With over 59,000 WordPress plugins (and counting), there is a global market for these tools across WordPress-powered websites. The tricky part is finding these potential customers. So, if you have just created your first WordPress plugin, you might also be wondering about the next obvious step: “how to sell WordPress plugins?”
Thanks to WordPress’ popularity, there are multiple ways to sell WordPress plugins for a decent price. Through this developer’s guide, we will show you the best ways to showcase your WordPress plugins for sale.
Free or Premium: pre-considerations for selling WordPress plugins
As a WordPress developer, you can use the WordPress CMS tool to build a website, practically for free. Adding to that, you can install a variety of plugins and themes from WordPress’ repository on your website – again at zero costs!
This is a good reason why WordPress is so popular among website developers, with over 60% market share in the global CMS space. The ever-growing WordPress ecosystem requires all kinds of plugins to make websites more functional and appealing to netizens.
Now that you know why selling WordPress plugins makes business sense, you can position your plugin as either of the following options:
- Premium plugin, where you sell the plugin exclusively in a paid version, and users must purchase the plugin to use it on a website. Typically, premium plugins cannot be uploaded to the official WordPress plugin repository. For premium plugins, you would need to build a smaller but more loyal customer base.
- Freemium plugin is the more popular mode of selling WordPress plugins. With this option, plugins are available in both free and paid versions. Freemium plugins can expand your customer base, but it can be challenging to convert the free plugin users into paying customers.
Typically, you should opt for the freemium model when you are new to the process of building a market reputation and must depend on third-party platforms (or marketplaces) for selling products on WordPress. Once you have gained market acceptance and a loyal customer base, you can switch to selling plugins mainly through the premium model.
Selling WordPress Plugins – Step-by-Step Guide
Primarily, there are 2 modes of selling your WordPress plugins, namely:
- On a popular plugin marketplace
- On your business website
Let’s discuss how to sell your plugins through each of these modes.
How to sell WordPress plugins on a marketplace?
Let’s start by learning how to sell WordPress plugins on a marketplace. A WordPress plugin marketplace is a low-risk and low-cost option for selling your plugins. Most popular marketplaces have thousands of registered users looking to buy the best plugins for their websites.
Some of the popular online marketplaces for WordPress plugins include CodeCanyon, Codestar, TemplateMonster, and MOJO. Each of these marketplaces contains thousands of plugins, grouped under various categories. To sell on any marketplace, you must create a user account and upload your plugin. Once it is approved by the marketplace admins, you can set its price and host your plugin on their servers. You will also get a product page (for your plugin) on the marketplace.
To improve your plugin sales on a marketplace, make sure that the plugin contains the following:
- Product description: that accurately describes your plugin and its functionalities.
- Product image: of a high resolution that can accurately illustrate your plugin.
- Demo website: where interested users can view your plugin in action.
Why should you sell a plugin on a marketplace? Let’s discuss next.
Why you should sell WordPress plugins on the marketplace
Here are some of the pros of selling a WordPress plugin on a popular marketplace:
- As marketplaces already have a high customer base, you don’t need to make efforts to attract new customers to buy your plugin.
- You only need to share a percentage of your earnings when you make a sale.
- You don’t incur additional expenses in setting up your website to sell your plugin. This includes server resources, website domain, and software tools.
On the flip side, some of the major marketplaces charge a steep price for hosting your plugin, which can impact your overall earnings. Additionally, as the competition level on marketplaces is high, you need to think of innovative ways to differentiate your products from competitors.
How to sell WordPress plugins on your website?
Next, let’s see how to sell WordPress plugins on your website. For this, we recommend you use the WordPress platform to design the website and then use the WooCommerce plugin to manage the plugin sales.
With the WooCommerce plugin, you can easily set up an online store with the following elements:
- The detailed product description on individual web pages or posts
- Online product demos or videos
- User manual with all the plugin information and how to use it (with screenshots)
Additionally, you can obtain product licenses (for selling WordPress plugins) from WooCommerce or any of the following license providers:
- Easy Digital Downloads (or EDD)
- CodeCanyon
So, what are the advantages offered by selling your plugin on your personal business website? Let’s know about them.
Why you should sell WordPress plugins on a website
Here are some of the pros of selling a WordPress plugin on your business website:
- You don’t need a heavy commission for plugin sales on your dedicated website, as compared to marketplaces.
- You can choose to set your own price for the plugins and earn the entire revenue yourself (without any additional charges).
- You can develop a strong brand identity in the WordPress user community, thus prompting more sales and revenues.
On the flip side, there are a few disadvantages of selling WordPress plugins on your dedicated website:
- You need to spend time and resources on building your website the right way.
- You need to market your products to WordPress users to attract them to your website.
- You need to pay extra to set up your payment gateway using WooCommerce.
Conclusion
Thanks to WordPress’ global popularity, the WordPress plugins have a growing base of users and developers. These plugins can be sold on digital marketplaces or through dedicated websites, as described in this article. As an independent plugin developer, you must choose the best mode of selling your WordPress plugins depending on your business objectives and budget.
Flipper Code has developed years of expertise in the WordPress platform and has benefited its customers through various website and plugin development services. If you are still unsure about choosing WordPress, here are some interesting WordPress statistics that might change your mind.
We can also help you develop your next WordPress plugin. Drop us a message with all the details today.
