Money money money

[MWillits]

Just had a quick once-over Ovi payments and tried to correlate that with sales numbers from breakout reports and Ovi store reports. It seems that I'm only getting about a half the money I should be getting (and that's after Finnish VAT, Ovi, operators etc). And the gap has been continually increasing over the last year.

Is this just a problem with my account or do other have same problems??? I've emailed Ovi about this some two months ago with a nice spreadsheet and got no response.

Thx

P.S. It's a shame really that we have to reach for emails, XSLs, PDF invoices and paper bank statements then spend hours over them in this day and age. Wouldn't it be great if ovi reporting didn't show "estimates", but rather real data?

[Jon Heron]

Wouldn't it be great if ovi reporting didn't show "estimates", but rather real data?

YES!
I still cant believe it doesn't, never mind that all the competition shows the "real data"....
Whats the deal?

Cheers,
Jon

[pixsta]

Same problem here. I only get 40-50% of estimated revenues. I already wrote Ovi regarding this and got the plain answer that this is "normal" due to delayed operator billing.

[intellsys]

This is an annoying issue and these days I decided to find out how much differs estimates of the real payments. And most important, if any of our products show increased refund rates. Based on current month estimates and monthly payments my feeling was that I should expect a payment rate of about 70%-85%.

The major problem I faced trying to compile the data is that on July Ovi has changed reports format, such that now I've needed to manually edit every report to add invoice number, remove subtotals and fill in "Content fee amount" for each transaction. ( "Content fee amount" is available only for subtotals that is somehow unexplainable.) Another issue was a missing report for one of our invoices, resulting in very low payments for May and June, which I needed to compensate.

The results are well above my expectations:

At the first look, the overall paid/estimate rate for our account is 69.57% (TOTAL in red)
But the computed pay/estimate rate as an average for past months excluding most recent 4 moths is: 95.64% (AVERAGE in green)
And I am confident that the real rate is even better because I noticed transactions going 9 months back. If I compute the average excluding 7 months the pay/estimate rate becomes 97.41%

So the good news is that with a delay of 4 months we should expect receiving more than 95% of the estimated revenue, and after seven moths we shall get more than 97%. Refunds and returns are not so high, now the only question is how do we increase ten times the sales

This is the final result in a chart:

Please do not copy or reproduce this chart outside of this forum.

P.S.: The decisive fact, convincing me to undertake such a “laborious” two days task, was that January invoice reported to December estimate is only 41%

BR,
Lau

[pixsta]

Very interesting! I have started with a similar thing this month. The following table shows the percentage of received money from the estimated revenue (for my best-selling item):

May	97%	0%	100%
June	74%	51%	49%
July	97%	48%	52%
August	73%	25%	75%
September	60%	35%	65%
October	32%	0%	100%
November	14%	0%	100%

For explanation: The first column is the percentage from the estimated revenue that was really paid out (e.g. 14% in November), the second column is the percentage of paid out operator billing based payements respectively credit card payments.

The next table shows the average revenue per item (e.g. if the item costs 1€ then 100% equals 1€; according to the Ovi aggreement it should be 70% for credit card and 60% operator billing starting with October 2010):

	Operator %	Credit %
May	0%	80%
June	65%	80%
July	66%	84%
August	89%	77%
September	86%	79%
October	0%	74%
November	0%	74%

What you see is that the revenue per item is a bit higher than expected (due to price differences in different countries). Further, operator billing seems to have a delay of at least 2 months (e.g. no operator payment received for Oct/Nov with the December payment).
All data includes payments from June 2010 to December 2010. The latest payment from January 2011 is not included yet.

[vereal]

Yeah. I have just started selling my content. But looking at all these problems, begin to doubt. May waive the sales in OviStore and leave only the light version of the app. Conclude a contract with the bank for Internet-acquiring and sell only by credit cards through own website. Moreover, as already discussed, in OviStore completely absent protection and elementary to steal any content. Plus at own website also much more convenient. No need to wait months for any content changes to QA.
Tell from your experience, whether justified billing sales all of these risks?

