, how to reproduce it, etc… Making it next to impossible to fix the bug, let alone help the user (and possible other users running into the same bug!).

What’s happening here? And why?

Has the reputation of software companies (or internet companies in general) become so bad that users don’t even bother to ask for help anymore?

Some users at least don’t seem to expect any useful help. Instead:

• They’re just stating the problem or complaining about it.
  No questions, no request for help, or even an expectation of a fix.

• They’re addressing other users, asking “Is anyone else having this problem?”
  What’s that about? How is finding other with the same problem going to help you? Why not report the problem to the company directly so that they can actually do something about it? (this one is especially common on public Forums and Facebook).

• Or this weird one we’re often seeing:
  “Why isn’t it possible to …?” (often followed by something that is possible).
  I don’t get it. How is knowing “why” gonna help you? Don’t you just want us to help you make it possible?

Or has “warning other users about this piece of shit” become more important than actually getting your own problem solved?

Typical “App Store Attitude”. I admire the altruism, but think about it… if you help the software companies actually fix the problem… isn’t that more helpful for other users?

Or is this like, I’ll complain about the problem in public so then “they” will have to listen to me and do something about it.

I can understand and accept this one, but only in cases where it really is a last report to get the company to listen and act. But come on, be fair and at least try the normal support channels first.

Some examples

Here’s some example one-star “reviews” from the Apple App Store and the Android Market. Interestingly, none of these reviews were posted under the user’s real names…

Crashes Constantly
This would be better if it didn’t crash completely after every few comics scanned.

Garbage
This use to work and no it won’t work on my itouch!!!!!!!!!! WTF!!!!!!!! Seriously and their support is non existent!!!!! want my money back for this pos!!!!!

New update crashes at start-up!
App is good, but new version crashes on iPhone 4. No testing prior to posting? WTF.

Doesn’t Work
For me, in my phone, The latest version is broken. It just crashes

Needs fixing
The search feature does not work!

Waste of money
this is no comic app

FYI: each and every one of these “problems” could have been solved with one short email from our support guys. Except that last one maybe, but we’ll never know…

Since then, the marketshare of Android devices sold has become much larger. Here’s a chart from a June 2011 article about the worldwide smartphone marketshare:

See the steady light-blue diamond line (iPhone) and the purple dotted line (Android)? A more recent article at the Android Authority site indicates that the Android Marketshare is now at 42%, vs 27% for iPhone.

It looks like Android is growing fast and has gone way past the iPhone. That is, in terms of devices sold. But how does the increasing Android device marketshare translate to actual sales of Android apps?
Let’s look at the Collectorz.com numbers again.

August 2011 sales of CLZ database viewer apps

These are the total August 2011 sales stats for our CLZ mobile database viewer apps. In August, we did no promotions or new version releases. Just a regular month, so the sales numbers should be a good indication of average Android vs iOS sales.

• CLZ Android apps sold: 407
• CLZ iOS apps sold: 1051 (545 on iPhone, 506 on iPad)

Note that our CLZ viewer apps are not universal binaries. We have separate apps for iPhone and iPad, so there may be a small percentage of users who buy both the iPhone and iPad edition, slightly skewing the results in favor of iOS.

First week sales of CLZ Barry wireless barcode scanner app

CLZ Barry is our new wireless barcode scanner app, released for both iOS (as a universal binary for iPhone/iPad) and Android. It was announced (read: hyped) early, building a 3,000+ member “preview club” before launch. So we were able to sell quite a few apps in the first week.
Here’s the numbers for the 1st week sales:

• Barry for Android: 798
• Barry for iOS: 2267

So, what’s up with Android users?

So what’s up here? With Android device sales now higher than iPhone sales, why are our Android app sales still below 50% of our iOS app sales?
Well, I can only guess, but here’s some possible reasons:

• Maybe the Collectorz.com audience is different from the average smartphone buyer and maybe more likely to buy an Apple device?
• Maybe the fact that iOS apps also run on iPod touch and iPad is skewing the results?
• With many low-end Android devices now available, maybe the average Android user is less of a “smartphone user” compared to the average iPhone user?
• Maybe Android users are more price-sensitive? (Our apps are $10 on both iOS and Android.)

