If you are thinking of selling WordPress plugins, you will find that it’s an exciting business opportunity with many ups and downs.
Here are just a few lessons I’ve learned selling plugins and what you can expect in your own adventure.
Start out small
I didn’t start out selling plugins right away, it all started with a free plugin I was offering in the WordPress plugin repository Contact Form 7 Image CAPTCHA, but as more and more people began using my plugin and as more requests came in from users for more complex options, I decided to start the process of creating a premium version of the plugin to help offset the cost on the time I needed to put into maintaining the plugin.
Be prepared to offer support
When I first started selling plugins, I found myself really busy at the beginning of the process working with customers on resolving bugs that had not come up in my initial stages of testing. I quickly found that I needed to set up a ticketing system on my site in order to help better organize my support service and provide customers with a more efficient way of communicating with me as there had been many cases early on where outgoing or incoming support emails were going to the spam folder, the ticketing system helped resolve many of those issues.
After some time and some more thorough testing, the plugin became more stable and support tickets started coming in less and less.
Don’t forget that WordPress is Global
When my first plugin became available in the WordPress repository, one of the most frequent requests I had was to include support for specific languages. At first, I was unprepared for the influx of interest from other counties, but with a lot of research on localizing WordPress plugins, I was quickly able to get my plugin localized to work in other languages. Luckily if you are offering your plugin in the WordPress Repository, you can take advantage of their system to provide additional languages which can take the burden away from you to come up with the translations yourself, however, if your plugin is not provided through the WordPress plugin repository, then you will need to be prepared to create and maintain your own language files.
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