Furniture theme released (by nopCommerce team)

a.m. wrote:

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!

a.m. wrote:
Very nice, very clean.

FYI, the word is "dining" is misspelled as "dinning".

http://furniture-theme-demo.nopcommerce.com/dinning-room

I don't think there is a reason to worry for any of the solution provider or vendors as nopCommerce team has to meet its expenses and this is a one good way for the same.

Having more good quality theme or plugins is actually good for nopCommerce eco-system.

Definitely, nopCommerce team has an additional advantage over other vendors. But what is wrong with it? They build it, they spend time on making it a great platform, and they should have advantage over it.

However, there should be a concern for all of us to make the market larger by making nopCommerce very popular. I request nopCommerce team and other community member to come up with an idea to make nopCommerce more popular that will help everybody connected with the nopCommerce, and not just nopCommerce team.

TCH wrote:
Currently it's not planned

SWW wrote:
Thanks

jariwalakrunal wrote:

They should not necessarily have an advantage not if they want a network of vendors. More on what is wrong with this, please read below.

jariwalakrunal wrote:

Please do try to come up with an idea :-), but it has been discovered long ago and is called marketing. As far as nopCommerce is concerned these are some of the things it involves:

Targeting .NET developers on Google and across social networks, targeting the same developers on codeplex and stackoverflow and the like. Targeting the Umbraco, DNN and Orchard communities.

Targeting retailers who are related to .NET developers using the social networks or other tools (please suggest).

Targeting web agencies who deal with e-commerce and have at least a slight interest in .NET.

How do you target them? With paid advertisements and maintaining a good amount of valuable content for these groups - could be blogs, forum posts, could be anything. Connecting to well known people in these communities, who will be your evangelists and opinion leaders. Connection to well know blog venues on the subject of .NET, ASP.NET, e-commerce and republishing your valuable content, they just love to do this.

There are of course many other approaches to consider but putting into action even a small fraction of these costs a lot of money and time. Will nopCommerce do this? I doubt it. Will you do it? Yes if you are a nopCommerce vendor and serious about it. Imagine if there were many serious nopCommerce vendors, involved full time with just developing for nopCommerce. Their competition will create all this that you call an "idea". Now do you see what the problem is for nopCommerce when vendors are being stifled by creating a disadvantage, which you thought is a nopCommerce "divine right" (nobody questions the right though)?

Moreover businesses are looking more and more for quick, complete and affordable solutions out of the box. And if you are to compete on the e-commerce market, which is becoming more and more automated and SAAS oriented, you need to have your big-time vendors, you cannot rely on a network of customization partners only.

We do want nopCommerce to be successful in monetizing the system, but if it goes the way of Prestashop, be assured there will be no real network of vendors, only freelancers and developers who have a full time job somewhere else and bring themselves additional income by selling an extension or two. And we do believe this is going to stop nopCommerce from becoming the Magento of the .NET world.

7Spikes wrote:

I agree all ...

a.m. wrote:

Looks great! Is the CSS Menu implemented as a plugin or hard coded? If it's a plugin, will it be available outside of the theme?

SilhouetteBS wrote:
The theme is provided with one plugin (theme helper). This plugin handles all non-standard functionality such as top menu with categories, etc. It's provided only with the theme and won't be available outside of the theme.

7Spikes wrote:
No worries about. As I've already written we do not plan to develop dozen or hundreds of commercial themes or plugins. Our primary focus is customization services. I don't think that 4 "official" themes can stifle a really good third-party vendor.