Would you close sales in a specific country?
Hey hackers,
The more I talk multi-currency with people, the more I see this opinion that's counter-intuitive to me: Some founders would like to close their products to some countries. This can be either temporary or definitive. Some of the reasons:
- Not wanting to deal with customers because they don't speak the language
- Not wanting to spend time on customers that have lower purchasing power than their ideal customer
- Political events (Russia/Ukraine)
- Legal events (India not allowing recurring payments)
How do you feel about this?
I could easily add the "block payments in such country" feature on Pricery.io but it's a sensitive topic, and I'd like to refine my thinking with you all.
On the contrary, I love seeing founders make it easier for people from everywhere to use their product. It's so cool to see founders incorporating purchasing power parity pricing and multi-language options. I remember reading that @gergely used this way of pricing with The Tech Resume Inside Out and it ended up accounting for between 30 and 40 percent of his sales. It's a win/win.
I agree! The other thing is that 55 percent of all content online is in english, though only 5 percent of users are english speaking. People think the internet has "leveled the playing field" as far as access to education, online services, etc., but that's not necessarily the case.
SO TRUE! When you push your website in English, one would think that anyone can access it, but if you account for secondary speakers, only 17% of the world pop can barely read what your homepage says. In other words, 83% of the world can not comprehend what's being said on your website !!!
It's even worst with price localization, since the number of people able to pay for your product is a fraction of that number.
Thanks for this wholesome comment @fleur_inthecity !
I absolutely agree: International pricing and parity pricing are key to increase foreign sales, remove friction, and even prevent local competitors from rising. That's 100% the reason I started pricery.io. Thanks for the The Tech Resume example. I will reach out to @gergely right now!
Depends. In my case for SUALVI for example. If I really wanted to I could ban a couple of countries from getting to my shop to prevent them from reselling my paid templates.
I found a couple of online shops that had stolen and compiled assets from many different places and would either resell them as their own or give them away for free to make money from ad traffic.
A quick search helped me find out where they were based of and if I wanted to take the time to do it, I probably would. Although the people that would've gone to those site wouldn't have been customers either way.
Hi Kev, what's SUALVI? Is that your product?
In SUALVI I help people learn how to use DVR to edit their videos. And the actual products are digital assets so that they don't have to build them from scratch if they don't want. Like, animated titles, transitions, some tools, etc.
Ok, I found your website, it makes more sense to me now ;)
I'm surprised to see 10 likes, but almost no comments. Would you or would you not close your app sales to some countries if you could? And why?
as a small time founder i feel the same. If i had moeny and legal resources i would have tried to provide services to everyone irrespective of their country however i am struggling to make ends meet and i cannot deal with repercussions of serving customers from companies sanctioned by my government.
I don't understand your point: You would close sales to some countries?
yes for e.g. north korea or iran.
Got it!