[Authors] offering paid support

Parallelus said
Yesterday a customer stated since the theme they bought cost $50 they expected better support than a $35 theme, otherwise the price should be reduced to $35. The discussion was unrelated to the actual support being given, they were just expressing an opinion.

Really? Oh god!
I face “complicated” and demanding people each day in our ticket system,… I guess that’s just how the world turns.

duotive said
I have a question for you guys. Do you make small changes to the themes for free?

we do not offer any customisations at all for free or payment. if it’s a bug we fix it, if they’re having trouble using it we help, if they want to set a theme up exactly like the demo we help, if they want to change some colours or graphics (or more) we tell them “sorry this requires web development skills, please find a web developer, we are unavailable for freelance work”

Back onto offering paid support. We will clearly list the things we offer support for (free or paid) and clearly list the things we do not offer support for (free or paid). We are not currently setup to take on custom tweaks or freelance projects, so are not intending to have a higher priced “customisations” option.

• I cannot install this item
• I cannot make it look like the live demo
• I am getting an error when using this
• Pre-sales question

• Please customise the images/colours/layout/menu
• Please add this extra xyz feature for me
• Please create a new item with similar features to the one I bought

We’ll also have to have something about refunds like It support staff feel your question cannot be answered under our Priority Paid Support you will be given a refund as soon as we read your question. No refunds can be given after we spend the time to help you with your problem, no matter the outcome of the problem. This is simply a priority service fee so you can get your question looked at quickly.

As emphasis here is on the priority factor, we will answer paid priority support questions in the order they pay to make it fair.

Bah, I hate long posts. But there we go.

if they want to change some colours or graphics (or more) we tell them “sorry this requires web development skills, please find a web developer, we are unavailable for freelance work”

And another question: what do you do if the change is something that you did not think when you created the theme ( multilingual slideshows ) and they asked you to added ( that is not a feature, that is a must if the website is multilanguage AND it’s not a bug )

And what do you do if the theme does not work with a plugin?

This all end up to user feedback. Do you get bad feedback if you do not do this? That is what i am afraid of.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

Well I’ve just whipped together a very basic optional “paid” support feature.

It is available here: http://support.dtbaker.com.au/support-ticket.html (see near the bottom)

I’ll update again after a week or so of using it. I wonder if anyone will pay? Interesting test!

Nice! Good luck. I’m very excited to hear the result!

Well it has only been 4 days and I have already had 7 paid support email tickets ($8USD each).

It’s early days, but I think this is working wonderfully!

Down the track I might hack on another paid support level that will include instant messaging / skype support – charged a lot more of course.

Very nice result, the great idea is to show “with paid you will be put in N position on 128”. So many tickets to wait is a lot of time, so your system works well!

There are no doubt, if you have many tickets to solve, this should bring few extra incomes

dtbaker said
Well it has only been 4 days and I have already had 7 paid support email tickets ($8USD each).

It’s early days, but I think this is working wonderfully!

Down the track I might hack on another paid support level that will include instant messaging / skype support – charged a lot more of course.

Hmm. That’s barely $500. If you are earning $5K+, then is a 10% addition really worth confusing some buyers and making the other angry (perhaps). Also have you considered what will happen when 80% of buyers opt for paid support?

For the instant support, are you going to bring someone or do it yourself. As a developer, I don’t really enjoy being disrupted while I’m coding.

So these are just my thoughts, not to say you idea is not good. Actually, the support system is kind of broken and need some new resolutions