Today is Shop Plugins fifth anniversary. It has been six years since launching Shop Plugins. It has been very rewarding working with so many store owners to enhance their shops.
Reflecting on the past few years
Here are a few things that stand out from the past few years.
Why sell plugins?
Back in 2017 I wrote about Why I Started Shop Plugins. Most of those reasons are still true. I really enjoy being an independent WooCommerce plugin seller and having complete control of the relationship with customers.
What is the best advice you’ve received?
The best advice I received about selling plugins came from Alex Denning from Ellipsis: Increase your prices and turn on automatic subscriptions. That advice has helped us stay profitable and grow month over month even through seasons where I didn’t have any time to work on the shop.
What software do you use to sell plugins?
I sell WooCommerce plugins on a software stack of WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads. It might surprise you that I don’t sell on WooCommerce, but back in 2014 EDD was a better choice for software licensing. EDD has been rock solid this whole time and there’s been no reason to change. We have a few EDD extensions, but the most important are Software Licensing and Recurring Payments.
Help Scout for the support desk. AffiliateWP for the affiliate program. ConvertKit for email marketing. Recapture for abandoned carts. Koko Analytics for pretty analytics. All the code is managed with GitHub.
Today at the Shop
There are ten premium WooCommerce plugins for sale in the shop and one plugin on WordPress.org. There are four plugins in presale mode that might get revamped and released at some point in the future.
Based on my time tracker I spend 10% of my work week on shop tasks, but the shop represents 20% of my income. That’s not a bad split, but I’d like to increase both of those numbers in 2021.
My WooCommerce Agency works with several shops that have recurring revenue using the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. Because of this it is natural that Shop Plugins would benefit from that expertise. WC Subscriptions Schedule and additions to Toolbox for Subscriptions are direct results of lessons learned from selling millions of monthly subscriptions.
You might have already corresponded with the newest team member in the past few weeks. Stephanie Lipovsky joined in December 2020 in a customer support role. She’s doing a great job supporting customers and helping to improve plugin documentation.
What’s Happening This Year
In the near future I have updates and new functionality planned for all of the plugins in the shop. I also have a new plugin in the queue focused on shops selling recurring subscriptions.
I’ll also be adding a feature requests system so customers can have a voice in the features and additions that are added to plugins.
And finally, this week I’m running a sale on all plugins for 5 days to celebrate 5 years in business! Use the code CELEBRATEFIVE at checkout to get 20% off your purchase.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Shop Plugins in its first five years!
Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash