Sure. As you may know currently we earn on selling the user guide, copyright removal key, premium support and customization services.
This theme is more like an experiment to see how popular (and profitable) it could be. There will be 3 more themes released: computer store, clothes store, wedding store. PSD are already done, HTML markup is being developed now. Then we plan (maybe) to develop several commercial plugins (not related to theming) such as shipping or payment modules, feeds, live chats, etc.
But most of our efforts is currently focused on the customization services.
This theme is more like an experiment to see how popular (and profitable) it could be. There will be 3 more themes released: computer store, clothes store, wedding store. PSD are already done, HTML markup is being developed now. Then we plan (maybe) to develop several commercial plugins (not related to theming) such as shipping or payment modules, feeds, live chats, etc.
But most of our efforts is currently focused on the customization services.
Thanks Andrei, this is valuable information!
Tim, Eduardo,
Your thoughts are also well appreciated as always!
I really hope you are right and I am speaking on behalf of all the people that run and work for Nop-Templates full time.
But since Andrei, mentioned Magento and Prestashop, I think there is a clear distinction between the business models that these companies follow to monetize their systems.
Mangeto have the enterprise version and Prestashop have their addons.
Magento have a huge market place of third party vendors, whose competition among each other has made Magento as big as it is right now.
Prestashop in contrast have a way smaller market place dominated by their "module certified" (same as "official") labeled addons and a community of freelancers who try to scrape a living out of a few sales of their own addons.
I don't think that Magento themselves have commercial themes or addons. They do have a few themes but they are free and basic. Their business model is quite different after all.
Which model is better? From the point of view of the creators this is subjective. Which model is more scalable? well... one thing is for sure - Magento was launched later than Prestashop, but it wasn't Prestashop that Ebay bought for over $180 Million.
Whatever nopCommerce choose to be, Magento or Prestashop or something in between (is this possible at all?) or even something new we will respect their choice as we all agree that the nopCommerce team deserve some serious returns for their effort and top quality product. The only thing we ask is to have clarity about this, as it is important to the vendors, just like Microsoft for example who keep a close touch with their Visual Studio industry partners and disclose their plans to them (this is a real example by the way).
Again, thanks all for your thoughts in this!