indesale - a place for you to sell your games.

[indesale]

Hello everyone!

I am part of the of a team that built a new free digital marketplace we call indeSale.
(www.indesale.com).

The idea is that indeSale will be a marketplace for everything indie and digital, including music, ebooks, games, software and so on.

Anyone can signup for free, start their own store, upload products and sell them online, all you need is a Paypal account.

Then you just click "add a product" select "game" and start entering the game's information and upload it.
You can upload screenshots and even a fee demo. You can also indicate if the game has adult materiel in it.
When someone buys the game, they are paying at Paypal directly to your Paypal account, then they receive a download link to their purchase, which expires after 3 days or 3 download trials. 

We also offer the ability to completely design each store page and each product page, to the level where you can just click and drag elements of the page to where you want them, then change their colors, text colors, borders and pretty much everything about them... Thus giving each product page the taste and feel of the product.

We also offer the possibility to offer special offers and discounts on products, and will introduce new promotional tools in the near future.

Our motto is that indeSale is your independence to be creative!

The deal is that everything is free, and if people make a sale, we collect a 12% fee. So we collect a fee only if and when people earn.
But now we are at our alpha trial stage, so anyone who will sign up before June 1st, will get the services completely free(we WON'T COLLECT ANY FEE) for the next 6 months.

We really want people to try the system and send us some feedback about their experience, what is good, what is bad, what we can improve and so on...
It would be really great to hear your opinions as game designers as well as players.

You can send us feedback or issues to feedback@indesale.com or support@indesale.com

The web address is www.indesale.com

Thank you very much,
The indeSale team.

[Retro Wolf]

The light blue text on a white screen is hard on the eyes!

How many times can I download my purchase?
indeSale allows you to try and download your purchase 3 times and/or for 3 days.
That means that if 3 days past or you tried to download the product 3 times, your download link will be expired.

Rather than 3 days, 3 times. Why not as many times as you want forever? It is an indie and open site after all.

[indesale]

Hello Oldschool_Wolf!
Thank you for your input. It is most appreciated.

Rather than 3 days, 3 times. Why not as many times as you want forever? It is an indie and open site after all.

indeSale is a digital marketplace. Most sellers prefer to sell one copy to each buyer, whether they sell music, books, games or other digital merchandise.
This is why we help protect your products by restricting the number of times and the number of days during which the download link is active to the buyer, so it would not be abused.

However, at indeSale it is important to us that sellers will be free to decide upon every aspect of their products, therefore in the future we will let sellers choose themselves whether after purchase the download link should be expired after a while, or should it remain active always.

The indeSale Team.

[Eggie]

I personally can't stand sites that only give you x many chances to download, it's really not unheard of for my internet to cut out three times in a row. I don't see any anti-piracy benefits either, once you've downloaded the file once there's nothing to stop you copying it as much as you like anyway. All stuff like this does is mess up the experience for legitimate customers.
Really glad to hear you're letting people choose if their link expires or not, that's a really smart feature.

[Retro Wolf]

If you look at GOG.com, they let you download as many times as you like DRM free. They just make you "promise" not to redistribute the files. They seem to be quite successful.

Perhaps if it was as many times as you like over 3 days? That way if a download fails, you haven't accidently used up a download.
Though you kind of address this:

....therefore in the future we will let sellers choose themselves whether after purchase the download link should be expired after a while, or should it remain active always.

The indeSale Team.

[indesale]

Thank you Eggie and Oldschool_Wolf for your inputs!

Oldschool_Wolf, we love GOG!
However, our service is aimed more towards small indie game designers.

It happened to us in the past when we just happened to come across a really terrific little adventure game that someone made using Adventure Game Studio, and it was so clever and well written that we told the creator, "you know, you really should sell it, because it's so good, people won't mind paying for your work".
But the person had no way of doing it.

The idea is that now, this person does have a way of doing it: you just sign up, put in your Paypal account, upload your product, design the page the way you want it to look and that's it! You're in business!

When someone buys your game, they buy it directly from you and the money goes directly to your Paypal account. We are not like Amazon or GOG in that aspect, we are just the marketplace. We do not handle the money (that is done through Paypal and nothing goes through us), we do not control the way your page looks, what you upload or the price you charge. Everything is done between the indie seller and the buyer.

That is why it is very important to us, now that we are in our trial stage, to receive these inputs from you guys, so we'll know what are the options both game designers and players would want available to them.

So by all means, if you have any other suggestions, ideas, notes and so on, please do not hesitate.
You can also send them directly to us via feedback@indesale.com.
We take everything said to us seriously and consider it.

And of course if you are game designers, we would love it if you give our service a try and tell us your opinion of it...

Thank you again!
The indeSale Team.

[Retro Wolf]

I do like the idea behind it, maybe one day i'll create something that is worth paying for.

I know it's still in the early stages, but it's difficult to find content unless you search for it (you have to know what you are looking for). As far as I can see there's no page that lets you browse available products.

[indesale]

Oldschool_Wolf, yes you are right that it is  difficult to browse the website at the moment. In a couple of weeks we will introduce a much more convenient way to browse it by category and genres and so on.

