Last weekend we decided to run something of an experiment with LittleSnapper on the Mac App Store, dropping the price to just $4.99 for a few days. As with any pricing adjustment, we obviously wanted to balance the extra exposure (and hopefully sales) against any angst from users who bought the app previously on the App Store. Remember, unlike our own store where we could hypothetically refund unhappy customers from the previous day there's no way to do that on the Mac App Store.

Prior to the weekend LittleSnapper retailed for $24.99. For three days it sold for $4.99 and since then, the price has been $19.99 - a price that we believe to be a little more appealing to users (that is, under the psychological $20 barrier as opposed to simply "cheaper").

So how did things go?

Rankings

Over the course of the first 24 hours of the promotion, we jumped from 284 in the US Top Paid Apps chart to number 11 - and in the US Top Grossing, we jumped from 120 to number 17. As a result of the large chart leaps, LittleSnapper appeared in the What's Hot section of the store (where it remains today). Even today, we're about 100 places higher in the respective charts than we were before.

Reviews

Prior to the sale, LittleSnapper had relatively few reviews on the Store. Today, there's 33 Five-Star reviews for the App. Almost all of the increase was driven by people writing glowing reviews after picking up a bargain copy of the the app.

Sales

On the first day of the promotion, we saw LittleSnapper sell roughly 60 times as many copies as the previous day. There was an inevitable decline (users snatched up the deal as soon as the price changed), however we're now selling roughly double the number of LittleSnapper copies that we were before. We think that whilst the lower price ($19.99 as opposed to $24.99) certainly influences this number, we're attributing most of this increase to exposure through the higher chart rankings mentioned above.

So would we recommend the idea of a short-term App Store sale? Absolutely. Some may have qualms with volatile pricing (not to mention the devaluing of a product's worth), but at the same time developers will always look to increase their rankings on the Store and this is certainly one promotion we'd consider running again in the future.