We need your help! Take nopCommerce survey & help us to help you.

As part of our continuing efforts to make nopCommerce better we are asking for some help from you. Please complete our survey by clicking here. This survey is super quick (only 10 questions) and will help us continue to improve nopCommerce to serve YOU better!

Thanks!

UPDATE 1: I've just edited the survey questions 8 and 9 because some people got us wrong. We're not going to make nopCommerce a commercial product (where have you read it?). nopCommerce itself will always stay free. The questions are about the professional support services.

UPDATE 2: Please download the survey results here (http://www.nopdownloads.com/downloads/Docs/nopCommerce_survey2012_report.pdf). If you want to discuss them, please do it on this page.

Survey complete. Nice to see you are considering commercial services

Survey completed !!!

Done!!
BTW Q 6 requires a radio button

I've seen lots of open source project go down hill because they don't make money and the contributors lose interest.  Fortunately, this hasn't happened with this project.  If you're thinking about selling consulting services to online merchants, don't do it!  Your customers aren't online merchants, it's the developers who resell, customize and support your product for the online merchants.  

If you built this product with the intent of supporting merchants directly, then be prepared for catastrophic failure.  Most merchants who are making money don't want to bother themselves with nopCommerce.  They will hire a developer to design and put together the site for them.  The developer chooses the best product for the customer's need and makes a recommendation to the merchant.  Some merchants don't care about the platform, while others want to know what software is being used.  By offering consulting services, you're essentially competing with the developers and they will fear you will take away their customers.  It can get very nasty because most will steer their clients away from nopCommerce or bad mouth it to other developers.

How about charging money for nopCommerce?  Don't charge a fortune, but a few hundred bucks for a commercial go live license.  You don't have to add license keys or checks, but make it clear that if you use it for commercial purposes, you are obligated to pay.  You already do this with your remove logo fee, perhaps this can be an extension of that with stronger wording. Since your customer is the developer, most of them will bill or have the customer purchase it.

There's a lot of people who will complain, but I can guarantee you that they are not the ones who are making a living from it. You'll find that most developers will gladly pay because they want you to still be around to support and upgrade the product. Open doesn't mean free. You can make it open and charge a license if they use it commercially. This model works surprisingly well for quite a few companies.

There are a tiny number of viable shopping cart solutions in the .NET space and they all charge fees.  They have tons of developers using them and surprisingly, they are able to stay in business despite having closed source, horrible customer service and running on ancient ASP.NET technologies.  Why? Two reasons.

First, many of their developers are dying to leave if they find quality alternatives, but they are afraid of open source because it makes it harder for them to justify their fees.  It doesn't make sense, but some customers psychologically feel that if the software is free, then the consulting rates should adjust accordingly. They are also afraid of being tossed into a pool of hungry developers who will drive down their fees or take away their customers.

Second, some merchants are afraid of free software because they fear it will leave them high and dry if they need support or need future upgrades. A license fee is a small price to pay for most of these businesses. I've had to do a really hard sell on some open source products with some customers, especially businesses that are used to paying for software. Many fear open source products may have bugs or are insecure, etc.  Essentially, they feel more secure if the software comes from a big sounding brand name company.  Here in the US, there's a common phrase in the consulting world "No one got fired for hiring IBM."

In addition to charging for the software, you may also want to hold quarterly or annual developer conferences and online training sessions. You can charge for this months in advance and plan your event based on the number of attendees.  This is a great way to get to know your developers and the kind of things they need to see in the product.  The forum isn't good enough for this.  If you charge money for your software, you're developers are going to treat you like a business partner and they will share information with you so that you can help them help you.

I would also sell support incidents strictly to developers and their customers who need help in an emergency situation. I would make the cost high enough to deter high usage of the service.  You don't want it to eat up a majority of your time. You can deliver the service through a remote session on your website.  Don't try to make a living off of this, but it's just there to make customers and developers feel more at ease.

Finally, developers don't want their customers to see advertisements for $5/month hosting.  Most are trying to sell hosting along with their services.  The last think they want their customers to see is $5/month when they are charging them $300/month for a dedicated server.  I know of one ASP.NET e-commerce company that's losing its developer community because they are selling hosting on their site, while charging developer program fees.

