Here’s an update on our experience selling iPhone apps.

Sales

I was expecting to sell just enough of them to my existing customers, so that we could cover the costs of development. Then after that maybe get some positive effects from the cool looking screenshots on our website, convert a couple more visitors into buying our stuff.

But overall, sales are higher than I expected, much higher in fact. Here’s a weekly sales graph:

I’ll keep the absolute sales number to myself
But for each of the apps you can see a high sales peak when we announced it to existing customers of the respective Windows software. For the movie, book and music apps, there was a second, smaller bump later, when we updated our Mac software with the necessary iPhone export features. And for each of the apps, those first peaks more than covered the development costs. Which was a nice surprise of course.

But what I am even happier with, is the fact that sales are still strong. After the launch peaks, sales have dropped to a nice steady level. The iPhone apps are now generating a considerable amount of extra monthly profits. Enough in fact to make it worthwhile to invest more development time.

It’s hard to tell whether the availability of iPhone companion apps is actually convincing more new visitors into choosing our software over that of our competitors (hi Max!). Partly because of the inability to track iPhone sales. More about that in the next paragraph.
But my idea is that it gives our website an more “up to date” feel. Even if you don’t own an iPhone, you may be impressed by the fact that our company can do this kind of stuff

Tracking

As you know, I love tracking everything. And in this regard, selling iPhone apps is a nightmare.
Apple gives me nothing to work with, I don’t even get instant sales notifications. I have to login to the horrible iTunes Connect system to download my sales stats manually. Initially I did this every day, downloading the CSV reports, importing them in Google Docs, summing the counts to get a nice graph per app. But this was so much hassle that I am now doing that per week only.

But what’s even worse: Apple doesn’t give me any customer information. Just overall sales numbers per day/week/month and per region. So I have no idea who purchased my apps. And I have no way to link iPhone sales to existing customer data.

This means I can’t follow up by email with tips or news about updates. And it makes it impossible to send targeted, segmented email campaigns. E.g. for a new campaign to sell the Clz Movies app, I am forced to just email all Movie Collector users again. I have no way to exclude the ones that already purchased my iPhone app. That just sucks.

Marketing

Two of my favorite ways to sell stuff are Google Adwords, Discount Coupons and Upselling during checkout. But for selling iPhone apps, I’m out of luck on all three.

Adwords lets me bid on terms containing the word “iphone”, like “iphone dvd organizer”, but I cannot use the word iPhone in my ad because of trademark violations. This makes it hard to write high CTR ad copy.
(I read somewhere that if you contact Apple they may give you permission to use their trademarked words. I haven’t looked into this yet.)

Apple’s App Store does not have a discount coupon system. Which is a shame, cause I would love to do temporary promotions for my iPhone apps to specific segments of my customer base. Of course I can temporarily lower the price of my apps, but then everybody gets the lower price. Could be a fun experiment too, but I’d prefer to use coupons. Just gives me more control.

iPhone apps can only be purchased through the App Store on the iPhone or iPod touch itself or through iTunes. It is not possible to sell them yourself, in your own online shop. IMO this is one of the reasons of the success of iPhone apps: having a simple one-stop-shop for all iPhone software, just enter your iTunes password to buy stuff.

However, it also means that I cannot bundle the iPhone apps with my regular software. I mean, how cool would it be to if I could just offer a “Movie Collector plus Clz Movies” bundle offer in my own shop? Or what about having the Clz Movies app as an upsell on my Upsell page. A $10 iPhone companion app would be the perfect upsell…
I am doing the best I can to make all my customers and new visitors aware of the mobile apps, but if they want them, they need to make a separate purchase in the App Store.
Why not allow me to sell some kind of vouchers that my customers can then use to download the iPhone apps? How hard can it be?

Customer Feedback

In general, our users love the iPhone apps. We already have many favorable reviews in the App Store. And we received some great suggestions and feature requests. We are implementing most of those in the upcoming 1.1 updates.
Not all though… some users would like to see the iPhone apps grow into full iPhone editions of our Windows/Mac software, including editing features. But that’s not where I want to take these apps, at least not at the moment. They have been designed as mobile viewer apps, as companion apps for the Windows editions. Adding editing capabilities would complicate everything (both code and UI) and I don’t expect any extra sales from it.

