Hello everybody,
The total number of posts in this thread reveals that further discussion might be required.
I think when the model of charging leads to a shortened overview of plugins and other items in the marketplace, it should be urgently changed, so that the marketplace becomes a central repository for EVERYTHING again. Otherwise nopCommerce will loose popularity in the medium term.
I will share my personal business experience:
When it came to decide whether nop Commerce is suitable for my customer, the FIRST AND ONLY DECISIVE step was: is there all the required plugins available? Thank good, that was at a time all plugins where still in the marketplace. I can say for 100% sure:
1) If I hadn't found the plugins, I would have probably closed the browser window immediately with the conclusion that nop Commerce is not popular at all and moved to another software.
2) I think the average nop Commerce user expects that the marketplace is the CENTRAL AND COMPLETE repository of available plugins and other stuff - if it isn't there then it does not exists! Thus nobody will google for plugins.
3) I can also confirm that when I recently (and for the first time) bought a plugin from the marketplace, I was confused that I had to go to the website of the vendor, create new credentials and buy it from there.
Kind regards, Stephan
Marketplace Themes gone?
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Few words from my point of view. We are pleased that the discussion took place. The idea of charge is totally fine, it's an open-source project and as every open-source project, it has to be monetized, in that or another way. I suppose, everyone accepts it, however, the way how it was introduced is totally unacceptable.
Comparing nopCommerce with Magento, for the sake of completely different basics and business models, is pointless. The advantage of nopCommerce was that what was wrong with Magento, nopCommerce solves. It solved these problems and attracted those customers who did not want to participate in the Magento ecosystem or other PHP-based solutions. From a business point of view, it is an ideal solution and the person who came up with it deserves a medal. Constant profit, independent of the number of plugin sales, no risk. Charging a commission for a sale, even though it will seemingly give you more profit because you will receive a higher commission, is risky because mostly there is no sale and you would be strictly connected to the popularity of the vendor. Besides, the decision not to introduce a commission per sale is obvious, the current marketplace is not able to enforce it, so you had no other choice.
This problem was raised already when the marketplace was changed for the first time when plugin verification was introduced. The aforementioned software also performs verification, but only because they offer it on their own platform. Therefore, they are taking responsibility for it, so they must be sure of the products offered. Here, even if you get the source code and compiled plugin, customers can buy something completely different on the partner's website. Even though we did not accept it, we adapted to the changes. But after time you can see that the level that was supposed to change has not changed. Now, we cannot accept it.
What's more, when you offer products on your marketplace, you need to maintain, manage, and verify it. In this case, the fee is completely normal and no one would have a problem with it, even if it would be the same solution as now. Furthermore, the level of offered products would increase enormously.
Again you gave Magento as an example, but Magento offers plugins in its own store. Magento has a dozen times greater share in the e-commerce market than nopCommerce. As far as I know, it's about 12% of all online retail stores. According to the SimilarTech website, which of course has inaccurate statistics, but gives the general point of view, Magento has 116,000 live websites, where nopCommerce has 8000.
It needs to be made clear that plugins and themes, with some exceptions, don't sell in amazing daily amounts. For many months, if not years, we have been seeing changes taking place in the nopCommerce community. Years ago, the community had many active users, those who had active support for beginners and beginners who needed it. This clearly shows even the monthly karma level visible on the forum. Currently, the majority of active users are bots.
Marketplace and plugin publishing activities are, in my opinion, strongly linked to the partnership. In the current situation, each partner has been downgraded to the status of a regular user who came from the street and would like to publish the plugin. Free credits or modified plugin publishing rules, for each partner, would be a perfect added value for partnership packages which below the gold level are completely unprofitable. The $700 or $200 fee just to get a Solution Partner badge is incomprehensible. Apart from the listing on the site, the solution partner badge, and the footer removal discount, the rest of the benefits is redundant. After many years of active participation in the life of nopCommerce, each partner is able to support their customers, therefore the discount on premium support services is useless.
