GetlyOur own products, taken apart
We sell things here too. Here are the decisions that shaped them, including the bad ones.
We made every call in these two, so we can show the reasoning rather than assert it — and say which calls were wrong. Nothing below is advice we have not taken.
Why we wrote this down
Across 2,894 live products from 1,254 stores, 1,480 ship exactly one image, 383 carry a description under 200 characters, and 2,746 state no licence in the one field a buyer, a filter or a search engine can read. A rule on its own is an opinion; a rule with a product beside it that visibly follows it is a standard.
Five things a listing owes its buyer
- 01
Answer the question the buyer is actually asking
Not "what is this" — they can see that. "Will this work for me, and what happens after I pay?" Name the version it needs, what is in the download, and what they have to do first. 383 live listings have a description too short to answer any of that.
- 02
Show it more than once
One image is a thumbnail, not evidence. Show the thing in use, show what is inside the file, show the part you are proudest of. 1,480 live listings have exactly one image, which is the single cheapest thing on this page to fix.
- 03
Say what they may do with it
For a digital product this is the whole question, and 2,746 live listings do not answer it. The product wizard asks for a licence when you create one now; if yours predates that, one dropdown closes it.
- 04
State what it does not do
The fastest way to defuse a refund request is to have already said the thing the buyer is about to be disappointed by. It costs a sentence, and it is the part of every listing below that took the longest to write.
- 05
Make sure it opens on a machine that is not yours
Ask anyone who has sold assets and you get the same story: it worked for the author because their environment quietly supplied something the buyer's does not — a script that happens to sit in that project, a texture still on that disk. That is why the two products below are checkers, and why Getly reads the bytes you upload rather than trusting the check that ran on your own computer.
The products, taken apart
Every decision, what it cost, and what we got wrong first.
Requires Unity 2020.3 or newer
Getly Publisher for Unity
A free editor tool that reads your package the way a buyer's project will.
Requires Blender 4.2 or newer
Getly Publisher for Blender
A free, GPL extension that finds what will be magenta on the buyer's machine.