Thanks for your feedback. Please find my opinion below:

ralphberger wrote:
That's not true. Our customers are merchants and developers
UPDATE: But yes, I presume that we have more developers than merchants

ralphberger wrote:
I haven't told about merchants only. Support services will also include basic development support (of course, for some complex modifications and features you'll need to hire developers for customization services). Furthermore, commercial services (such as support or customization) will help making a really strong company. And merchants will be confident that nothing bad will happen with nopCommerce in the near time. Isn't that good for everyone?

ralphberger wrote:
OK. Who stops them from doing so? Customers can always hire such developer. Nobody will make them to use nopCommerce official support services. BTW, I'm sure that at least 20% of merchants even don't know that they're using nopCommerce (because they ordered their shops via third-party software companies). Furthermore, most customers prefer to use their native language (not everybody speaks English good). And they'll better go to a local software company and order support services there.

ralphberger wrote:
Some software projects prefer to be open-source, others to be commercial, but most of them are good no matter of their business model. nopCommerce will stay free. I'm absolutely sure that's changing money for a license is the way to go down hill (for nopCommerce).

ralphberger wrote:
Look at PHP shopping cart (90% of them do not change license fees). BTW, there are no any good and popular .NET shopping carts except nopCommerce and aspdotnetstorefront (IMHO, the worst source code I've ever seen).

ralphberger wrote:
But why is *NIX so popular? Please also see my 4th answer above

ralphberger wrote:
Thanks for suggestion. Also considering it.

ralphberger wrote:
We do not plan to provide hosting services. But if you've meant "recommended hosting" block, then I'm sure that each open-source software should have it. A lot of merchants prefer to open and deploy shops themselves and they need to know good hosting companies (which were tested for good compatibility). I don't want them to start using so popular but so terrible GoDaddy. BTW, as I've written above at least 20% of merchants even don't know that they're using nopCommerce (hence do not visit the official site of nopCommerce).

To summarize: nopCommerce will stay open-source and free.

@ralphberger

You make some very good points and you are clearly speaking from experience and with carefully considered judgement. The effort you have put into your post demonstrates your intention to help. While I don't agree with everything you have said, you should be commended (not voted down) for your contribution.

Darren

I would like to see a few changes to the business model.  First, I would like to see a per-incident option for high priority issues.  Large ecommerce sites (mine had 70M page views annually, before I sold it) cannot be implemented without a solid plan what to do when something goes wrong.  Posting to a forum in the hopes of getting help isn't good enough.

Something else I would like to see is a subscription-based forum for more thorough souce code assistance.  (Perhaps the open forum would shift to provide peer-to-peer help for store owners, while the closed forum would be more developer-to-developer oriented.)

I would also like to see the development team provide customization services.  Some of that work could be brought into the product, so it could be an excellent way to enhance the product while generating the revenue necessary to fund the work.  Of course, some custom work would need to remain proprietary, but not all is of that nature.

Finally, I would like to see the multi-tennant version be a paid version.  Anyone who needs this can pay for it, and it shouldn't be cheap.  Multi-tennant solutions are not cheap, and they need to be backed up with strong support.  Make it a strong comprehensive professional solution.

Bottom line, this shouldn't be a charity.  The developers of this fine product should reap the rewards of their work, and the store owners and developers will benefit from their motivation!

I don't think that anything that is expensive also signifies that it is of good quality. Being a part of the open source philosophy is way beyond the joy of money. I do agree that the developers should be rewarded well of their efforts but that reward need not be just monetary.
That said, open source giants like Red Hat started with a free solution and afterwards built a strong support system around that model and charge for the services that they provide. But the needs of the end user are very important. Some small/ medium businesses are looking for support which should necessarily not be 24/7 but should be economical, while large stores would require a robust support and are willing to pay much more. So the support model should have multiple options inline with customer requirements.

Andrei, will you be publishing the results?  

Also, Question 9 first option says "per accident".  I think you meant "per incident".