Ending up with a sad situation that for some time some partners are favored by picking up plugins and themes in categories. Despite sorting "From Newest", products are artificially arranged. After many years of partnering, we notice that the benefits of it are diminishing instead of increasing. Finally, we have come to a situation where premium themes are offered by one partner, and among 350 plugins, half are free plugins, and out of the rest - 150, 100 of them belong to two partners. It's hard to say that it's a community if somebody will look at it from the outside.
Best,
Patryk
Comparing nopCommerce with Magento, for the sake of completely different basics and business models, is pointless. The advantage of nopCommerce was that what was wrong with Magento, nopCommerce solves. It solved these problems and attracted those customers who did not want to participate in the Magento ecosystem or other PHP-based solutions. From a business point of view, it is an ideal solution and the person who came up with it deserves a medal. Constant profit, independent of the number of plugin sales, no risk. Charging a commission for a sale, even though it will seemingly give you more profit because you will receive a higher commission, is risky because mostly there is no sale and you would be strictly connected to the popularity of the vendor. Besides, the decision not to introduce a commission per sale is obvious, the current marketplace is not able to enforce it, so you had no other choice.
This problem was raised already when the marketplace was changed for the first time when plugin verification was introduced. The aforementioned software also performs verification, but only because they offer it on their own platform. Therefore, they are taking responsibility for it, so they must be sure of the products offered. Here, even if you get the source code and compiled plugin, customers can buy something completely different on the partner's website. Even though we did not accept it, we adapted to the changes. But after time you can see that the level that was supposed to change has not changed. Now, we cannot accept it.
What's more, when you offer products on your marketplace, you need to maintain, manage, and verify it. In this case, the fee is completely normal and no one would have a problem with it, even if it would be the same solution as now. Furthermore, the level of offered products would increase enormously.
Again you gave Magento as an example, but Magento offers plugins in its own store. Magento has a dozen times greater share in the e-commerce market than nopCommerce. As far as I know, it's about 12% of all online retail stores. According to the SimilarTech website, which of course has inaccurate statistics, but gives the general point of view, Magento has 116,000 live websites, where nopCommerce has 8000.
It needs to be made clear that plugins and themes, with some exceptions, don't sell in amazing daily amounts. For many months, if not years, we have been seeing changes taking place in the nopCommerce community. Years ago, the community had many active users, those who had active support for beginners and beginners who needed it. This clearly shows even the monthly karma level visible on the forum. Currently, the majority of active users are bots.
Marketplace and plugin publishing activities are, in my opinion, strongly linked to the partnership. In the current situation, each partner has been downgraded to the status of a regular user who came from the street and would like to publish the plugin. Free credits or modified plugin publishing rules, for each partner, would be a perfect added value for partnership packages which below the gold level are completely unprofitable. The $700 or $200 fee just to get a Solution Partner badge is incomprehensible. Apart from the listing on the site, the solution partner badge, and the footer removal discount, the rest of the benefits is redundant. After many years of active participation in the life of nopCommerce, each partner is able to support their customers, therefore the discount on premium support services is useless.
Ending up with a sad situation that for some time some partners are favored by picking up plugins and themes in categories. Despite sorting "From Newest", products are artificially arranged. After many years of partnering, we notice that the benefits of it are diminishing instead of increasing. Finally, we have come to a situation where premium themes are offered by one partner, and among 350 plugins, half are free plugins, and out of the rest - 150, 100 of them belong to two partners. It's hard to say that it's a community if somebody will look at it from the outside.
Best,
Patryk
Team Member
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- 10/22/2008
- Armenia
nop4you wrote:
It's a little bit over exaggerated. As I've mentioned here you have 40% discount if you decide to purchase credits for one year. So actually it's $327 per month. And please note that you have 66 plugins. It's less than $5 per plugin
From our account, daily we have 364 credits (and that is not a full list of our pluigins!)...5 cents seems not much, but 364*30days cost us 546$ per month, per year, is over 6500$. That is a lot!
