Magento Marketplace – facts, thoughts, and expectations

Magento 2 is now available, but it is not the only ecosystem’s improvement. Meet a completely revamped version of the platform’s marketplace. Below, we share some facts, thoughts, and expectations related to Magento Marketplace.

Being the largest ecommerce resource for Magento apps and services, Magento Marketplace gathers the most reliable software solutions by top developers. Their products expand the potential of the ecommerce platform with new features and you can easily get all desired improvements with Magento Marketplace. Extensions on the website are:

• easy to discover;
• of high quality.

The marketplace is designed with customers in mind (and with developers), so it is easy to discover relevant products. As a customer of Magento Marketplace, you get curated user experience, new functionality, and everything necessary for making your business thrive. You can trust all products from the new website, since they are precisely reviewed and checked for quality.

Thus, Magento Marketplace introduces a great chance to stay on top of all new innovations. The platform offers a plethora of themes designed to make your website looking fresh and unique. Besides, you can get voice support and even installation of extensions as a part of your purchase.

Magento Marketplace Merchant Guide

Magento Marketplace Developer Guide

UPD (18.11.15): Magento Connect has been updated

UPD (14.12.15): Magento Marketplace (70/30 revenue share split)

UPD (10.04.16): Magento Marketplace has been released

Magento Marketplace doesn’t work at its full potential but we can already tell a lot about the new website. Let’s start with the front page.

Frontpage

You can find the frontpage of Magento Marketplace here. It propose you to watch video about Marketplace, search for extensions, developers, or themes, illustrates facts about the platform (including success stories), as well as shows Featured Extensions, Featured Partner Extensions, and Featured Developers. Each block of information (all three are divided into smaller blocks) is quite self explanatory and provides the ability to proceed to new pages with the ability of vider choice.

Featured Partner Extensions

In case of Featured Partner Extensions, you also get more precise search tool that offers such filters as Platform (in our case, it was possible to choose only Magento 2), Edition (Community or Enterprise), and Versions (disabled option); Categories (no categories were available); Rating (1-5 stars); Price (it is only possible to choose free or paid options, no price slider is available); Stability (stable or beta builds); and Panon-rtner Type (non-partners or 5 types or partners are available to choose from).

Each extension block on this page includes extension’s name, picture, description (sometimes too short to understand its purpose), developer and its status as a Magento partner, and price.

Featured Extensions

The only difference between Featured Extensions and Featured Partner Extensions pages is in the absence of developer’s status in extension blocks.

Featured Developers

As for the Developers page, it offers the same search as you get on the front page of Magento Marketplace. Each developer block consists of the developer’s name, logo, and description. Besides, it shows the number of extensions, themes and what particular services are offered by each developer.

Category Pages

Category pages looks the same as Featured Extensions: you get similar search and extension blocks.

Product Pages

As for product pages available with Magento Marketplace, they have absolutely different look from those familiar from Magento Connect. You can still see extension’s name, rating, short description, and available options, such as Magento Edition, Support (duration), and installation services, as well as price and three available tabs – Overview, Reviews, and Support, but it is a completely new design. Unfortunately, there are no Images available yet.

Company Pages

A company page offers a company’s broad description, website URL, and country (in case of Amasty). Besides, you get several ways to connect the developer. And there are all available extensions and themes listed under appropriate tabs.

The Extensions tab offers such filters as Most Recent, Show, and Editions (All Editions, Community, or Enterprise). For Community and Enterprise, another filter appears. It is related to versions, so you can choose to display all versions or 2.0.

Search

As for a search page of Magento Marketplace, it works as described above (you can choose between extensions, themes, and developers and apply various filters). Search results can be filtered by the most relevant options, the latest ones, in alphabetical order, or in reverse alphabetical order.

Conclusion

Magento Marketplace seems to be raw: product pages don’t have any images, some filters offer only one option, while others are even disabled. At the same time, the new website for Magento extensions and themes goes up with the time due to its completely revamped design. Marketplace is a fresh breathe of air which was inevitable after the appearance of Magento 2 – a completely new version of the popular ecommerce platform. The new website still requires a lot of improvements and updates, but it is only a matter of time.