We did get some complaints about the $9.99 price tag. A lot of iPhone apps are cheap, ranging from $4.99 for popular games like Peggle, to $0.99 for small gadgets, to free gimmicky apps.
However, judging from the sales, $9.99 seems to be a good price. Maybe we would sell a couple more if the price was, say, $4.99. But I am sure that we would be making a lot less money

Finally, an interesting effect I am seeing is that users of other mobile devices (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, etc…) are quite upset with us doing iPhone apps only. Some of them really feel discriminated and accuse of of being Apple zealots. We have seen weird discussions on our forum, with Blackberry users bashing the iPhone’s features, bringing up sales numbers of mobile devices, ultimately demanding that we create Blackberry apps too, because there’s more Blackberry devices around than iPhones…
I tried explaining that the App Store has sold more software than all other mobile devices together and therefore it makes more sense to create iPhone apps. But of course, that didn’t help much

What’s next?

So will we ever create similar apps for Blackberry or Android? Windows Mobile maybe? Mmm, don’t think so. I don’t think the extra development costs will ever be earned back. And what’s more important, we do already offer an alternative solution for other mobile device with our Movie Collector Connect web application. Connect editions for books, music, games and comics are in the works.

I’d rather invest more time in improving the iPhone apps, try to sell some more of those. Which is what we are doing now. We are working on 1.1 updates for all five apps, improving the user interface and performance, adding some more fields and a couple of missing features.

The approval took 11 days, not bad.
We submitted it on April 29, got the first feedback on May 3 (a request for a copy of Movie Collector) and it got approved yesterday, on May 10.
Strangely enough, both responses were on a Sunday

Maybe if we provide a test copy of our Windows apps immediately when submitting, we can get our other apps approved within a week.

Now let’s see if we can sell some of these apps. Will let you know how it works out.

It’s a companion app for our Movie Collector software, not a stand-alone product. Users can catalog their DVD collection using Movie Collector, then export their collection to the iPhone viewer app, so they can always have their collection with them (e.g. at the DVD store, at friends, etc..).

Why iPhone apps?

You may be wondering why Collectorz.com is moving into this market. Do I really expect to generate serious profits by selling iPhone apps?

No, I don’t. I think it is quite hard to make money selling iPhone apps.

Of course we all know the success stories of developers making millions with a small app selling for $0.99. But in my opinion the growing number of apps in the AppStore makes it harder and harder to reach serious sales volumes. Your chances of getting any visibility in the AppStore are just too low, even for a brilliant mass-market application. And for niche apps like ours it’s next to impossible.

And the trend for iPhone apps to be priced between $0.99 and $4.99 doesn’t exactly make it easier to make some profits. And of course Apple wants 30% too.

So why are we developing iPhone apps anyway?

• iPhone apps are a perfect fit for our cataloging software. One of the reasons people catalog their collections is to prevent duplicate purchases. Users print lists to take with them to the store, or export their list to CSV files on their phones or PDAs. A collection viewer app on the iPhone makes this easier (and cooler looking).
• Our iPhone apps are add-ons for our existing Windows and Mac apps, so we can sell them to existing customers and promote them to new customers on our website. No exposure in the AppStore needed.
• Because it’s a niche application, we can go for a price that is a little higher than that of the average iPhone app. We have set the price at $9.99.
• We will be creating five Collectorz.com iPhone apps, for which we can share most of the code. This helps to keep development costs relatively low.
• Offering iPhone apps will be good USP for the Collectorz.com software, something our competitors do not have. In other words, they may help sell more of our of Windows and Mac software.

Clz Movies blurb and screenshots

Did you ever come home with a new DVD, only to find out that you already owned it? Annoying isn’t it? And costly too.

And did a friend ever ask if you have this or that movie…
… and you couldn’t remember?

Movie Collector and this companion iPhone app Clz Movies can help you avoid embarrassing situations like this, in 3 easy steps:

1. First catalog your DVD collection with the Movie Collector software (available for Windows and Mac OS X).

2. Then export your collection list to the Clz Movies software on your iPhone or iPod Touch, including movie information, edition details and the DVD cover images.

3. Now just always take your iPhone or iPod Touch with you to the store, so that you can check which DVDs you already own and which ones are on your wishlist.

- Avoid Duplicate DVD Purchases
- Manage your DVD Wish List
- Show off your DVD collection
- Have cool movie facts at your fingertips

Let’s hope Apple approves it soon. I can’t wait to see what happens when it’s finally available in the AppStore.