Hi everyone!
Today is very exciting as we are launching a major update to our resource marketplace. After a year and a half of hard work, we’re announcing our revamped resources system, Pro Resources, which will revolutionise buying and selling quality products.
Information for buyers
Our goal with the BuiltByBit resources marketplace is to provide buyers with the safest and easiest-to-use experience. The release of Pro resources will bring us closer to our goal with some significant improvements, making your experience even better. Authors who switch their resources to be Pro will give you the following benefits:
- Pay through almost any payment gateway, including PayPal, debit/credit cards, iDEAL, Przelewy24, Alipay, and 50+ others. Click here to view the full list of supported gateways
- Buy several resources at a time by adding them to your cart or buying a bundle to receive a discount on several resources from an author
- Additional privacy as authors will no longer be able to see your full name and potentially address that PayPal direct payments typically require
- Easier to understand license terms & agreements through our new standardised EULA. The permissions and limitations of using resources you purchase are always the same
- Earn money by referring resources to friends. Authors can opt to give you a % of the sale price on purchases you refer to them
- Try before you buy with our enhanced image carousel:
- Try server setups, plugins, and configurations in-game for free with our hosted testing servers, provided in partnership with PebbleHost
- Explore builds and models through 3D previews embedded into our site
- View gifs and YouTube videos of resources in action, all through the carousel
These benefits only apply to our new Pro resources, which authors must manually opt their resources into. Authors have the choice as to whether they’d like to opt their resources made before today into our new Pro system; we are working to onboard as many authors to provide you with the best experience that we can and already have almost two-thirds of resources by payment volume switched over to use these Pro features.
Pro resources will be distinguished from legacy resources with a ‘Pro’ tag, and each category has an added filter to show only Pro resources.
Information for authors
We strive to have the most powerful features for our authors to build your own businesses while not overwhelming you. This update is especially great news for the authors on our platform, bringing many new features that have been requested for years. Today we’re releasing 27 new features exclusive to our Pro resources. You can click on each to be directed to a more detailed explanation on our new Author Knowledge Base:
Increase ease of payment
- Full chargeback protection - Partnered with Tebex to ensure you never lose money from chargebacks again
- 50+ payment gateways - Accept PayPal, cards, and countless other payment methods to your Tebex Wallet
- Add-to-cart system - Buyers can add any Pro resources to their cart and checkout in a single transaction
- No PayPal account required - Accept PayPal payments even if you aren’t able to use PayPal
- Full sales tax compliance - VAT/GST will be collected and remitted for you, so you won’t have to worry
- Reduced gateway fees - Pay far less than the regular PayPal gateway fees, just 2.49% + 40c per transaction
- Enhanced privacy - You and your buyers can no longer see each other's full names and addresses after purchases
- Coupon codes & license keys - Create % or $ off discount codes to share, up to 100% off
- Split payments - Automatically provide collaborators with a portion of your resource revenue
- New EULA system - Replaced old Terms and Conditions with consistent terms so buyers easily understand their rights
Increase basket sizes
- Addons & upsells - Sell extra files and services on top of your resource, such as a premium support Discord role
- Bundles - Batch several resources together into a single package and sell them at a discounted price
- Pay-what-you-want - Set a minimum price (or release for free) and let buyers pay you what they think you deserve
- Cross-sells - Checkout process optimised to increase the likelihood of buyers purchasing several resources
Increase discoverability
- Curated sale events - Include your resources in our site-wide sales for special events like Christmas
- Monthly email newsletters - Have your resources feature in our monthly newsletter to 200,000+ subscribers
- Referral links - Give affiliates a portion of sales when they refer a buyer who buys your resource automatically
- Discord bot - Automatically verify buyers in your Discord server and assign them specified roles
- Pro-only filter - Display your resource alongside others when buyers select only to show Pro resources
Increase conversion
- Hosted testing servers - Provide us with files, and we’ll host a server for buyers to try your product for 30 minutes
- 3D preview - Seamlessly host and integrate SketchFab into your product page for builds and 3D models
- Advanced image carousel - Attach GIFs and embed YouTube videos to the carousel to display your resource
- Automatic buyer conversations - Start conversations with buyers upon purchase to send additional information
- Advanced wishlist - View information on which resources have been wishlisted the most by users
- Powerful analytics - Understand the performance of your resources to optimise the purchase experience
- Custom tab links - Neatly link to external platforms such as GitHub, Discord, and Patreon on your product page
- Receive reactions - Added social proof of receiving likes, hearts, winners, and other reactions
You’ll notice that we’ve focused our improvements on four core areas for Pro resources. This Pro resources system has been in the works behind the scenes for over a year, and since the beginning, these areas have been where we’ve concentrated our efforts. Increasing basket sizes, discoverability, conversion, and the ease with which buyers can pay are four ways that our authors are able to make more money and better support their buyers.
Cost
The upfront and ongoing costs of Pro features haven’t been cheap for our partners and us to provide, so we will be charging authors a small 9.9% platform fee on each purchase for resources that migrate over. The release of Pro resources allows us to introduce new features which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible to provide, such as free hosted testing servers for buyers and other expensive benefits. We’ve worked hard to reduce this fee to be as low as possible, and we’re confident that the cost will be minor compared to the additional revenue it will bring through the optimised purchase flow for buyers.
How to migrate to Pro
Almost two-thirds of resource revenue has been migrated and is already being earned through Pro! All free resources have automatically been migrated to Pro, so they will have the benefits of Pro for no added cost. Switching to Pro is completely optional for existing resources published before today, so if you would prefer to continue selling resources without our fee or these new features, then you are welcome to do so.
If you’re not currently an author on BuiltByBit but would be interested in publishing your assets on our platform, then that’s great to hear! All resources created from today onwards use our Pro system, so it’s as simple as creating a resource to get started. Today we've removed our requirement of a $10 Premium account upgrade in order to publish paid resources, so now is a great time to start. Also, check out more information about our free migration service, where our team will assist you in moving from another platform to ours.
Removal of Premium requirement for paid resources
Anyone can now create paid resources, even without a Premium account upgrade! This huge step significantly lowers the barriers to making money on BuiltByBit and means that anyone can start publishing with no upfront costs; we only make money when you do, so we will always remain perfectly aligned. This is something we're particularly excited about because it brings us one step closer towards our vision of being the safest and easiest platform for young entrepreneurs to learn about business and earn money.
Resources submitted by users with the Premium account upgrade will receive a higher priority in our resource approval queue, so our existing Premium authors can expect their resources to be approved up to 3 days sooner than unranked users.
Resources is our new homepage
As you've likely noticed, we've changed our homepage from forums to resources! While we have no plans of ever removing our forums, this change was made to reflect our focus on our resource marketplace as the future of our platform. We have plans in the coming months to design a new homepage that provides a better mix of content from both areas of our site, so watch this space!
Other changes applicable to all resources
Beyond these Pro features, there are a number of changes we’ve made that apply to both Pro and Legacy resources. We’ve completely redeveloped the resource creation page from scratch with a tabbed design to reduce complexity from adding all of the added options. You can also work with collaborators to publish resources, save your progress to come back later, and preview what your product page will look like before it is public. We've added new resource states for you to have better control of how your resources behave. A resource’s state can now also be draft, unpublished, or unlisted (read more about resource states here). We’ve made other minor changes and improvements, including:
- Added a minimum price of $0.99 for resources. All paid resources with their price set below this threshold have been increased to $0.99
- Added rule 5.10 which clarifies that we don’t allow authors to encourage buyers to pay through manual methods or external payment gateways, such as cryptocurrency gateways, on their product page. This rule was added to ensure we can provide the most seamless and safe buying experience and for licenses to remain tracked on our platform
- Added ability for collaborators to bump resources that they’re added to and to see resources they’re collaborating on within their author dashboard
- Added ability to create a launch sale event before your resource becomes active, automatically giving a defined discount for seven days after your resource is published
- Added an option for sale events allowing you to easily apply a sale event to all eligible resources rather than having to search for each individual resource
- Added a search bar to the resource homepage and category pages
- Added a Resource ownership rights forum as a place to buy, sell, and trade the ownership of your resources
- Added a requirement that all resources must use at least 3 tags to be published/updated
- Adjusted the number of purchases displayed on resources only to show the number of actual purchases made through our platform. Manually issued licenses no longer count towards this total
- Adjusted our ads manager to only allow for Pro resources to be added as featured resources. Any resources not switched to Pro before next week's auction will automatically have their bids removed until you switch them to Pro
- Adjusted resource reviews to now clearly show when a review was given for a product that wasn't paid for through our platform to prevent abuse
- Adjusted the Author dashboard dropdown in the navbar to show more options for authors to easily select without having to go to the overview page
- Adjusted the cooldown between creating sale events from 28 to 14 days and the maximum amount of time a sale event can last from 14 to 7 days
- Removed the day and year units of time when setting license durations, instead requiring all licenses to be specified as a number of months. All current licenses and resources have been rounded to the nearest month. The minimum license duration is now 1 month, so any resources set to just a few days have also been rounded up
- Removed the ability to create a temporary license that lasts for longer than 60 months. If you’d like a license to last for longer than 5 years, set it to be a permanent license instead
- Removed the ability to specify a minimum number of days after the resource is purchased that a renewal will be possible due to a lack of use. All resources can now be renewed at any time after purchasing and the time will be extended
Mick
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