New purchasing power parity discounts
Since shortly after the launch of my first book, I’ve offered a simple “purchasing power parity” deal: a 50% discount for those outside the top 50 countries by GDP (according to Wikipedia’s table). I really want to make sure my knowledge is accessible by as many people as possible, at a fair price.
The discount has been somewhat successful, with:
- 94 claims out of 708 sales for Speed Up Your Django Tests
- 105 claims out of 707 sales for Boost Your Django DX
But I did initially expect a higher percentage of discounted sales.
The current process has purchasers email me their request, to which I reply with appropriate discount code links. Whilst I enjoy hearing from the developers around the world who contact me, it is somewhat labour intensive. I’m sure there are some people who don’t claim because of the effort, and sometimes I take few days to reply, hindering access.
Gumroad, the platform I sell my books on, announced a purchasing power parity feature a few days ago on Twitter. If a creators activates it for their products, their checkout pagess automatically add location-based discounts:
A much smoother process. They haven’t (yet) published per-country discount data, but the documentation states:
The discounts range from 20% - 60%, are sourced from the World Bank, and refresh weekly.
It’s possible that this change will make my book more expensive in some countries and cheaper in others. But there may be countries within the GDP top 50 that now gain a discount - we just can’t tell right now.
Despite this opacity, I’ve just switched it on, as an experiment.
Please check out the sales pages for my products to see if you’re offered a discount:
If you spot any problems, let me know with an email!
—Adam
Learn how to make your tests run quickly in my book Speed Up Your Django Tests.
One summary email a week, no spam, I pinky promise.
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