Change Extensions to Marketplace?

[steveharman]

Hi,

I wonder if it's worth changing the nature of the 'Extensions' section so it become a Marketplace for all things OpenCart including Extensions?

For example; commercial support services, optimisation, installation, theme editing, hosting, custom coding & development etc, I appreciate there's a 'Partners' area on opencart.com but that seems like just a list of company names & contact details.

Steve

[Johnathan]

I'm not sure if I'm for or against the idea, but I do think if this were implemented that a 20% cut would be too high for services. That's a pretty large fee when you're getting paid for actual timed work, versus selling an extension that has already been made. I don't know what percentage would be fair...are there any examples of this for other shopping cart systems?

[steveharman]

Fair point. Perhaps we could adopt a fixed-fee approach when it comes to 'services' advertising in such a MarketPlace. i.e; £20 a year for entry in the marketplace in order to list services such as development or hosting rather than 20% of any sales as per Extensions.

Magento does this sort of thing by splitting down & detailing its 'Partners' area into (a) Building and (b) Extending. The former being for services that help you get your store up and running (custom theme work, hosting, installation...), the latter for say third party system integration, SEO, accounting etc.

On the face of it the big difference between the Magento and OC 'Partners' sections is that each entry (partner) has a decent description of what they offer. Compare and contrast....

OC
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=partner/partner

Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/industry/

Steve