Some mac software publishers have described to me as much as a 5% increase in their conversion rate resulting from adding an in-app purchase option for their users in addition to offering a web store.
If anyone has had experience with the impact on your sales of adding in-app purchasing, it'd be great to hear about it. I'm curious where the 5% figure falls within a range of samples. It seems realistic to me, but it's based on a small sample pool. We just released a new embedded web store SDK specifically for mac developers which is a little different and we're hoping it has as big of an impact on conversion rates as we'd like it to. It's got a lightweight Cocoa framework; it adds about 57K (compressed) vs the more typical 1MB or so, the look and feel are pretty customizable using CSS, and the in-app purchase store has all the same store features as the FastSpring web stores have. One would think being able to do merchandising such as cross-selling without the user ever having to leave the software application would result in a significant increase in conversion. Time will tell, but I'm curious to hear from those who can share some insights/data. Dan
