Tom’s Guide is missing one thing (unless it’s included in the “product” umbrella, but I feel it’s best to make it separate), your game could be great but if your website including the shopping cart and payment page puts people off, this will lower your CR of course. This is really vital as it could drop a 1% CR to a 0.1%CR or worse.

I’ve seen people post stats of how many hits the cart gets yet a suprisingly large number of people fail to complete for one reason or another.

Our service is different from other press release services (I shall get a list in the PR post…) the way that it’s YOU who manages the actual press release – we just give you the contacts and one-click option to send your press release to editors. That’s way it’s YOU who gets contacted (and not the PR person/company).

A) Focus on *big* picture. Make sure the product/price/quality meets your overall goals.
B) Handle customer complaints: whether they are about price, product, pirates, or just pure rabbish. Handle it. You can use email, FAQ lists, forums, automated email answers. You gotta deal with them somehow.

I must point out that Ken brought up a very important point: Don’t let the whiners get special rank. And don’t get caught on spending too much time on dealing with whiners – you don’t have to personally email everybody. I remember Kai-Peter responding *individually* and publicly* in his game forums to one customer complaining about the price. Kai mentioned several benefits and explained why the price is what it is. I think this was excellent way to handle the complaints. Other people who would complain about the price can see the thread or can be directed (by players in the community) to read the post.

When should you spend time to get every sale? Especially at the beginning, but I really think personal contact even afterwards will be beneficial. Yes, it takes time – and you cannot deal with every email. But you can use email sometimes… and use other methods for the rest of the time. You must learn to balance it. I know players appreciate personal contact. And if they appreciate that – they will tell others about that. Automate what you can… but have a personal touch in the support. I remember we had a customer who complained about the price of GEOM and it was true that $24.95 felt bit too much for us as well. Still, he bought the game – but sent a small complain. We decided to drop the price to $19.95 (not totally because of this one customer, but simply because we wanted to see which would give us better sales result). The “complainer” contacted us about the reduced price, and we gave the complainer $5.00 back (because it was just a week or two before he bought the game) and emailed and asked him to make sure he has received the money. It took some extra time, but the customer is happy – and that makes us happy as well. But note: if this would have happened several times then we would (maybe) have dealt with it differently – like Ken said: “chasing people down individually takes time”.

I remember that DavidRM spent about 3 months playing his Paintball Net game before he saw any sales. He played, chatted and spent time with demo players and finally he started to see some sales. Of course he cannot individually hunt all the sales any more – but in the beginning it can be efficient.

There’s no right answer or right guideline that will work in every situation. You must make sure you spend your time on right issues. Yet – you must make sure your game is a quality game (and sells ;) – and you must make sure customers – as many as possible – are happy.

My belief is that in the beginning, even if you have to fight for every customer, try and get every sale you can. If that means emailing a couple grumpy customers, or tweaking some elements of the game… do what it takes.

Obviously, people are different. You can only do what works for you. Some people can make anything work.

But it can! :)

Chasing people down individually takes time. Time that would be better spent elsewhere. As soon as you start handing out special discounts/bonuses/etc, then others will be demanding that they get them too. But more importantly, that community that you value so much is going to see that the people that helped build the community get passed over while whiners get special ranking.

Everything has a cost. You’ll never please everyone and every single person you make an exception for will cost you.

I first said:

You must set a high price – and make sure your product achieves that quality. At least don’t change the price lower if nobody is buying – they won’t buy after that either. First you gotta try what’s being said there. But you could *try* different pricing to make sure it’s optimal for you… who knows if $10 or $20 price tag is optimal for your game – you really gotta test it.

I mean: you gotta test the price. Make sure your product is a quality product. Like you pointed out in the #2.

After that – the whiners. If there’s enough complains… and you think you can handle them, you could try some of the hints mentioned (discounts, add-ons, etc.). If you can get some more sales for sending couple of emails… that cannot be bad?

I really can’t agree with this. You have 2 situations:
1) The complaining group is small. Bending over backwards to please them is a waste of effort. No matter what you do there will always be people who complain.
2)The complaining group is large enough to be concerned about. At this point the above advice doesn’t go far enough. There may be a real flaw with your game and you need to address it.

That’s it. Either their concerns are big enough to address, or they’re small enough to ignore.