As we all know, it’s not easy to market and sell audio plugins.
On top of developing the audio plugin, many devs have to develop a site and backend to showcase their products, handle payments, calculate taxes, and send the download link and activation keys. That time and money could be better applied toward developing user features on the plugin.
While platforms like Shopify (and many others) make it easier to sell anything online, selling audio plugins isn’t that straightforward.
I’m gauging if there’s a need for a Shopify app that makes it easier to sell and download your audio plugins. The app helps you list it on your site, handle VAT/taxes, and after costumer purchase, automatically fulfill your order by emailing your customer activation keys and a link to download your audio plugin.
If that’s something that interests you, or you think the idea sucks, let me know below.
I have an audio plugin store running on Shopify with an app called SkyPilot for digital delivery. This works fairly seamlessly without me having to write any code outside of the plugins themselves. Shopify has international tax features built in, but I’m not sure how comprehensive these are.
The main missing piece, in my view, is a Shopify plugin to allow custom unlock code generation and delivery at the point of sale. There are plugins that will make up random codes for you, or deliver pre-generated codes. But apparently nothing that lets you specify your own code-gen function that automatically takes customer/order info as an input.
I had in mind a simple DRM scheme where I would do that - in order to avoid having a server that could go down.
For lack of a no-code solution, I am currently DRM free.
I’ve been using Moonbase.sh for timeoff.audio and they’re a great end-to-end solution (storefront, vouchers, customer accounts, hosting installers, online/offline copy protection, the whole thing).
If one day I wanted to move elsewhere, I would probably probably only move the ecommerce bits to Shopify, and leave the licensing/CRM bits in Moonbase, by syncing the backends with an app built with Gadget.
There’s probably a million different ways to go about this though
Yeah, we have some merchants issuing Moonbase licenses from Shopify already, either using voucher codes to link the two, or using Shopify Flow to automate product fulfillment. With this in place, it’s easy to get a fully automated flow, including customer log-ins with license management on your Shopify store - without having to pay for like 3 different Shopify apps, hoping they all work together.
