My tips on selling in the Asset Store

Note: Woah, I didn't expect people would still be reading this, so I decided to update it with more up-to-date information.

Since the time of this original post, I've been part of online discussions with fellow Asset Store publishers and UT's Asset Store team, and while it is slow, there is progress. And we certainly are being heard.

However, it seems to be a policy for them to share no roadmap to the public, even to us publishers, so who knows what improvements they have set in motion.

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This is a crosspost from my blog. Thought people here might be interested. Read the full version here: http://anomalousunderdog.blogspot.com/2013/05/my-first-time-selling-on-unity-asset.html

My tips on selling in the Asset Store:

1. If a customer previously purchased directly from you (not from Asset Store), it cannot be unlocked for them in the Asset Store for free. They have to buy it again in the Asset Store. (we've suggested to UT about us publishers getting promo codes/vouchers that we can give to people at our discretion)
2. Your publisher page is quite bare-bones. There's no sales graph or overall total sales. There's only the sales per month, and you can only view one month at a time. Switching from one month to the next is quite slow (for my Internet connection).
3. Your publisher dashboard gives you an RSS feed of your asset's reviews.
4. The ways you could offer support is usually via Twitter, email, tell them that they can PM you in the Unity forums, or if you have a forum thread about your product, give them a link. You'd usually put such links in your Asset Store product page's description.
5. I'd like to reiterate the standard warning: If enough customers complain that they are not getting adequate support from you, UT has the right to take down your product.
6. If your product is something visual, then potential customers will like to see video demos, or web interactive demos to see an example of how your product is useful. Their mindset is: "So what's this Asset Store package? Will it be useful in the project I'm working on?" That second question is what you need to address. And you do it by showing potential scenarios of how it's used, i.e. demos.
7. If your product is purely code instead, perhaps a video tutorial how to use it can also work. At the very least, post some screenshots. Surely there's something visually presentable that you can show?
8. If your asset store package has code, customers will appreciate it if you separate your code into your own namespace as much as possible to avoid name conflicts. And prepend your scripts with something like your plugin's name to make it unique.
9. Use the lowest possible version of Unity when releasing your asset package. Since they are distributed as .unitypackage files, the version of Unity used to create the .unitypackage is also the lowest version allowed to import that file. Frankly, I think this is just a conspiracy to force you to upgrade your licenses.
10. Selling on the Unity Asset Store is a non-exclusive deal. I.e. you are free to sell your product via other stores (ex. gameprefabs.com)
11. Your publisher dashboard has a "Verify Invoice" tab, for you to check if someone is asking for tech support on your product. The modus operandi is to ask for the invoice number on their receipt (something they automatically receive from email when they purchased your product), then you can copy-paste that to the publisher dashboard to check. UT also offers an API, so you can automate this. You'd need to do such things from your own web server. For example, if you have your own web forum, you can code it in such a way that users can type in their invoice number, and then their account would gain access to some sort of "buyers only" tech support section.
12. Possible places you can use to advertise your asset package:
    1. Main Unity Forums
    2. Google+ Unity Community
    3. LinkedIn Unity Group
    4. Unity South East Asian Mailing List (only if you're based in South East Asia!)
    5. Unity3d Subreddit

 

#11 is wrong. If someone buys your asset, they get an email with an Invoice-Number. You simply have to ask for that number and you can check it in your Publisher Administration under Verify Invoice. It's a lot nicer than writing an email to Unity every time

 

Ah, didn't know that! Thanks for sharing the information.

 

13. NEVER re-publish your asset under a new package removing old one. I was forced to pay 70$ for a pack I've already paid 40$ before because of this and I will email Asset Store forever asking for my 40$ back. This is absolutely absurd!!

14. NEVER force your buyers to pay again for the same asset just because you say it is this time 2.0 or 3.0, but in fact is the same product! Specially when you promissed that that update would come for free later this year... Right Allegorithmic?!? Shame on you!

 

For that, I had an idea - Gonna try it. If you asset merely consists of code and the bug was in code, you could just make a small video showing them how to fix the bug. True, you'd be exposing a small part of your code, but if somebody doesn't have your code, it doesn't mean anything to them. So instead of users PMing you for the fix, you just make a short how-to-fix it video and everybody could see how it's fixed.

 

I wouldn't be happy if I were forced to watch video tutorials to fix bugged assets myself, unless all it takes is couple of clicks. I think best course of action would be updating actual asset and if review time is an issue, provide updated files manually.

 

Yeah well the video shouldn't take more than 2 minutes. Just replace this with that, etc.

 

First of all, I think that this thread is a really good idea given the current environment of UT wanting to know what they can do. I would like to add a couple of things to the list as well.

15: The Asset Store Package Manager tools are very unimaginative, I would like to see a complete overhaul of that.
16: The ability to delete a package that is pending review (yes there is a need for this)
17: A metric on the Publisher Login page to allow you to see how many people are viewing your package vs sales. This could be very helpful in adjusting your price should you need to.

Thanks for listening.

 

There's no point to any of that when you can simply verify the invoice number. Some of the info in the OP, which is a year old, is outdated now and no longer true.

--Eric

 

I guess there is a bunch of things i could say since i have been selling in the asset store for 2+ years.

Invest in some high quality promotional images, dont be stingy here otherwise unity will never want to promote it on there frontpage.

 

I'm not sure about nr. 9, Using an old version of unity gives you a lot of errors with the new one and I noticed some scenes move incredibly slow. I think people should move to the new version, they aren't updating and fixing all the bugs for nothing!

Yeah I didn't know about the store's fix preview window so I uploaded the screenshots I had on the forum. Lots of mistakes on my latest assets but it should serve as a lesson for other new users to.