

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App. - mobileorchard
http://www.mobileorchard.com/app-store-heresies-higher-price-better-ratings-dont-discount-your-app-at-launch/

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patio11
I have a theory, not specific to the app store, that there is a strong
correlation between customers who are extraordinarily price sensitive and
pathological customers. This is based on every software vendor I've ever
spoken to saying "After we increased our prices, we dealt with a lot less
crazy people -- what's up with that?"

Anecdotally, when I increased prices by 20%, I noticed a marked change in the
number of... customers with unique understandings of the world. For example:
"I think Bingo Card Creator should print holiday cards. Except, not on my
printer, on your printer. And you should mail them for me. What do you mean
you don't do that, YOU THIEF, don't make me call my husband on you." (You
_will_ run into this customer eventually. A refund and apology is the quickest
way to preserve your sanity.)

Specific to the App Store, I think that Apple is _training_ their customers to
become pathological customers. From the perspective of the small software
developer, "The cost of this app is less than my information search cost, so
I'll just buy this app to see if it does what I want rather than reading about
it. Bought. It doesn't do what I want?! SUCKS! YOU FREAKING THIEVES!!!1 ONE
STARZ!" is just about the worst possible reaction a customer can have to you.
The App Store is training people to think of their software in that sort of
disposable fashion, but that means you're entrusting your corporate reputation
to a lot of people who have one-click access to LOLZ LAAAAAAAME.

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parkern
I think this really touches on something that Marco had mentioned in his blog
as well about the dichotomy of the app store. We all know people who have
Iphones and literally refuse to buy any apps that cost money, even ones that
are a dollar. Usually they are less savy users with far different
expectations. Pick any app in the top 25 that is under a dollar and you'll
surely see a bunch of oddly worded reviews, mostly hyper-critical and
complaining about what a waste of money it is.

Raising your app price will undoubtedly weed out these users and, while sales
will be lower, it will be a more quality, educated user. JMO

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hapless
Wishful thinking.

The correlation between price and perceived quality is very easily explained
by the data source. He's only looking at the apps that actually sold!

Free applications can be mediocre and still be widely-downloaded enough to
make it into the top 10.

Top-selling paid applications _must_ be of very high quality to sell at all.

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meterplech
and further, people will only decide to buy a paid app if they know it fills a
specific need. they will read reviews, check to make sure this app fills their
need. free apps are downloaded before the user decides if they are useful- and
thus obviously aren't.

i don't think this has "proven" that is makes any sense to keep your app at a
high price. it is a correlational relationship, not causal

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jasongullickson
One critical tipping point that I've observed (as a developer) is the
difference between $.99 and Free.

Early in the app store Apple decided they you could only leave feedback for
apps that you actually installed. From that point on, you had to download the
app to rate/review it and if it was a paid app, you had to pay for the
privilege.

This seemed to filter out allot of the off-the-cuff negative comments for paid
apps; maybe because it raised the "bozo threshold" or maybe because when you
pay for something, you try harder to get something out of it. Either way,
negative reviews for paid apps dropped for me (and seemed to across the
board).

I'm experimenting with this again by making one of my paid apps free for a
week, we'll see what the score looks like after that.

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pchristensen
_we'll see what the score looks like after that._

Please do share when you have the results!

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jasongullickson
So far the results are surprising. I expected a large influx of critical
(i.e., bad) reviews (given the large increase in downloads) but instead I
received just a few but they were either positive or if not completely
positive, very well-thought-out and constructive.

The next test will be to see what happens when the price goes back up
(tomorrow is the last day the app will be free).

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IraMitchell
I think this is true up to a point with many things. Also, if I spend $9.99 on
an app, I'm going to be looking to justify spending the dough. If it isn't
doing it for me, I'll likely try to figure out why by spending more time with
it -- and often times I'll figure out what I like about it.

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DenisM
this is exactly what I want from my users to do. :-)

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ryanschneider
Would like to see proof that higher ratings are good for revenue, any devs
want to share their income/ratings plot?

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pxlpshr
We've had our sales revenue killed overnight by one review when we pushed out
a big update a few months ago. We were doing ~$150 a day from one app, running
up the Top 100 charts in Social Networking and about to break the Top 50 fold
when everything went downhill as soon as that review was posted. Sales dropped
to under $30 a day.

The review was written by an Apple technician who worked at an apple retail
store. His review sounded very "authoritative" to the average consumer in
terms of features and problems with our app. He even cited the SDK but I knew
he was misinformed when many of suggestions were forbidden (integration with
Calendar, re-route native SMS/phone calls through our app, etc.) Nevertheless,
consumers trusted his review and that was all she wrote for that month of
sales.

Long story short, we tried contacting Apple to have it removed, no response as
usual. After about 3 days of google stalking, I found him on Flickr and sent a
PM. I gave him free app codes for his friends, and asked that he kindly change
his review so it's factual. I told him I didn't mind honest feedback, but that
his post sounded like an authoritative developer and was in fact wrong. He
kindly changed the review, and we exchange emails to this day. He's trying to
get into development.

Sales recovered some but certainly killed our momentum (and momentum is a big
deal on the appstore, the more folds you can break through generally means
more stable revenue for a time). The one-way street review system is extremely
frustrating... yet another major complaint I have about the store. Wayyyy to
much power given to the consumer.

~~~
ujjwalg
I completely agree with you. We have a lot of apps with >$14.99 price tag and
as soon as there is a negative review the sales go down a lot.

I also agree with you with the momentum aspect. If you are gaining momentum a
bad review can ruin it all for you. It happened to us on a $1.99 app in
education which made it to top 25 in that category but 1 bad review and it was
downhill ever since. It will be really helpful if Apple allows threaded review
system in which the developer can comment on the reviewers comments and the
reviewer receives an email notification to respond and change.

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frauen1
A good, data-driven, analysis of the relationship between price and customer
perception of iPhone applications.

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kbrower
Correlation != Causation

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pxlpshr
I get so tired of this comment - but I digress. Did you read the article? If
so, do you have anything of value to add based on personal experience?

Just curious...

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jwr
It's actually a valid point which I happen to agree with, stated with a
minimum number of words.

The article says that lower prices imply lower ratings, but the data presented
only shows that lower prices correlate with lower ratings. One could equally
well draw the conclusion that lower-priced software is of lower quality, hence
the bad ratings.