Early Facts and Thoughts

UPD (14.12.15):

Magento Marketplace is a robust ecommerce website built upon the Magento platform, which offers integrated payments via credit cards and PayPal. It hosts both free and paid modules, services, and themes. The launched of Magento Marketplace is planned for the early 2016, but its beta version should be available within the recent weeks – by the end of December 2015.

Magento Marketplace will be much more secure and robust ecommerce option, but unfortunately, these are all good facts related to the marketplace. So, let’s face the truth and the new standards: Magento Marketplace utilizes a 70/30 revenue share split!

Yes, now you’ll have to pay 30% of your ongoing revenue just for being on the market. And the worst thing is the absence of any reliable alternative solution. Extension developers can still sell their software through own websites, but they won’t be able to utilize the power of Magento Marketplace (Connect) anymore if not agree to get only 70% from their revenue. But what is destined to good old Connet?

The old marketplace will be discontinued at some point in the future. It will stay alive until the migration off all extensions will not be completed. As for the Magento 1 and 2 modules, they will be added to the marketplace only after specialists will review them (as promised before). If you are a developer with extensions on Connect, get ready to be notified via email with instructions on how to submit your modules for the review. Please note that your existing Submitted or Live extensions will be migrated automatically.

Besides modules, the migration procedure will move such data as your bio, logo, email, full account name, address, and support link to Magento Marketplace.

New submission requirements are:

• You should check and agree with the Magento Marketplace Terms and Conditions.

• An automated Basic code check will be used for all your modules.

• Reliable business information is now required to ensure efficient payment processing.

• The same is about complete profile information.

• Basic Check is mandatory (as well as other similar procedures). The procedure scans Magento 2 & 1 modules for plagiarism, security issues, as well as Magento coding standards.

Since developers can easily change prices, the usage of a 70/30 revenue share split will probably lead to a significant price increase. Thus, we have a question for merchants: are you ready to pay more for the same Magento modules? And if you are a developer, please tell us your opinion about Magento Marketplace.

UPD (18.11.15):

Magento Connect has been upated, and you can find the first Magento 2 extensions there. Currently, the website offers both available now modules and upcoming plugins. It is also necessary to mention that all software solutions within updated Magento Connect are divided into the following groups: Customer Experience; Site Management; Integrations; Marketing; Utilities; and Themes. Every group includes several categories, which makes your search very convenient and fast. You can find the new Magento 2 extension marketplace here: New Magento Connect. New Magento Connect will be released in Q1 2016.

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New Magento Connect provides customers (both merchants and developers) with a plethora of new abilities. Magento turns Connect into a better place for discovering new extensions as well as monetizing and innovating products and services.

First of all, it is necessary to mention a new homepage. It has a clean and modern interface, looks more user-friendly than the first version of Magento Connect, and offers intuitive checkout as well as streamlined navigation.

Besides, it is much easier to find extensions you are looking for, since New Magento Connect introduces dynamic pages with new and popular products. Furthermore, curated lists are chosen by experts from different reliable companies.

As for educational materials, they are published monthly and include stories about Magento extensions and developers that changed the ecosystem.

Another important enhancement introduced in New Magento Connect is a new approach to the quality of extensions and modules:

• All products are evaluated before being published on the marketplace.
• Extensions are analyse in order to detect stolen code.
• Modules approved by Unit Test are more preferable.
• New Magento Connect uses reviews by experts.
• The community have a stronger voice in this process.

In their turn developers get a new dashboard with all important metrics, such as revenue, the percentage of repeat and new customers, and the number of total views, saves, and downloads. Thus, it is extremely easy to monitor conversion rate without any third party solutions.

It is also worth mentioning that New Magento Connect is integrated with Composer and probably will provide better connection with GitHub, at least we hope so.

How do you see New Magento Connect? Please, share your thoughts in comments.