The Business of Software

I have seen trialpay advertisements and I've got several e-mails about them, however I am sceptic with this. However, recently I have came accross couple big software companys  that offer trialpay - http://www.winzip.com/trialpay.htm and http://www.lavasoftusa.com/single/trialpay.php that got me thinking.

I would appreciate anyone sharing their experience with trialpay.

It does work. But I don't use it as my primary selling method.

I only have links on my uninstallation page that offers the product for free via TrialPay.

http://www.conceptworld.com/NoteZilla/nz_uninstall_survey.asp
http://www.conceptworld.com/RecentX/rx_uninstall_survey.asp
http://www.conceptworld.com/QNP/qnp_uninstall_survey.asp

There are people out there ready to accept the TrialPay offers.

From a consumer's point of view - I've actually bought a couple things with TrialPay.  When I want to send flowers to someone, there's usually one or two advertisers on TrialPay that do that.  According to my experiences it's been more-or-less OK:

1) you pay more for the flowers when going through TrialPay than if you just go to the flower vendor directly (seems kind of scammy to me), but the premium you pay is still less than the cost of the software you're getting (at least for the couple times I did it)

2) I've had mixed results with the flowers being on time, etc.  But I'm pretty sure that would have been no different if I weren't going through TrialPay - but maybe I would have ended up with a better flower vendor.

3) once there was a TrialPay that simply required me to *bid* on something on eBay.  My failed bid got me some free software (can't remember what).  I wondered what the software vendor ended up getting in payment from eBay.

So, I'll probably do it again at some point, but only when I need to send flowers again (or I can get eBay to let me spend nothing) - and even then I might not.

Heh, wow. Awesome dot com bubble business model there. I tried it out, "buying" a copy of winzip by signing up to ebay with an anonymous email address, and bidding on a random item that was about to expire, and then paying via paypal. So, I got a copy of winzip for ~five euros instead of 30 euros. A decent discount. Also, I should allegedly have some useless tat from ebay, but I asked the person not to send it to me.

Almost everyone is happy here, presumably. I'm happy because I got a 25 euro discount on the software, Winzip are happy because presumably they got paid something for this transaction, Trialpay are happy because they presumably get a middleman's cut, and people are using their service. The person holding the auction is happy because an auction that otherwise wouldn't have sold attracted enough money to cover the listing fee, plus they get to keep the item. Only, ebay is cheated here... all they know about me is a disposable email address, and some fake contact details. I despise ebay, so I'm not terribly concerned about shafting them, but they're set up to lose big on every transaction.

Ultimately trialpay is doomed. There are two categories of offers, those that cost more than the thing you're getting for free and are therefore almost worthless (I might be tempted in to the vistaprint offer at some time in the future, that would seem to have some value...) and the ebay type offer that is easy to exploit. This can't last.

You can almost predict the trajectory of their fall to the millimetre. Some time soon, they'll have to start getting tough on their terms and conditions, then people will sign up and spend money but still not get the product they were after. People will start viewing it as a scam, and all the high profile partners will pull out, and that'll be the end of them.