X-Developer Cross-platform development in C++, Flight Simulation

Whether to sell on X-Plane.org or X-Aviation (UPDATED!)

As a developer who sells his product on both platforms, I want to give other devs insight on the pros and cons of each platform. Don't expect a definite "winner" or a special recommendation for you, I'm just sharing my personal experience and thoughts here.

Own website vs established shop

First, let's talk about using one of these platforms in the first place. As a newcomer, using a renowned shop platform is a must. You may think your product is good enough to be sold through your personal website only, you can do marketing and advertisement yourself, and you are trustworthy enough so people send you money.
Trust me, you are most certainly wrong!
Buying immaterial things like software online relies on trust, perhaps even more than buying things in real life.
For the customer, buying on your personal website with Paypal button is like buying a used car from "Honest Achmed" in a shabby backyard, whereas buying on X-Aviation or X-Plane.org is more like going into a big Mercedes-Benz showroom and being served by a besuited official.

Sure, people like Peter Hager may be successful selling their planes through their own website, but few people in our community have earned the trust that every product of theirs is top-notch quality.
So, unless you have a track record like Peter, you should rely on the trust that people have in the big online shops, with the thousands of customers already, various payment methods, buzzing support forums, and the strong feeling that you actually get something for your money.

Now that we have decided we must sell through an established selling platform, being X-Plane developers, our choice boils down to the above mentioned "Big Two".

Shop websites

First, the similarities: Both offer a top-notch e-commerce system with product categories, preview pages, shopping cart/checkout, customer database, the whole enchilada. Both offer your customers the option to checkout either with credit card or Paypal.
Considering the overall visual appearance, the X-Aviation shop website wins. It looks tidier and more "Web 2.0"-like with the customer reviews built in. Also the graphics look sleek and modern, the animation is smooth and unobtrusive.
X-Plane.org on the other hand is more like Amazon or the classic GMail. Rather basic in the visual appearance, but well structured and clear. The icons look a bit 1999 though.

Support forums

Also, both offer hosting the support forum for your product - here X-Plane.org is the clear winner. The "Invision Power" forum software they use is simply great. The moderation options are very intuitive to use. Posting multiple attachments and graphics is done easily. The search function is a bit strange though, as you have to be proficient in using the advanced search options to get good results. The quick search tries to be smart but fails often. Another big plus of the IPBoard software is the mobile version. Browsing the X-Plane.org forums on your IPhone or Android is a great experience and feels like a native app. Browsing the X-Pilot.com forums on a mobile device is a pain, as you are constantly scrolling right and left.
The X-Aviation support forum (X-Pilot.com) is a rather simple forum software that is also less intuitive to moderate.
Update 2011-08-25: X-Aviation also uses IPBoard now, which is a huge step forward in usability of their online community. It is a newer software version than the one X-Plane.org uses. However, I've not yet got my moderator rights back which got lost in the migration process. So I can't comment on the moderation options of the latest IPBoard software. The mobile version however doesn't work at all for me. I tapped the link "mobile version" several times, but still get the standard layout on my Android. I heard from IPhone users that it works great there. I messed up more than one support thread when trying to split parallel discussions in a topic apart and literally spent half an hour getting a thread back together.
A big plus for X-Aviation though is that given their smaller portfolio they are able to provide support themselves, as they know all the products they sell a lot better than it would be possible for X-Plane.org with a total of 435 products at the time of writing.
I have complete confidence that when I'm unable to check the forum myself for a few days, Cameron will take care of all the obvious newbie questions, answer all installation-related issues and leave only the really hard-core questions for me to answer. That is something I can't and won't expect from the X-Plane.org store.

So much for the visible, the "customer" side. On the developer side there are huge differences.

