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Looking for help on how to monetize my extension!

Hi! We are grinding away on our extension and trying to get an idea of how to make money, and I would love some feedback. I made one of these a few months ago and it was quite helpful.

So we are making a browser extension that highlights products on Amazon based on where they are made. Our initial version is US specific, so if someone wanted to only purchase things from the USA, or give some priority to those, we make that easy. Doing this requires a ton of research, most manufacturers don’t bother saying where they manufacture, or they mislead that it is made in the USA even when it’s not. We’ve been researching and building the extension for just shy of 6 months, as a 4 person team. We have a few hundred users currently, and get half a dozen more every day, which we are content with given that the extension doesn’t work very well yet. What the point of this post is, is to get some feedback on the ways we’ve thought about getting some revenue, which we are looking to start doing in the next few months.

The most obvious source of revenue is affiliates, but it’s not easy. Amazon doesn’t allow extensions to be a part of the affiliate program, so we would only be able to collect revenue from users who went to our site, which we haven’t even built yet. On top of that Amazon doesn’t want sites overlaying their site like we do, so they wouldn’t allow us in the affiliate program until we made some large changes to make our extension quite a bit worse. Even then we might not be allowed in, reviewmeta.com which is a generally similar project to us was removed from the affiliate program, and now sends their traffic through a middleman. I’ve spoken to a bunch of similar extensions and the amount they make from the Amazon affiliate program, even with millions of users, appears to be shockingly low. In an AMA on Reddit the owner of review meta said he has only just managed to overcome his monthly server costs a few months ago, after 3 years in operations, despite having 5 figure daily site visits and hundreds of thousands of extension and app users.

What we have found is most Made in the USA products aren’t on Amazon, so in the distant future we would love to have separate affiliate deals with a multitude of sites, like donegood.co has done in their extension, however that would be very expensive because of the huge variety of searches we get. We might have 10,000 users and only get 200 searches for shoes in a week, so it would be very hard to convince online shops to set up an affiliate program with us when the estimated monthly traffic is that low (with 10 sites sharing 200 searches). We would need an enormous user base to make that feasible, it wouldn't help us for years. We can’t go that long term when Amazon could implement a filter of their own at any time.

That train of thought has brought us to our current decision, subscription. We are going to offer a premium version of the extension for 2$ a month or 10$ a year. The good thing is that we can do it quickly, and I have a lot of experience in digital marketing. It will be relatively easy to figure out the worth of a sign up, and if we can get it above our CAC we will quickly be able to get breakeven. There are a lot of problems with it though. I currently only sign up for Netflix, some of the other founders have Spotify and Amazon prime subscriptions, but in general we are trying to charge for this service in a way people aren’t used to, and that we aren’t sure if we would sign up for ourselves. Also asking people to take their credit card out of their pocket for just 2$ isn’t traditionally advisable. At these very low levels of charges I imagine people are pretty insensitive to similar amounts. For example are we getting 50% less users at 3$ a month? Another issue is how different it is from other freemium experiences. When I think of mobile games I believe they get all their revenue from a tiny % of their users. 95% of people don’t pay, 1% of people pay 90% of the total revenue, so going for a very broad low cost model seems quite different from those experiences. Freemium makes more sense than a hard paywall because if we do get significant free version signups we could invest into setting up a proper affiliate program.

There is also an ad based model, but I don’t think it would be feasible to keep the advertisers specific to the country of our users, at least without being a ton of work and getting way less revenue. (For example if someone from the US was browsing and got shown a made in China pair of shoes, that would ruin the experience.)

I would love to hear any thoughts on this!

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    I'm not sure why you put "longpost" in the title but I don't think it'll attract much visitors with it haha.

    Regarding your post. That's an interesting extension. I never knew these extensions were around and that people gain money with it. Although I cannot advise you on a good business model, reading this post reminded me of something I saw earlier this week. When I visited buffer.com and they asked a couple of short questions about pricing. I think it was something like these questions:

    • What's your dream price to pay for Buffer?
    • What price would be too high for you?
    • What price would make it not trustworthy to use Buffer?

    I think this can give them quite a good insight into what people are willing to pay for buffer.

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      I'm looking for those special kind souls who see Long Post and can't wait to jump in!

      I will check out buffer.com, I haven't researched how to ask people what price I should pay yet.

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    Hey @PayOffWizard. I've already expressed my thoughts on the monetizing to you and, sadly, I don't have more advice to give at the moment.

    I am following tho and learning as well, hope you succeed.

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      I did forget to mention a few things tho about charging for subscriptions, specifically in extensions:

      • Chrome Web Store has disabled their in-built monetization. They've cited a few things, but rampant abuse of the system was #1 concern. That means, that unlike mobiles, there's no built-in way to pre-populate and charge for things, ie, the subscription funnel is then fully manual -- user has to enter everything which is not ideal
      • Because the built-in API is no longer useful, you now have to build a separate free vs paid user thing which is a hassle. One way that I saw this being overcome is that there is a public free extension and a private paid extension. While this is supported by CWS, the link could be leaked, meaning you still have to have some kind of client-side / extension validation
      1. 1

        Hi, from what I saw I thought they had disabled that during the pandemic, I haven't seen that it's a permanent thing. If that is the case that is very unfortunate for us.

        It will be really cumbersome to have 2 different programs for users, I don't see us managing to make that work.

        Thanks for the feedback, I will look into these more.

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