One day your write a cool software utility and decide to sell it on the Internet. Welcome to the club! We estimate that there are about 20000 active shareware companies at any given time in the world. Where to start? This article is covering the basic aspects of selling shareware online.

Create a Website.
Buy a domain name, create a website, upload software screenshots and write program description, write something about it's cool features and why do you think it is useful to people. If you are a software engineer, try to make your description clear to an average Joe. It is always good to have full software "Help" section available on the developers website. Keep your website clean, the visitor should understand that this site is about software that he could purchase online.

Built a trial license protection for your software.
Usually when you finish writing your software utility it is a freeware that means anybody can run it once installed on his computer. Therefore you must implement a trial limitation to your version. Two main types of trial protection exist: time-limited and features- limited trial types. With a time trial protection potential customer installs a trial version, which may be feature limited version of the full software or time limited version or both.

Time trial protection is the most popular one. This means that when a user installs the software he can use it "for free" for only so many days, typically 30. Some software developers targeting "impulse buyers" may set it lower, say 10 days, some products, usually that run daily on your PC may have time trial limit set to 60 or even 90 days.

With a limited features trial protection you may limit certain features of the software in a trial version. These could be important pieces of software functionality, say for a file converter you may limit a maximum size of the file to be converted or total number of files that could be converted at once. The user will still be able to use the software, however he will miss the crucial functionality of the product and may buy it later since he urgently needs it.

How to protect your software? You may write sophisticated software protection algorithms yourself but why spend time to invent a wheel? There are many software protection packages available such as Asprotect or Armadillo.

How to collect payments
Ok now you are ready with your product and the website and you want to start selling your software. We estimate that over 95% of shareware products sold online are paid by credit cards. But here you are facing an issue that you cannot charge major credit cards (VISA, Mastercard, AMEX) unless you have a merchant account. There are software registration companies that will do this for you. Digital River is a leader in this area. They own and operate several software registration and credit card processing companies: Regnow, ShareIt, Swreg, eSellerate. There are also other independent companies such as Plimus, Avangate (Romania), CleverBridge (Germany), SoftKey (Russia). You may also use PayPal. Service charges that these companies collect vary depending on your product pricing, additional features that you may order from them. It is the best to check each software registration company listed above to see if it suits your needs.

Marketing and advertising your software
This is a very broad topic but for shareware I would identify few major types of promoting your software.

Submit your product to shareware archives. For example Filesland , SerialDownloads, TverSoft are sample software archives. There are over 1000 software archives. You may use automated submission tool such as Robosoft. This software utility allows to write a standardized software description and submit it automatically to about 1000 software archives. Once your product is listed there you will immediately get first orders, people come to shareware archives

Use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Yes it works. You may open a pay per click account at Google Adwords or Overture which is a Yahoo company now, put a few dollars on your account, write and ad and it will be displayed on thousands of websites at once. People will come to your site, download trial version of your product and if they like it then purchase it.

Newsgroups: sometimes people online are looking for specific tool. This could be anything, say MP3 to WAV converter or Search and Replace tool. If you product has functionality that is exactly the same that the newsgroups poster is looking for you may post comments about your software. Not only you will let that person know about your software, but hundreds of other visitors will see that post over time.

Email marketing. Yes I am talking about legit email marketing, not spam. There may be lists of users available that would like to purchase your product. They may subscribe to certain news and will be happy to see that a new software product is available. Forums, shareware archives and blogs may have these email lists. You would have to contact the owner of the website/forum/blog and arrange an email advertising campaign for it.