It's a little bit over exaggerated. As I've mentioned here you have 40% discount if you decide to purchase credits for one year. So actually it's $327 per month. And please note that you have 66 plugins. It's less than $5 per plugin
Team Member
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- 10/22/2008
- Armenia
nopAccelerate.com wrote:
It's very important for have integrations for all countries. So mostly it'll be payment plugins or other integrations for local markets (e.g. Italia, Mexico, Spain, Iran, Russia, the Netherlands, etc). And considering that locale markets are not big enough and these plugins don't give much profit to developers , we're ready to publish them for free
Can you share how you decide for this kind of plugins?
It's very important for have integrations for all countries. So mostly it'll be payment plugins or other integrations for local markets (e.g. Italia, Mexico, Spain, Iran, Russia, the Netherlands, etc). And considering that locale markets are not big enough and these plugins don't give much profit to developers , we're ready to publish them for free
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- 4/18/2011
- Poland
a.m. wrote:
No, it is not if you calculate fee without discount. My calculation was monthly based, which is without a discount. Sure, "buy more get more" rule is valid, but the year price with discount is high as well.
Discount by the way seems to be weird.
Imagine, we will publish 25 plugins and paid for 6 months to get a 20% discount. After a month we will unpublish 20 plugins. Credits for the rest will allow us to get published plugins for more than a year but had only 20% at the time purchase.
From the opposite situation, the final price will be different, if we will purchase credits for year+ for 5 plugins (which will give us 40%) and after month will add another 20.
A much better calculation would be to apply a discount related to the number of credits, instead of time interval per plugin.
Also much better would be an additional discount per partnership level.
The best option if you combine the above 2 if will decide to keep the 'publish fee'.
A discussion here starts pointing out that the sales model will be better and more accurate than the publishing model. But that will require rebuilding the nopCommerce marketplace and be a provider to own customers and vendors. Not sure if nopCommerce is ready for this.
By the way, why you edit the content of our posts? Please revert changes done to our posts, as it does not violate the law.
Regards,
Tomasz
It's a little bit over exaggerated.
No, it is not if you calculate fee without discount. My calculation was monthly based, which is without a discount. Sure, "buy more get more" rule is valid, but the year price with discount is high as well.
Discount by the way seems to be weird.
Imagine, we will publish 25 plugins and paid for 6 months to get a 20% discount. After a month we will unpublish 20 plugins. Credits for the rest will allow us to get published plugins for more than a year but had only 20% at the time purchase.
From the opposite situation, the final price will be different, if we will purchase credits for year+ for 5 plugins (which will give us 40%) and after month will add another 20.
A much better calculation would be to apply a discount related to the number of credits, instead of time interval per plugin.
Also much better would be an additional discount per partnership level.
The best option if you combine the above 2 if will decide to keep the 'publish fee'.
A discussion here starts pointing out that the sales model will be better and more accurate than the publishing model. But that will require rebuilding the nopCommerce marketplace and be a provider to own customers and vendors. Not sure if nopCommerce is ready for this.
By the way, why you edit the content of our posts? Please revert changes done to our posts, as it does not violate the law.
Regards,
Tomasz
MVP
Gold Solution Partner
Certified Developer
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- 7/23/2009
- India
I do agree with vendors sharing their concerns here. I think other vendors will share too.
And I see everyone supports nopCommerce with monetising marketplace however agree that the way it's done is not really vendor friendly and infact impacting marketplace and the position of nopCommerce badly.
And I see everyone supports nopCommerce with monetising marketplace however agree that the way it's done is not really vendor friendly and infact impacting marketplace and the position of nopCommerce badly.
MVP
- 580
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- 7/22/2014
- India
ncodetechnologies wrote:
I totally agree with this approach.
Instead of charging per day, it should be charging per sales so that will be win-win situation for both vendors and nopCommerce.
Also i really like the suggestion of extending marketplace to place the order from nopCommerce site, it self and get commission for each sales so there will be not any redirection will be happen to vendor sites and customer can trust to place order on nopCommerce itself as customer know nopCommerce not vendors so i believe it will increase trust and will give better user experience to customer, vendor and nopCommerce team as well.
