Software Channels

Today Google disabled our Checkout account and with that the ability to process payments via Google Checkout. We are in the middle of finding out, what is going on and what the problem is. I guess some envier has reported some copyrighted material on tradebit, which slipped our monitoring.

Too bad, that Google does not try to talk to you, before they disable your account. Especially when you turn more than $2,000 daily with them. I know, that we have many things to improve and we are a 5 people company… but deleting a business relationship without notification on a Friday night is VERY unprofessional! We are in wild panic and try our best to re-instate the second payment method asap! As long as that goes on, paypal is the only payment we can offer! Sorry folks!

Last week we ran some Google Ads for certain files on tradebit. We spent around 500 US$ to drive traffic to manuals and sound effects as a test. We wanted to find out, how much a paid visit is actually worth and we learned that our pages are not yet converting as good as we want them! The sales cost us around 8US$ per buyer and the average sale was around 15 US$. That is too expensive to make sense! So our conversion rate is not good enough yet.

There are numerous postings out there, covering the same topic and some reveal simple and logical views on conversions. The next weeks will bring some new design tweaks and some new pages to tradebit. We also want to implement some A/B testing of the landing pages to improve the user experience. After 13 years in the business I believe that simple still rules. So we will try to simplify our pages and streamline the design again - towards readability and fast loading.

Some merchants have mailed during the last 4 weeks about the new model and the problems they have with it. I honestly believe, that there are some things that have been NOT communicated clearly enough: The new model and hosting plan on tradebit actually gives you MORE options and power than ever before and it is not a change to higher prices by default. Some merchants are even paying LESS!

Let me try to explain everything (again) and how you can get the most out of it.

I believe most of the merchants are totally confused, because we get
complaints about the new model, but I think some ADVANTAGES are not getting
thru:

1.) We ask for commissions for sales on tradebit.com, not for sales on your domains!!!

2.) You have a detailed REPORTS page in the SALES section of the member area

3.) You can take the buttons from the edit page, replace “publisher[at]tradebit.com” with your paypal email and receive FREE sales, 100% into your account

4.) Clickbank and Paydotcom sales are 100% free and go directly to your account

5.) If you link to your products on tradebit with the new affiliate link system, you get ADDITIONAL commissions for EVERY sale the clicking customer produces on tradebit. Even if he buys an ebook and you linked for your sound effects!

So, to answer some questions:

“I am not sure how to use this new payment system on Tradebit to pay the musicians. Why are the payments coming from Tradebit now instead of directly from PayPal?”

Look into the REPORTS page on the Sales Statistics… there is a new link!

“Why doesn’t the payments being made from Tradebit indicate what is being paid for?”

Look into the REPORTS page on the Sales Statistics!

“Do I have space available to add any more full releases for sale on Tradebit or do I need to delete some of the content currently available for sale?”

Space is basically NOT limited any more… we put a limit at 99 Gigs, but if you are a merchant with a track record on tradebit, just tell us how much more space you need and we will move you to bigger drives!

Does that help?

Folks, you asked for it - you got it!

If you go to the SALES section in the member area, you will find a new link in the header of the content part. The link says “Sales Reports” and gives you a monthly detailed view of all sales and the status of the payment. This report should be very handy for your monthly reporting and your tax reports at the end of the year. I hope that satisfies the requests of some of our merchants (right, Adam?)

More features will follow in the next few months. We now focus on the affiliate sales and to bring you more good content. I will keep you posted here in the blog and on the forum!

Folks, sorry to post it here, but most merchants will see it on the homepage: 1 of our 4 cluster nodes for the web front just died away! We are working on the problem together with the hoster. For 1 hour or less, it could lead to problems in surfing, picture display and sales processes. We hurry up!

The RAM on the server just went out of business!

After we have published our affiliate program last week, we have started to publish some ads in various networks. Among those some ads on Facebook and some on Google Adwords. The click-through rates are really different. While people on facebook are not too heavy clickers and float around at low CTR of 0.1% or even lower, the Google Ads have brought much more traffic - figures of 0.8% or higher were the result of the tests in the last few days.

I have been reading about the low click rates on social networks, but for 1 ad we did not have a single click in over 15,000 impressions on facebook. After that, I guess we have to revisit the whole ads process in the different channels and tweak the texts and banners. These low figures seem to be pretty low for everybody.