[pixsta]

Yeah. I have just started selling my content. But looking at all these problems, begin to doubt. May waive the sales in OviStore and leave only the light version of the app. Conclude a contract with the bank for Internet-acquiring and sell only by credit cards through own website. Moreover, as already discussed, in OviStore completely absent protection and elementary to steal any content. Plus at own website also much more convenient. No need to wait months for any content changes to QA.
Tell from your experience, whether justified billing sales all of these risks?

I sell some applications through my personal website with an in-house payment system. But these are applications which are not available in Ovi-Store (neither as light nor full version) as it would break the Ovi Terms&Conditions!

The main problem is to drive interested users to your site which is really difficult. I started to sell one of my apps through the mentioned website. Sales were low but I got almost 100% of revenues (ok, you have to deduct VAT and some payment system fees so in fact revenue was about 75%) and the money was on my bank account - no inaccurate statistics etc. such as on Ovi store. Then I moved to Ovi store; sales doubled to trippled immediately but total (!) revenue was about the same as with the on-website sales. I finally decided to remove the app from Ovi store go to my private website again. To summarize: the number of sales in Ovi store was much higher than on a personal website, but revenue is much the same.

[vereal]

I sell some applications through my personal website with an in-house payment system. But these are applications which are not available in Ovi-Store (neither as light nor full version) as it would break the Ovi Terms&Conditions!

But where in the Ovi Terms&Conditions stated that I can not place the light/free version at OviStore, and the full version only on my site?

[Jon Heron]

In my experience Ovi store will reject your content if it links to a webpage that sells S60 software, even if its a link to your webpage in the about screen (and you sell software on your page).
Here is a snippet from a PM from OviJude:

Hi Jon,

I have some insight on why it's stuck in our QA process. It's because there is "For other great applications, visit snappyappz.com" under the "About section" and we are suspecting it's a link to external storefront which will fail our QA process.

The website was not a storefront and my app passed...
Cheers,
Jon

[ivanlitovski]

At the first look, the overall paid/estimate rate for our account is 69.57% (TOTAL in red)
But the computed pay/estimate rate as an average for past months excluding most recent 4 moths is: 95.64% (AVERAGE in green)

Remarkable. This leads me to believe something is wrong with my payments.

Stats are here

My data shows I've only received 59.7% of the estimated revenues until the end of 12/2010 (that is after VAT, Ovi's 30% and operator charges). If I exclude last 4 months, the number is 44.2%. If I include payment received in Jan 2011 (but not include revenues for this month), I get around 72%. Data starts in Dec 2009.

It would be great if you posted how exactly do you calculate "your average for past months excluding most recent 4 months". Even better, why not post the XSL so we don't compare apples with oranges...

Thanks

[pixsta]

Are your calculations based on the content fee breakout reports which are sent by email (by the way: has anyone received the report for the January payment yet?!?)? My calculations are based on these reports. Therefore I just sum up all payments received for a specific item and add them to the corresponding Month (bin). According to Ovi Terms&Condition the max. payment delay is 180 days, so the bins older than 6 months should not change anymore. For us this means that June 2010 is the last "full" bin which is in my case 74% of estimated revenue, but e.g. July is already 97%.

And for the estimated revenue I use the statistics provided as download (csv) in the Ovi reporting tool.

[intellsys]

Exactly, I have also used breakout reports. And once you have all data collated in one file you can use "Data pilot" on Open Office or Pivot tables on Excel. (I've used Open Office)

@pixsta
If I am not wrong Ovi Store Terms&Conditions refer to a 180 days term after they have received payment or proof of payment, so there are possible delays longer than 180 days in some extreme cases.
(P.S.: I have not received January breakout report yet.)

Remarkable. This leads me to believe something is wrong with my payments.

No, your chart looks ok. I understand you cumulate payments, we compared month by month, not cumulated. (Well, I have cumulated them to get the overall TOTAL (69.57%), that is equivalent for your Jan2011 value 72%. )

(I apologize I do not post the .xsl, I am not skiled enough to build a template or something like that and I do not feel comfortable posting the actual data tables.)