I use Easy Digital Downloads plugin for WordPress to sell my works. When you make payment, the plugin is generating automatically a download link that give you 1-year access to purchased files. Link is shown in Purchase Confirmation page (until you clear cookies) and is also emailed to you.
When download links expire after 1 year, you are eligible to renew your subscription at half price, if you want to continue getting updates I will create a discount code with your name to re-buy at 50% off.
Update frequency vary from monthly to yearly depending by topic and sales volume of each database. When I publish updates I click “resend receipt” in WordPress dashboard to notify all customers who purchased that particular database that an update is available, to re-download if they need. If you do an one-time research and do not need updates, please inform me to delete you from customers list, DO NOT report my emails as SPAM which cause email notifications to no longer reach inbox of other customers who need updates.
Some customers blamed me for “not sending updates” because their company is blocking emails containing links. If you do not receive email notification, save the link from Purchase Confirmation page, keep an eye on Updates page and click link again to re-download (link does NOT change when files are changed / updated). If you lost download link, send me a message in chat and I will give you via chat.
Note for free products: many people “buy” the free databases just because find them free and NOT because they need that particular data, deleting file shortly after purchase. Consequently I do not send email notifications when update is available for free products. If you lost download link, you can simply checkout again. Remember that free databases contain less data and are updated less often than paid databases.
Can you renew automatically so I no longer need to buy again yearly?
Some customers suggested this, and is do-able with a plugin recurring payments, but I never used it, because:
- I won’t be able to offer 50% off starting from second year.
- Some people do one time projects and don’t need updates.
- Some people close business so no longer need updates.
- Some people leave company and another person need updates, notification of upcoming renewal that give option to cancel subscription goes to invalid email address, and is risky to get complaints for accidental rebilling.
Can you send only what is new instead of whole database?
Would be too time-consuming to email database as attachment to each customer, and inefficient because updates may bring changes or add more data for existing cars too, not just adding new cars, and if for any reason you jumped an update, you risk making your database incomplete.
Between September and November 2019, due to difficulties in scraping data all years (1960-2019) for Australia car database I provided a temporary file containing 2019 models separately from older file dating back from March 2019, most customers did not appreciated this, they wanted all cars to be in a single file, which I provided in December 2019 after 20 days of scraping.
Certain customers integrate my data with their own data, this require extra effort each update, they asked me if I can send only newly added cars and not entire database. You can spot what is new by copying new database below existing database and use an Excel formula to spot duplicates in ID or URL column, rows that return FALSE they are new. Alternatively, you can filter out the cars launched in current year regardless you got them before, and recompile them into your database.
For American car database, since 2020 I added a column “date added” so you can easily filter cars added at each update. I may do the same for other databases in the future.
More notes
Got many people asking if will receive updates after buying, including few idiots who think that need to pay (buy again) after each update and get angry that frequent updates will turn into high costs for them. What is not clear in “Buy FULL database + FREE updates for one year“? Please tell if have another suggestion how to make people understanding without asking via chat. So, you do not need to buy again after each update, and you do not need to re-download after every update if you do not need updates so often, you can download only when you need latest database.
The only case when you need to pay each update is when I do a private project for your exclusive use.
Had few customers (big companies) who offered to pay each update, pay bonus money to update database more often. I can do this, but this raise a question: how do I should deliver updates to “normal” customers who are not paying the bonus?
There are several data providing companies who do not display prices on website or purchase buttons, you need to email them and show who you are in order to receive price offer (usually 10x more expensive than databases sold on my website) then sign a legal contract before receiving data, and I suspect that they give different price based on your company size, if you are a startup they will ignore your email. Offering myself personalized solutions such as delivering updates less or more often depending by how often each customer is paying, would have been possible in 2012 when number of customers was <10, once I exceeded few hundred customers is no longer viable. Also I think that big companies may get angry if they figure out that I sold same Excel file to someone else at cheaper price.
Note: things may change if I will offer API as alternative to Excel file downloads, API can be priced either per query, either in packages like 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 queries per day/month, so you pay according how much you use.
