New year’s resolution: Make the Marketplace great again

[opentype]

I’m not judging in any way, just listing some observations about the developer/Marketplace situation in the recent years. 

• 4.5 tightened the rules drastically. Result: several developers left for good.
• price increases. Developments needs a self-hosted installation and possibly a demo website. It’s now 850 + 300 annually. Someone starting out as developer really needs some killer products to earn that back and then generate profits. Cloud testing of resources would make it even more expensive (+1,788 annually). 
• Shift/changes to cloud. The lower tiers don’t have the ability to install third-party products. This decreases the reach and makes running independent third-party shops less useful/profitable. 
• Signatures turned off. No possibility for passive advertisement through community posts. 
• Limited compatibility field. Sales can only be created for one version, limiting the income. 

I have no magical solutions to offer, but are improvements for this something we could put on the table for 2023?
Currently, I am not very optimistic. We only have a handful of active developers left with continued announcements of departures. If it is still working well for some (?), it’s probably because of a large set of files and existing customers with renewals. But I can’t see how new developers would want to get involved in the current situation, replacing the ones who left or even growing the marketplace. 

I understand the costs and downsides for IPS. Paying for code reviews, chargeback fees and of course all the support issues with third-party resources. But then again: Looking at the broader field of online software: all the big players strive with and in part because of a flourishing third-party marketplace. So, improvement could easily be a “win-win-win” situation for IPS, developers and IPS customers. 

 

(I would have some suggestions myself but I don’t want to push the topic in a specific direction, so I am leaving it at the problem statement for now.)

[Kirill Gromov]

Cool topic, I will express my humble opinion, if possible. 

1) I think a very small number of applications pay off (only a part, of which more than a hundred are bought), so I treat development as a way self-education and have fun. It's definitely not profitable! Big developers stay here because of third-party orders, no more, I think.

2) I think the marketplace is not very important for the IPS, since third-party developers have repeatedly approached with possible improvements, but the staff are kindly silent. One, two and many more..

[Adriano Faria]

11 minutes ago, Kirill Gromov said:

but the staff are kindly silent

 

[tPx]

Once this platform had perhaps the largest fan base. Now the prices are more and more expensive, and the income from the marketplace is less and less. People can no longer afford to support the licenses and purchase plugins/integrations /templates.

I lowered my prices by 70% and for nothing. From a minimum income of $300 I reached 0

Many of us raise the issues, they are very well seen by the rest of the community, but the developers turn their heads when it comes to those topics, even if you use the mention function. 

[Martin A.]

We're a dying race, no one's gonna take our place once we eventually leave and this platform will be without any 3rd party developers to bother them and break their codes. Sounds like the dreams of the IPS management 🙂 

How long haven't we begged them to do something about the marketplace?
Everything we say is ignored. The amount of topics lacking a staff answer in this forum is evidence of that.

[Matt]

16 hours ago, Martin A. said:

We're a dying race, no one's gonna take our place once we eventually leave and this platform will be without any 3rd party developers to bother them and break their codes. Sounds like the dreams of the IPS management 🙂 

How long haven't we begged them to do something about the marketplace?
Everything we say is ignored. The amount of topics lacking a staff answer in this forum is evidence of that.

I do not think that is a fair assessment.

We bear the support burden when a third party item has a bug. We are the first point of contact when a customer's community throws an error. To help reduce this burden, we do review submissions before they are published. It helps, but we still get tickets daily that are caused by third party items. This is the nature of code, it breaks sometimes.

Free development licences have been discussed before and we could not formulate a fair plan without effectively giving away copies of the software to anyone who was thinking about creating a plugin or theme. We could consider a new model where we take 30% of sales, but do more to help authors by giving out free licenses, etc but we really want to meddle less in what you do, not tighten the rules further and take a bigger cut to offset the losses on license sales, etc.

Technology marches on. We are investing time into developing forward thinking architecture that marketplace authors can leverage, such as GraphQL, new workflows based around triggers and events. These changes mean much less code overloading and more API use which will be upgrade resistant. 

We have always strived to help marketplace authors both with development and marketing of their products. If you look at all of our peers, not one of them has invested as much time and money into developing systems third parties can take advantage of.

Marketplace sales are still very strong. There are still gaps in what we offer that marketplace authors can take advantage of. Our feedback forum is open to read and a great place to start when looking for ideas.

 

[SeNioR-]

On 12/31/2022 at 12:33 PM, opentype said:

Signatures turned off. No possibility for passive advertisement through community posts. 

@Matt May we know what was the reason? Will signatures be marked as deprecated soon? I am asking out of curiosity 🙏

Edited January 3, 2023 by SeNioR-

[Matt]

2 hours ago, SeNioR- said:

@Matt May we know what was the reason? Will signatures be marked as deprecated soon? I am asking out of curiosity 🙏

Bad for SEO, bad for screen readers, bad for visual clutter, not really a "thing" with modern community platforms.