Main benefits will be nopCommerce team can track each sales and calculate the commission based on sales, vendor don't need to create their own shopping sites which will save lots of money from vendor end as well to develop and maintain their shops and customer will be better user experience to purchase the plugin from trust worthy platforms.
I strongly believe instead of daily charges, if they extends market place then it will be win-win situation for whole community.
Charging to host the plugins on daily basis is not a fair enough step especially when there is no sales on daily basis and majority of vendors are having the same concern that their all plugins and themes are not sold on daily basis so I strongly believe that daily charges to host the plugins are not good.
On the top , customers are redirected to venders page when they are supposed to buy the plugin and there is no facility provided by nopcommerce team to manage the sales of plugins and majority of all venders have invested to build / develop their own shop page to have the sales of their plugins. so this also going to create a negative thoughts in customers mind that they are trying to buy something from nopcommerce market place but payment processing is done at other place. So per day charge for hosting only is not recommended.
Rather, nopcommerce team have to think for EITHER one time charge per year basis to host the plugins OR commission to be charged per sales for plugins like Envato or Code Canyon and its fair too.
As per current plan venders needs to pay on daily basis where there is no guarantee of sales on daily basis and venders may have to pay from their pocket regardless there is an income or not.
If nopcommerce will go to implement commission per sales from their on sales site or market place then it will help to venders and more income they will have as commission and venders will also have revenue and they have to pay commission on the basis of total sales , so it will be a win win situation for nopcommerce and venders both and customers will have a great level of user experience and they can do everything from a single site only....
I highly recommend to implement nopcommerce own market place from where all products can be sold and they can charge their commission per sales and this way venders wont have any burden to pay for hosing the items only.
I hope current plan of per day charge will change soon by nopcommerce to grow more along with all their venders.
On the top , customers are redirected to venders page when they are supposed to buy the plugin and there is no facility provided by nopcommerce team to manage the sales of plugins and majority of all venders have invested to build / develop their own shop page to have the sales of their plugins. so this also going to create a negative thoughts in customers mind that they are trying to buy something from nopcommerce market place but payment processing is done at other place. So per day charge for hosting only is not recommended.
Rather, nopcommerce team have to think for EITHER one time charge per year basis to host the plugins OR commission to be charged per sales for plugins like Envato or Code Canyon and its fair too.
As per current plan venders needs to pay on daily basis where there is no guarantee of sales on daily basis and venders may have to pay from their pocket regardless there is an income or not.
If nopcommerce will go to implement commission per sales from their on sales site or market place then it will help to venders and more income they will have as commission and venders will also have revenue and they have to pay commission on the basis of total sales , so it will be a win win situation for nopcommerce and venders both and customers will have a great level of user experience and they can do everything from a single site only....
I highly recommend to implement nopcommerce own market place from where all products can be sold and they can charge their commission per sales and this way venders wont have any burden to pay for hosing the items only.
I hope current plan of per day charge will change soon by nopcommerce to grow more along with all their venders.
I totally agree with this approach.
Instead of charging per day, it should be charging per sales so that will be win-win situation for both vendors and nopCommerce.
Also i really like the suggestion of extending marketplace to place the order from nopCommerce site, it self and get commission for each sales so there will be not any redirection will be happen to vendor sites and customer can trust to place order on nopCommerce itself as customer know nopCommerce not vendors so i believe it will increase trust and will give better user experience to customer, vendor and nopCommerce team as well.
Main benefits will be nopCommerce team can track each sales and calculate the commission based on sales, vendor don't need to create their own shopping sites which will save lots of money from vendor end as well to develop and maintain their shops and customer will be better user experience to purchase the plugin from trust worthy platforms.
I strongly believe instead of daily charges, if they extends market place then it will be win-win situation for whole community.
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Hello,
Still I am thinking that we are not in proper conclusion to make vendor friendly marketplace.
Vendor friendly word it means nopCommerce team itself can think for each there vendors small/medium or big are able to afford whatever fee it is yearly/monthly or daily. Discount is not going to go for life time. Think better something for life time and vendor friendly. Instead of like playing with dog and giving greed for biscuits. Sorry if you feel bad but fact is truth.
