Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

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mlarsen
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Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by mlarsen » Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:21 am

I'd love some feedback from the ablecommerce community regarding the viability of attempting to sell custom conlibs to the community.

I love Ablecommerce as an ecommerce platform in alot of respects and I'd like to develop and sell enhanced conlibs to the community ( and use my self of course). I'm very familiar with the DotNetNuke (DNN) platform that has module that can be developed and easily installed by end users as the have a standard package that will install sql scripts, css and aspx. And has a marketplace to sell to all tens of thousands of the DotNetNuke Community.

My experience with Ablecommerce is that 1) custom conlibs often need to be remote installed by the developer (not scaleable), 2) There is no (not that I have found) 3rd party marketplace to sell to custom modules or skins to an unknown community size. I've seen webs sites that try to list how many domains are running what ecommerce platform and AbleCommerce is listed as a few hundred.

My concern is that the investment in development may result in no way to market the conlib to the community and if they did find me and buy the product that I'd have to get in remote and manually install it for each customer resulting in time cost making it unprofitable. My team build a taxcloud implementation for Able and then found out it was going to be released as baked in - my bad, Does becoming a Able Partner help to know what is in progress?

Am I off base? How big is the market and how do we market to it?

I'd love it if we had a market place for conlibs that would promote the community to develop lot of useful conlibs or skins for the community.

I know there are a few developers that sell custom work but there are very few and virtually no custom skins and the only way they have to get the word out is this forum - correct?

Your thoughts?
Mark

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jmestep
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Re: Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by jmestep » Thu Jun 22, 2017 1:19 am

Most of our plugins at W2M are such that the purchaser can install them. Able does have a link in the footer of their site for plugins, but it's not something most people will find. It points to:
http://www.ablecommerce.com/AbleCommerc ... -C106.aspx
There is no third party market place that I know of and very little exposure for plugins as you have found.
Usually our plugins are a spin off of a small customization someone has wanted or an idea we have while working on a project.We do the code then do much more work on it to turn it into a plugin. Some of them are fairly popular and some of them are very rarely purchased.
Hope this helps.
Last edited by jmestep on Sun Jul 30, 2017 11:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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mlarsen
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Re: Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by mlarsen » Thu Jun 22, 2017 8:11 am

Judy,

Thanks so much for your feed back! I've purchased a couple of your plugins and you do great work! It sounds like plugins alone aren't going to feed you very well. I did see that link but it doesn't do much for promoting.

Thanks again
Mark

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Re: Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by AbleMods » Wed Jul 26, 2017 2:32 am

I've been selling AbleCommerce plug-ins since 2007.

There are a number of factors that come into play. Your mileage may vary, but for me they do not work as a sole source of revenue. Here's why:

1) There are well over a dozen 'flavors' of Able Gold now. A single change from one flavor to the next could break your plugin. Thus you're stuck with now maintaining 5 different flavors of your plugin to maintain compatibility with the various Able ones in the wild. This creates an enormous time-hog for you as the developer to maintain the various versions. Find a bug in one? Well now you have to update 5 different projects, test five different Gold installs because you rebuilt the project, rebuild five zip files, confirm five different sets of instructions do not need to change, and then update five different digital goods in the store.

2) Deployment is a huge hassle. The lack of any standardized plugin deployment (like Wordpress for example) makes it a very manual process. And the risks of the site going completely down due to a single mistake are high. Most Able site owners don't know a user control from a text file. So your instructions have to be painfully detailed, or the client is going to complain (loudly) about having to spend $500 to install your $195 module. This stuff is technical and there's no way to insulate your clients from that at present.

3) The best customizations are only feasible if the client owns full source code. But, you cannot distribute CommerceBuilder.dll yourself without permission. So you could have written the greatest customization to AbleCommerce ever invented. But you can't deploy it and the client has no clue how to recompile a class library. I could take the last 10 years of project work I've built and combine them into a single, massive plugin that would make your head spin. But I can't sell it because it would have to include a recompiled version of existing AbleCommerce programming.

For me, after spending years trying to find what works, what sells and what's profitable...I gave up. Pre-written plugins work in simple scenarios like a new report or a new dashboard control. But anything more advanced requires so much effort to maintain that it's simply not worth it. Or worse, you wind up pricing it so high (to cover your own expenses) that nobody wants to buy it.

It's easy to sell work you've already done for other clients. But I consider that unethical. My client paid me to write something for them. Legally, they own that work, not me. I have no right to re-sell that work they paid for unless they give express permission to do so. In that case, the client is entitled to a portion of the proceeds for every sale. Now you're talking contracts, term limits and commission tracking. No thanks, I have enough to do already.
Joe Payne
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mlarsen
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Re: Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by mlarsen » Thu Aug 03, 2017 5:43 am

Joe - thanks for your input - too bad - I come from the DotNetNuke (DNN) experience and module/plugins had a great deployment framework. Ablecommerce could grow so much if developers could market and deploy easily.

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Re: Marketing custom conlibs to the Ablecommerce community??

Post by AbleMods » Thu Aug 03, 2017 8:06 am

Yea it's something I've been wishing for some time.
Joe Payne
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