[jesuralem]

I agree but this doesn't answer the question 🙂

6 hours ago, SeNioR- said:

Will signatures be marked as deprecated soon? I am asking out of curiosity 🙏

[Matt]

No dates planned, no. 🙂 

[tPx]

19 hours ago, Matt said:

We bear the support burden when a third party item has a bug. We are the first point of contact when a customer's community throws an error. To help reduce this burden, we do review submissions before they are published. It helps, but we still get tickets daily that are caused by third party items. This is the nature of code, it breaks sometimes.

Free development licences have been discussed before and we could not formulate a fair plan without effectively giving away copies of the software to anyone who was thinking about creating a plugin or theme. We could consider a new model where we take 30% of sales, but do more to help authors by giving out free licenses, etc but we really want to meddle less in what you do, not tighten the rules further and take a bigger cut to offset the losses on license sales, etc.

First of all, why don't you plan a panel for every person who has at least one product for sale? You can redirect the tickets to us, we receive a notification and if we really don't deal with the ticket, the money should be returned to the person who bought the product. It doesn't even have to be a panel, something simple to redirect them to a page where to be able to answer them. Why do you have to take the burden of answering them and convince people about third party files. That way our work would be easier, updates would be faster and customers would be happier. There are people who wait and every 2 weeks for an update.

Secondly, you could offer development licenses at least to people who show interest, and once the interest ceases, the license will be withdrawn. I'm not complaining that I pay $40 every 6 months, but it's $40 just for the basic license, not including the other plugins that people need. And if I were to buy the full license, it probably wouldn't be profitable for me at all, and I wouldn't even get my investment back.

Help us, listen to us and I guarantee that within a year, new people's entries to the platform will double or even triple. Because people need encouragement, and encouragement comes primarily from the top of the food chain, namely management .

PS: Jobs within the community would also be welcome. I sent an application to a campaign here, even to this day I have not received even a refusal.

[Matt]

3 hours ago, doc said:

First of all, why don't you plan a panel for every person who has at least one product for sale? You can redirect the tickets to us, we receive a notification and if we really don't deal with the ticket, the money should be returned to the person who bought the product. It doesn't even have to be a panel, something simple to redirect them to a page where to be able to answer them. Why do you have to take the burden of answering them and convince people about third party files. That way our work would be easier, updates would be faster and customers would be happier. There are people who wait and every 2 weeks for an update.

Secondly, you could offer development licenses at least to people who show interest, and once the interest ceases, the license will be withdrawn. I'm not complaining that I pay $40 every 6 months, but it's $40 just for the basic license, not including the other plugins that people need. And if I were to buy the full license, it probably wouldn't be profitable for me at all, and I wouldn't even get my investment back.

Help us, listen to us and I guarantee that within a year, new people's entries to the platform will double or even triple. Because people need encouragement, and encouragement comes primarily from the top of the food chain, namely management .

PS: Jobs within the community would also be welcome. I sent an application to a campaign here, even to this day I have not received even a refusal.

To be clear, I'm not assigning blame; we create enough of our own bugs 🙂 but it is a working reality that a portion of our support volume is caused by code that is not ours. We have added tools to speed up the debugging but it's not always clear that a third party app/hook is the problem.

There's a lot we can do of course but our problem is just people-hours. We make a loss on the marketplace currently when you factor in battling fraud, chargebacks, as well as debugging support issues. We are OK with that, but it does mean that we do not have a lot of resources to put into it beyond what we already do. I'm also not entirely convinced there's a pool of younger newer coders who would be willing to learn our framework and develop modifications. The problem isn't so much that people are leaving the marketplace (life changes, etc), it's that there's fewer to replace them. Part of the barrier is the cost of course, and I do recognise that but also PHP isn't a "cool" language anymore. Most developers are learning javascript (node, react, etc). This is why our future efforts are in building APIs, events and triggers that JS languages can take advantage of.

[Adriano Faria]

On 1/1/2023 at 5:32 AM, tPx said:

…and the income from the marketplace is less and less

Couldn’t agree more.

I'm evaluating whether it's worth keeping development when IPS5 is released. I'm probably one of the top earners due to the insane number of resources available but It's not worth it anymore. So much hassle for so little return. It definitely used to be better. In my specific case, while I have a lot to deal with/support, it's not a lack of support or new stuff. It is just what the marketplace became… and that’s it.

[Square Wheels]

26 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Couldn’t agree more.

I'm evaluating whether it's worth keeping development when IPS5 is released. I'm probably one of the top earners due to the insane number of resources available but It's not worth it anymore. So much hassle for so little return. It definitely used to be better. In my specific case, while I have a lot to deal with/support, it's not a lack of support or new stuff. It is just what the marketplace became… and that’s it.

This makes me sad.  I remember visiting the Marketplace to see the new and exciting offerings.  Now those are rare.

I use several mods to make my site what I want.  Regardless of the "community" direction IPS is taking for its high-paying corporate customers, I still use the software almost exclusively as a forum.