If some vendor are selling there themes or plugins for more then 150$-200$ each. if they sold 10 copies per month then they can afford 15 USD per month for nopCommerce fee from there 1500$ sells. But what about those vendors who are selling plugin on 29-49 USD and per month 2-3 copies sells and have to give 15 USD fee to nopCommerce for staying on nopCommerce marketplace ? what about development cost, maintenance cost(upgrade/downgrade), Support to each customer on same level. Which is same for each vendor. if we not provide good support then customer will come to you guys and you guys will have to be a judge for the solving case and many things will come into picture. Hope nopCommerce will not start fees for doing job as judge :)
All vendors are sharing there thoughts, suggested ideas(without an invitation from nopCommerce team like Uninvited Guest in marriage), making some arguments on nopCommerce decision. but except discounts no actions taken so far.
nopCommerce team should inspire there vendors more and more to develop very good plugins and themes and put into market place and start getting more customers. Vendors are real hero to serve customer at their best level. Then only nopCommerce platform is going to use by more customers and nopCommerce will get more partners, more payment for copyright removals. more premium supports and more leads :)
If vendors are not going to get more customers for eCommerce solution because of very low number of themes and plugins in the nopCommerce marketplace. To whom they can propose nopCommerce as a Best e-Commerce solution ?
nopCommerce is saying they want money because of they are doing manual approval checking each content images and all. think google play store taking 25 USD one time fee for life time they also have same process and even better from ours. Apple is taking 99 USD per year and they also have same process and even better from google play store and us.
So as per my knowledge and after so much discussion at this level nopCommerce should remove this credit concept for now until reach at least 10000 good plugins and themes. or else just put one time fee like google play store. or if need more money then do like apple store fixed fee per year.
Hope this post content or post is not going to remove and nopCommerce team can start putting action on this.
Thanks,
Jatin
Still I am thinking that we are not in proper conclusion to make vendor friendly marketplace.
Vendor friendly word it means nopCommerce team itself can think for each there vendors small/medium or big are able to afford whatever fee it is yearly/monthly or daily. Discount is not going to go for life time. Think better something for life time and vendor friendly. Instead of like playing with dog and giving greed for biscuits. Sorry if you feel bad but fact is truth.
If some vendor are selling there themes or plugins for more then 150$-200$ each. if they sold 10 copies per month then they can afford 15 USD per month for nopCommerce fee from there 1500$ sells. But what about those vendors who are selling plugin on 29-49 USD and per month 2-3 copies sells and have to give 15 USD fee to nopCommerce for staying on nopCommerce marketplace ? what about development cost, maintenance cost(upgrade/downgrade), Support to each customer on same level. Which is same for each vendor. if we not provide good support then customer will come to you guys and you guys will have to be a judge for the solving case and many things will come into picture. Hope nopCommerce will not start fees for doing job as judge :)
All vendors are sharing there thoughts, suggested ideas(without an invitation from nopCommerce team like Uninvited Guest in marriage), making some arguments on nopCommerce decision. but except discounts no actions taken so far.
nopCommerce team should inspire there vendors more and more to develop very good plugins and themes and put into market place and start getting more customers. Vendors are real hero to serve customer at their best level. Then only nopCommerce platform is going to use by more customers and nopCommerce will get more partners, more payment for copyright removals. more premium supports and more leads :)
If vendors are not going to get more customers for eCommerce solution because of very low number of themes and plugins in the nopCommerce marketplace. To whom they can propose nopCommerce as a Best e-Commerce solution ?
nopCommerce is saying they want money because of they are doing manual approval checking each content images and all. think google play store taking 25 USD one time fee for life time they also have same process and even better from ours. Apple is taking 99 USD per year and they also have same process and even better from google play store and us.
So as per my knowledge and after so much discussion at this level nopCommerce should remove this credit concept for now until reach at least 10000 good plugins and themes. or else just put one time fee like google play store. or if need more money then do like apple store fixed fee per year.
Hope this post content or post is not going to remove and nopCommerce team can start putting action on this.
Thanks,
Jatin