Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Coupon Experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I tried an experiment with coupons.  I put a coupon code for 10% off Action Solitaire in my email newsletter.  Now this in itself was nothing new, I've done this many times before.  I've never had particularly much success with such coupons in the past.

The experiment was that I added a bit more.  In addition to the 10% code in the newsletter, I offered a 20% off code for people who have previously ordered either Pretty Good Solitaire or Pretty Good Mahjongg, and then a 30% off code for people who have previously ordered both products.  But these coupon codes were not in the newsletter - they had to email me with their registration codes (as proof that they had purchased), and I would email them back the coupon code.

So the question was, would I get more orders from the 20/30% off codes or more from the 10% codes?

On the one hand, using the 10% code is easy, all you had to do was order and use the code you had already from the newsletter.  The 20/30% codes were harder to get since you had to look up your registration code in the game and email it.  And there is a school of thought that you are supposed to make things as easy as possible for the customer, anything you do to make it harder to order will result in less orders.  Certainly the higher discount codes required much more work on the customer's part.

On the other hand, the 20/30% off codes offered a bigger discount.

On the gripping hand, you had to already be a customer to get the bigger discount.  While my email list has a lot of customers on it, there are a large percentage of people on the list who haven't ordered.

So the results would be interesting.  It has now been almost two weeks - although I'm still getting requests for codes by email, most of the orders should be in by now.  What happened?

The results were that the 20/30% codes, the ones where they had to email me for their coupon codes, resulted in 10 times more orders than the 10% codes.    Customers were quite willing to do more work for a bigger reward.  (The 30% codes got 50% more orders than the 20% codes as well).

Note: if you don't know what I meant by "on the gripping hand", you haven't read enough science fiction.

Pretty Good MahJongg v2.32

We have released a new version of Pretty Good MahJongg.

Version 2.32 can be downloaded here.

This is our 4th release of the year, and another release related to Windows Vista.  With this release, all of our major products have been updated for improved Vista compatibility.  There are still a few other products to go, but these products are also undergoing a complete overhaul and so will be released a litte bit later,  In any case, the current versions will run in Vista, so there's no big hurry. 

We have 8 more releases planned by July.   After 4 releases in 4 weeks, however, we are going to take a couple of weeks off from them.

More Snow Pictures

Whodunnit?

The crime scene:

Blood stains on the sunroom floor this morning.  What happened here?

The victim:

Corpse found on the laundry room floor.  Deceased from massive trauma.  Corpse was moved from the crime scene, probably in the killer's mouth.

The suspects:

Mild mannered and innocent looking Inquistor.  Is she hiding a dark secret?

Ace.  Known to play with toy mousies, did she upgrade to the real thing?

Pumpkin.  A known felon with two priors.  Did she chalk up her third kill?

Before and After

Before:

Our driveway.

The 3 foot drifts in front of our door.

After:

Stage 1 of the snow shovelling is complete.  You can actually get to the street.

Stage 2 will be to make it wide enough that a car can actually get out.  That will be after I recover.  I don't think I have shoveled so much snow since 1973 (normally, we can get out without shovelling at all, but this snow was much too large for that). There's no hurry... there is nowhere to go.  Everything is closed.

From the State Journal-Register:

By 8 p.m. Tuesday, Springfield had received 11.2 inches of snow, making it the fourth-deepest 24-hour snowfall in city history.

Visitor

The other day (before the snow), we had a visitor.

He is an orange and white tabby and he came right up to the door.  He stood his ground, too, when Pumpkin went totally nuts (as she always does) and hissed and growled at him.  This is unlike our regular visitor, a tuxedo cat, who runs for the fence as soon as Pumpkin starts at it.

I've not seen this cat before, I hope it has a home.  There's been no sign of him since the snow.

Blizzard

We are snowed in.

From the Springfield Journal-Register:

By 9:30 a.m., the Springfield area was blanketed with as much as 7.3 inches of snow, according to Chris Geelhart, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln. A steady snowfall continued and was expected to dump another two to five inches before tapering off this evening, Geelhart said.

The Weather Channel, meanwhile, said Springfield could see another four to six inches of snow Tuesday.

If this forcast comes true, this will be the largest snowfall we have had in many, many years.

Some People are Just Nuts

Today when I was out driving I drove past the lake (we live near the lake - to get anywhere you have to drive past it).  There were people out on the lake in boats.  The temperature at the time was 15 degrees F (that's about -10 degrees C).   

On the other hand, it's a beautiful sunny day today.  Even though it is cold, our heat is not running because the sun is coming in the sunroom warming the entire house up.  And, of course, the cats are basking in the sunlight.

New Releases

I continue to be busy with new product releases.  I have set an ambitious schedule of 12 releases in the first 6 months of 2007.  That is more releases than I've done in the previous 2 years combined.  These releases include 10 updates to existing products and 2 new product releases.

So far, 3 of these releases are already done.  Pretty Good Solitaire v11.0.1 and Action Solitaire v1.12 were released in January, and Most Popular Solitaire v1.12 was released yesterday.  The 4th release is being prepared and will be ready soon.  So far, all of these releases are related to Windows Vista, but once those are out of the way there will be others.

Most Popular Solitaire v1.12

We have released a new version of Most Popular Solitaire.

Version 1.12 can be downloaded here.

This is another of our updates for Windows Vista.  This release improves Most Popular Solitaire's compatibility with Vista (previous versions work on Vista, but the help file would not be accessible, and this fixes some minor issues).