As a developer of apps, games etc., your primary skill set, but naturally, would be programming and software development. This is what you do the best and this is what you should be able to focus your energies on the most. While this would be the ideal scenario for you, the practicalities of life, however, could be substantially different, as you have probably experienced for yourself, to your disadvantage.
The unfortunate fact that most developers have to live with is having to spend large amounts of time and efforts on tasks and activities like setting up payment gateways, licensing systems, trial setups, analytics etc. – all sucking up your time, away from areas of your core competencies.
If this is where you are at, you might find a good friend in Paddle – a service that lets you easily setup checkout and provides several other useful tools for your web site where you sell apps and games.
My full review of Paddle follows:
Features
Checkout – Paddle provides tools with which you can build a checkout on your site suitable for your requirements. The checkout can be customized as a branded feature of your site, matching its look and feel. You can create an overlaid checkout screen so that your customers can buy your product without leaving the product page. You can also configure recurring billing through Paddle's dashboard.
Dashboard – where you can create and edit your product data, generate licenses, manage customers and produce various reports. An Overview is available using which you can track your revenues and order sources as well as see which countries yourcustomers are based in. With the order management option you can manage and lookup orders, process full or partial refunds etc. Other options allow you to manage payouts, products, coupons etc.
Other Tools
Four other tools are provided, as described below:
Trials – you can create time or feature limited trials of your apps using the Paddle SDK. Users can easily remove the trial restrictions via in-app purchase and activation technology available with the SDK
Licensing – a licensing tool/mechanism is provided with which you can protect the trial version of your apps. Customers can purchase a license at your website to obtain a license key that they can apply manually to the app to remove the trial restrictions. Alternatively, they can also buy the license through the in-app purchase mechanism.
StoreKit – allows you to incorporate in-app purchase mechanism so that you can offer your apps and/or games under the now massively popular ‘freemium' model. The StoreKit also allows you to offer additional content/features such as themes, extensions etc. via in-app purchase. You can also offer consumables such as credits, in-game currency etc. that your users can purchase on repeat basis.
Analytics – you can track useful parameters such as app usage times, trial usage statistics, trial to paid conversion periods, version-wise user counts etc.
Paddle Discovery – a proprietary, internal recommendation network with which you can increase the exposure to your apps and boost sales. Paddle Discovery works by algorithmically finding users who are likely to be interested in your app and recommending it to them via email and Paddle Locker – an app area where customers manage their purchases
Other Features
Customer support, file hosting and delivery, VAT handling (as and where applicable) etc. are some of the other features provided by Paddle. Also, if you have created your site with WordPress using the popular WooCommerce plugin, you are in luck as Paddle offers a plugin for WooCommerce.
Pricing
There are no monthly costs for using Paddle. A flat 5% of the transaction amount + 50 cents per transaction is what you will be charged
Free Trial
A free trial is offered to let you test the features provided by Paddle.
You can start your free trial by clicking here.
Conclusion:
If you create and sell apps, games and similar software products and don't mind the 5% + 50 cents per transaction fees, you should definitely give Paddle a try.
Click here to start your free trial.
currently Paddle is not good choce, they have a lot of problems, but you can’t see coz they are deleting bad reviews on trustpilot and etc…
It is kind of impossible to legally work with them from some EU countries.
They don’t let you generate the invoices on the payouts received, only providing a “reverse invoice” which in some countries is simply not a proper legal document.
Does paddle have integration with shopify? Thanks
Hi Bianca, not at the moment. Cheers.
Thanks so much for taking the time to review Paddle.com Catalin; we really appreciate it!
🙂