Be a Market Vendor or Open Your Own Marketing Site? That Is The Question!

So the topic has opened over in UnoBoonex's blog and it really deserves it's own section.  Besides, this is exactly my professionally trained field, so I can't resist doing this blog.

Unity is preparing to open the door up to create a new Market Place and do away forever with Expertzzz.com.  How many ways can we cheer?  This is going to be a huge change and go a long, long, long way in bringing more ethics to the Dolphin Platform.  Of course, with change also comes questions, and those who offer suggestions as to another way of doing things.

In this instance, under the "Premium" membership, a Unity Member will pay $20 per month to Boonex and be enabled to sell mods in the Market.  Unity appears to be utilizing a points based system that keeps track of coders and ranks them according to skill.  This is a great thing and as we have to pay to play (ie:  if you want to sell, you must pay a fee to Boonex for running this market) it will do away with people posting bad mods, selling them and then deleting their account and reopening a new one when the bad reviews start coming in.  This is the most important reason I can see for this. 

Now Boonex has made it part of the "Premium" membership that Premium members will receive a 10% Discount on all purchases in the Market place, thus helping the Premium Members to maybe recoup a small part of their fee.  So far, at least one member has mentioned that he doesn't particularly care for this set-up and could create his own site to sell his mods on.  He's right, he can, but let's examine that idea for a moment if we can.

Unity Market:  $20 per month and a discount of 10% on all sales to other "Premium" Members.  How many will go with the "Premium" membereship?  Well, all with a "SmartPro" license will of course get the 10%, other coders/developers/modders who are selling on the Unity Market and those who chose to pay just so they can test things.  In the end, this is going to be a small percentage of all who are members of Unity.  As a Financial Marketing Analyst, I'd place this number (just a rough estimate here) at less than .2%.  Please note, that's less that two-tenths of one percent. 

So, your cost is $20 per month and a 10% Discount available to less that two-tenths of a percent of the community population of Unity, Boonex handles all marketing of driving customers to the Unity site, you earn points that demonstrate that your an honest coder/devleoper and all your products have great feedback on them showing many satisfied customers. 

On the other side, you can go out and grab a host.  Let's say you find a $10 a year hosting plan that has a free domain name.  Okay, great, so for $10 a year you can now sell your products outside of the Unity Market, avoid that pesky $20 a month fee and also get 100% of the price on every sale, versus getting 100% on 99.80% of your sales and 90% on .2% of your sales. 

But wait?  How are you going to get Dolphin Site Owners to your site?  Okay, better throw in a few dollars a month for Advertising?  So where do you advertise?  Google? Well, you can try to shoot it by purchasing keywords like Dolphin, D7, D6, Dolphin 6, Dolphin 7 and of course the name of your mod (thingawippety for Dolphin) and that will get you some.  But those keywords cost money, let's say $.02 a keyword.  Of course, you'll pay for alot of people who are searching for Dolphin thingawippety's at Sea World, but at least you'll get some Dolphin Customers.

Now you can purchase ad space on Unity, not sure what the ad space costs or is going to cost, but I'm pretty sure that it will not be free.  So this is going to cost you money.  Then you have the option of going into the forums/blogs and trying to steer people to your site, but many will see this as a form of spam and Boonex may view it as your attempting to compete with the "Premium" members who are paying to list their products and it can get you a quick boot if they choose.

I can only say that at the Unity Market your pretty likely to have a steady stream of new customers and you will know exactly what your costs are going to be each month.  ($20.00).  You can try to throw in that it costs you money on the 10% discount, but is it?  There is a very strong likelyhood that if the member was not purchasing your product through the Unity Market they would never find it, let alone be able to purchase it.  So, this 10% is money you never had, thus you can not be losing it.  Look at it this way:

You list a car for sale for $10,000.00 or Best Offer and someone comes to look at it.  They offer you $9,000.00 (that's 10% off) and you chose to accept it?  Now, the car has been for sale for 3 months and noone has offered you more than the $9,000.00.  Have you lost anything?  Some would argue that you have, but those who are in sales/marketing will tell you that you have lost nothing.  Why?  Because the car brought you $9,000.00, you never had the $10,000.00, only the idea of having it?  You wanted the 10K, but you did not have the 10K, thus you lost nothing.  Remember, you can not lose something that you never had.

In the Financial Industry, I have seen guys scream and yell when a finance package blew up just before it was set to close.  They would run around crying that they lost a $20K or $30K commission on a large package and cry about it for days.  We tell them to suck it up and move on, they lost nothing.  The only thing they had was the belief that they we're making that commission, but they had NOT made it.  In Finance, no money is made until the entire finance package is accepted by all, closes and funds out successfully.  You don't make your money at the start of the deal, you don't make it as you go through the motions, you don't make it at the closing table, you make your money when the deal funds.  Not a second before or after. 

Taking it a step further, I've watched deals that have had to have the commissions cut to make them work, again guys will whine about it.  Why?  Because they believe they have lost something, when in reality they have just made money.  Again, they believed they had this income, but in reality they did not have it, only the belief.

So, I can't say which is better for you, as some will strongly believe they are better off setting out on their own to develop and sell their mods outside of the Unity Market, others like myself find the Unity Market to be a great idea when it comes to selling mods because it brings such a large group of people together.  The only thing I can say is this, take a look around your neighborhood.  Do you notice how the stores all come together?  Home Depot and Lowe's love to be as close to each other as they can, Wal-Mart & Target fight to put their stores closer to the road than the other, Sears, JCPenney's, Kaufmann's, Dillards, Best Buy, Circuit City (okay, CC is out of business) and so many others.  Auto Dealerships do it, heck even the strip clubs will saturate an area, all in hopes of stealing business from each other because consumers love convenience and will go to that one spot where they can hit 20 stores versus driving out into an area that has only 1 store. 

The choice is yours, will you join the Unity Market or will you go and open your own store somewhere else?  Love to hear others input on this.