At the moment there are very few products on the website and mostly bands have signed up and uploaded music albums. We do not even advertise it yet. We really just went online about a week ago and we are still just gathering a few users who would use the system and tell us their opinions and suggestions.

In a couple of weeks we will start advertising both the website and the products already in it...

[DBoyWheeler]

Hmmm... it may be a while till I get good at game making (be it AGS, Game Maker, or RPG Maker XP (albeit RMXP only permits selling a game as shareware)), but I'll have to keep this site in mind.

[Darth Mandarb]

I love the concept of this site.  I had a similar idea a few years back (though my idea focused solely on a marketplace for AGS made games).  I still intend to do it someday... but no immediate plans.

Anyway...

While I think the concept/idea has merit there is one major issue I see standing in the way.  I am not trying to be rude, but constructive (I've been told I come across as arrogant when I offer this kind of advice so be forewarned). 

The site design is completely non-functional.  It's VERY unclear how to use/navigate the site (I don't even see a navigation).   There are some icons that appear to be navigation but they don't actually do anything and are located in a 'cold' spot of the layout.  The layout is confusing and, over-all, you're unsure where to start or even what to do.  This will put a LOT of visitors off.  With something like this (where you want people to spend their money) one of the most important things is an easy to use website that is inviting and intuitive.

I would recommend taking a look at Twitter's Bootstrap front-end framework or even some of the pre-made templates that are available from WrapBootstrap if you want to keep it "in house" or, if there is money available, hire a professional designer to do the site design.  If you are serious about making a go with this project, which it seems you are, don't cut corners on the site design.  I've seen it so many times (near 20 years working in web development) where this kind of thing happens and a project fails almost before it begins!

I hope you find this helpful rather than arrogant.  I really like the idea and would love to see it become successful (anything that screws major greedy corporations makes me happy).  Good luck!

[indesale]

Hello Darth Mandarb,
Thank you for your input.

As we said before, we are just in our first alpha trial stage. Everything that has to do with buyers browsing the website is still offline. At the moment we are focusing on the seller's interface. Once we are satisfied that the sellers' interface is working properly, we will change the look and feel of the buyers interface. The entire homepage will look quite differently, promoting selected products and presenting new additions, and there will be a possibility to browse via category and genre as well as other ways of navigating through our website.

Meanwhile, everybody, we put up 2 DEMO pages to demonstrate how a game page could look (obviously there's nothing to buy in this DEMO):
This is an example for a game page on indeSale with default design:
http://www.indesale.com/product-38
This is an example for a designed game page:
http://www.indesale.com/product-39

you can see the level of freedom you get in designing your page.
You can also see that your game page can indicate on which platform your game will work (windows or mac),  if it has DRM protection or not, if it has adult material, you can upload screenshots and even a trailer from Youtube or Vimeo, upload a free demo that anyone could download and play, and of course give the minimal requirements.

Those who will sign up now and upload products will be promoted for free when we present our next stage in a few weeks. So it doesn't cost you anything, you get to sell your games online, and get free promotion... not a bad deal.
If you guys know of developers that would be interested in that, please give them our links.

Thanks!
The indeSale Team.
www.indesale.com

[Lewis]

Quick question as I'm on the move and can't check...

Do buyers need to register to make a purchase? Or do you only need an account to sell products?

I'm looking for an easy way of managing direct sales and so the ability to quickly and easily buy stuff is quite important.

Also, do you have/plan to introduce a 'pay what you like' option for sellers?

[indesale]

Hello Lewis.

buyers do not need to register in order to purchase products at indeSale.
They also do not need a Paypal account (but seller do).
Payment is done via Paypal, but you can choose to pay with your Paypal account or if you don't have one, with a credit card.

Sellers can let the buyer decide how much to pay. When uploading a product and setting a price, you can mark "let the customer decide" and you just give a minimum price.
To the buyer the "buy now" button will read "buy this product for [your minimum price] or more" and they will have a chance to change the price to whatever they want.
We currently require that the minimum price will be at the very least 0.99 of the currency you choose to sell your product in (you can sell in USD, GBP, EUR and other currencies).

Every seller at indeSale has a personal statistics page. You can see there a graph of your sale, sort it by months and even download a CSV report containing all the details of all the sales you ever made on indeSale.
Mind that we are in our alpha trial stage, and in the future more features will be added to those mentioned above.
We are counting on the sellers to tell us what they think works and what doesn't and what we could improve to make the service better for their needs.

Feel free to contact us if you have any farther questions or need assistance:
support@indesale.com

You can also join the Facebook group we just started, and post your questions there:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/159730650865196/

Thank you,
The indeSale Team.

[Lewis]

Sounds great, thanks!

[Lewis]

Dropped you guys an email about a few things, but most pressingly: In your T&Cs, in the section that sets out the revenue share terms, there's a broken link. So to use your service, users need to agree to T&Cs without having read all the associated terms. Bit of a legal issue, could do to be fixed

[indesale]

Thank you Lewis for inform us of that error. It has been fixed! 

The indeSale Team.