Still hoping that our Android app sales will pick up soon. Not giving up on Android yet.
But please forgive me for passing on Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 apps for now…

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Abstract:

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you in London!

There are all huge projects and we need more help. So we are currently looking for an extra Mac OS X developer.
Are you experienced in Mac OS X programming, OR a smart programmer interested in Mac development? Then read on…

About Collectorz.com

Collectorz.com® is a series of collection database programs for cataloging user’s home collection of music, movies, books, comics and video games. The key feature of the programs is the automatic downloading of media information (data and cover art) from our own online media databases.
Collectorz.com software is available in 3 flavours: Windows, Mac OS X and online/web-based. Next to that, we offer mobile companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Collectorz.com currently has 14 employees and we’re located in Amsterdam (WG Plein 384).

The job

You will join the “all-things-Apple” development team, to work on the Mac OS X editions of the Collectorz.com software. The goal is to finally bring our current Mac editions of Movie, Book and Music Collector to the same level as their Windows counterparts, in terms of features, usability and stability. Next to that, you will work on the new Mac edition of Comic Collector.

You will work together with the other Collectorz.com programmers, to keep the Mac editions in line with the Windows editions, and to connect them with the CLZ iPhone apps, iPad apps, Android apps and the online “Connect” editions.

Requirements

• University level, technical education
• Experience and affinity with Object Oriented programming
• Experience with Mac OS X programming (Objective C, Cocoa, etc…) is a pre, but not a requirement. (Smart OO programmers should be able to learn any programming language or API in no time).
• Affinity with Apple products and operating systems. Apple fan-boys preferred.
• Affinity with music, movies, books, comics and/or video games. Collector-geeks preferred.
• Living in or close to Amsterdam.
• No suits allowed.

Interested?

Send your cover letter and CV to jobz at collectorz dot com.

The purchase includes all rights to the CD Trustee software, the domain base40.com (former home of CD Trustee) and the CD Trustee customer database. With this acquisition, Collectorz.com is strengthening its position in the CD cataloging market.

“It’s great to see that CD Trustee users are so loyal to their trusted CD cataloging tool, and to its author Mike Paulick”, said Alwin Hoogerdijk, founder and owner of Collectorz.com. “We will do everything in our power to help these users convert their CD database, often representing years of work, to our Music Collector program. I am confident that they will feel right at home with their new software and the new mobile and online possibilities that are opened up for them now.”

“Music Collector really is the future. It is a much more powerful program than CD Trustee.”, said Mike Paulick, author of CD Trustee. “I feel good recommending such a well-supported product, and providing my customers a way to preserve their music data.”

About Collectorz.com

Collectorz.com is a software company based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and founded in 2000. It specializes in collection database software, tools used by home-users to catalog their personal collection of CDs, DVDs, books, comic books and video games. The first release of Music Collector, the CD database program, was in 1996, at the time called “Keep it Compact” and programmed in his spare time by Collectorz.com founder Alwin Hoogerdijk.
Currently, Collectorz.com sells 30 products, on 5 platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad and Android. On top of that, the company provides online subscription based editions under the Collectorz.com Connect brand.

About CD Trustee

The first version of CD Trustee was first released in 2001, by Mike Paulick of Sane Soft, LLC, based in Denver, Colorado, USA. Even though there has not been an update to the software since 2005, Mike has been fully supporting CD Trustee up till now. The program still has thousands of active users, most of them having spent a lot of time with the program, cataloging their multi-thousand CD collections.
Mike Paulick is retiring from the software business to be able to spend more time pursuing his many outdoor sports, including downhill skiing, whitewater kayaking, on and off-road motorcycling, camping, hunting and fishing.

Data transfer and Music Collector half price offer

Collectorz.com programmers have been working together with Mike Paulick, programmer of CD Trustee, to create an easy way for CD Trustee users to transfer their CD database to Music Collector, including all CD cover images. The data transfer is done by exporting to a “Music Collector CSV” file from a special final CD Trustee build, then importing into the latest version of Music Collector.
To facilitate the move to Music Collector, Collectorz.com has extended a special offer *only* for CD Trustee users: everyone who owns a CD Trustee license will be able to buy the Pro edition of Music Collector half price (for $24.95 instead of $49.95).