Distribution System and Reporting Software

To put it in one sentence: X-Aviation offers a whole distribution system, X-Plane.org offers only a shop.
Part of the excellent distribution system of X-Aviation is a GTK-based wrapper/installer that works the same on Windows, Linux and Mac. It is very user-friendly and goes hand-in-hand with the activation/copy-protection system. I know very little about the technical details, but I know for sure that this system has an unprecedented track record - I have not been able to find a working copy of one of the X-Aviation bestsellers on any of the usual suspect websites. Sure, every system can be broken, but I think X-Aviation set the bar very high on this. If anything can be improved in the installer, then it would be a detection for the folder the user selected. If it tested for the presence of X-Plane.app or X-Plane.exe to make sure the user selected the X-Plane main folder, it would score 100% on my personal scale. So it's only 99%.
Getting all this to work requieres you only to link a ludicrously small static library to your plugin code. This static library is available for all platforms with the gcc compiler, and now -because of my demand- for Windows also with the MS Visual C++ 9.0 compiler.
When sales begin, you can watch them live on the X-Aviation reporting system. The reporting screen is very intuitive and clear, you get the overview over the total sales and earnings on each day, summaries for each month, and a fancy little graph plotting your sales over time, which is extremely helpful if you want to see the impact of marketing like a paper advert. X-Aviation pays out every two weeks, and you may choose to be wired the money to your bank account or to use PayPal.

Compared to that, the X-Plane.org store is rather basic. It's more or less a way you can sell files. They don't provide an installer, a distribution system, or any means of activation or copy-protection. For many X-Plane products this is sufficient, as the typical X-Plane aircraft consists of a single folder you drop into one of the Aircraft/ subdirectories, and you're done. But as soon as you have to distribute other stuff, like the AIRAC data or additional frameworks your plugin requires, giving only a .zip-file to your customers is no longer an option. I resorted to using InnoSetup on Windows and InstallJammer on Linux. Both are very good solutions, easy to configure and the installers look instantly familiar to Windows users. The InstallJammer wizard panes are based on Tcl/Tk and try to resemble Windows Installer, which looks a bit awkward on Linux. For Mac I use Apple Package Maker, which is a huge pain in the ### to configure. Dear Apple, aren't you the company claiming to have the most intuitive UIs? Then go back to the drawing boards with Package Maker, will you?!
Also, it is left up to you, the developer, to think of a way to protect your software against piracy. The X-Plane.org shop offers a system to distribute serial numbers with each purchase though. You can provide a list of pre-computed serial numbers to the shop, that are sequentially issued with the purchases.
The reporting system of the X-Plane.org store also offers a live view and a month-summary, but it lacks many of the nice computations the X-Aviation system does for you, like the earnings-per-month and the neat graph.
You may also choose to be notified of each single order via e-mail. Which I diverted to a separate account, because it totally clutters up my workflow. Payout is at the beginning of each month, preferred payout method is also PayPal.

User base and marketing

Now on to marketing. First thing to note is that X-Plane.org has a HUGE user base. Based on the registered users, the X-Plane.org newsletter is read by nearly ten times the people who read the X-Aviation newsletter. A single marketing action on X-Plane.org can have huge impact. Also, X-Plane.org often has special offers bundling two or three products to be sold at a discounted price. With more than 170.000 registered users, announcements on the X-Plane.org forums reach a lot more readers than on X-Aviation.
Update 2010-08-25: It is also noteable that X-Plane.org ist the 3rd largest Flight sim site behind Avsim and flightsim.com (which are mostly FSX).
Also according to Nicolas' statistics, users spend more time and view more pages per visit than any other flight sim website. Since Nicolas also runs the Avsim store, I trust him he has access to these statistics and knows how to read them.

All things considered, I have to conclude that you can reach more potential customers when selling on X-Plane.org.

X-Aviation in turn is more like a place where they sell hand-picked jewelry. Less users, less potential customers. But customers that are used to very high quality standard. Probably more potent customers, looking for top-notch software. Your product has to be good to be sold on X-Aviation. If the quality of the X-Aviation users makes up for the lack of quantity I don't know yet.

Summary

X-Aviation: Top-notch, state-of-the-art distribution system
X-Plane.org: MASSIVE user base

No, there's no final recommendation. I'm happy to have my product sold on both platforms. I like Cameron as a business partner as much as I like Nicolas, and I don't care that they don't like each other. Perhaps it's "the mercy of late birth", as a former German chancellor put it, that I never engaged in the turf war between them, because the split happened long before I had my first encounter with X-Plane.

So I encourage any author of X-Plane software to find his/hers matching business partner and continue creating and selling great software!

PS: Unlike to my other posts, I allow comments on this. But when spamming gets too worse, I will eventually close them.