MarketPlace in numbers

The number of sales of our solutions in the 1C-Bitrix: MarketPlace store has already come close to a hundred, and therefore we want to share our experience. We will talk both about our products and modules developed by other studios.

MarketPlace - a platform that allows you to sell solutions (modules, components, templates, sample sites), developed for 1C-Bitrix. The customer’s ability to pay for solutions on the MarketPlace website appeared in August last year, it was from this time that the site began active development. Thus, not even a year has passed, but we will nevertheless publish our statistics and share our experience.

In total, we released 10 solutions, of which 6 are paid and 4 more are available for free download and use.

How to set the price?

Price is one of the decisive factors allowing the client to decide on the purchase of a solution. A good solution price is a price slightly lower than the cost of developing the solution functionality for freelancers / companies. The price should be such that it would be more profitable for the client to buy a solution than to order development. You should not break the price much: sales of modules with a cost of more than 5000 rubles make up only 14% of total sales.

Do not do the opposite - set too cheap a price. It hardly makes sense to sell the solution for 100-200 rubles - it will not pay off, because more expenses will be spent on updates, answers to customer questions and technical support. And you should not expect that such a decision will be bought 50,000 times and you will get a huge profit. Although Bitrix is ​​very common today, MarketPlace is still not the AppStore, and the market for selling solutions is limited.

This is how all sales in MarketPlace are distributed:



Source: www.1c-bitrix.ru/about/life/news/433579

We do not have solutions worth 5000 rubles, so we conditionally divided the decisions into price groups “Up to 1000 rubles”, “From 1000 to 2000 rubles "and" From 2000 rubles. " This is how our sales were distributed:



However, it is worth noting that the decision in the group "From 2000 rubles" is only one and it came out recently.

What are these graphs talking about? It can be seen that cheap solutions, of course, are sold best, but solutions from the group “from 1000 to 4999 rubles.” (or in ours from "from 1000 to 1999 rubles.") They also sell very well. For example, one sale of our module for 1990 rubles. It brings as much money as 4 sales of modules for 499 rubles. And, despite the fact that the modules from the group “up to 999 rubles.” are sold more often, more expensive module brings us more income (taking into account the costs of its costs, too).

According to data kindly provided by the head of MarketPlace Denis Donchenko, the most frequently bought solutions are worth 500 rubles. The average price of the solution sold (the ratio of the amount of money spent by customers MP to the total number of sales) is 1200 rubles.

Do affiliate discounts give?

The MarketPlace affiliate program allows you to set an affiliate discount for any solution. Having done this, Bitrix partners will be able to buy your solution at a discount of 40 to 50% (depending on the status of the partner). It seems that this is a lot, however, partners must give discounts. And here's why:



As you can see, as many as 49% of all our sales were made by partners. And most of these sales were ultimately paid for by the end customer (the partner sold the module to the client and earned 40-50% of the cost of the module on this). Particularly relevant is the affiliate discount for expensive unique solutions (in the price range from 20,000 to 50,000 rubles). We will gladly sell such a solution to the client and, as a certified gold partner, we will earn 50% of sales :).

With all this, most developers of such solutions for some reason do not give affiliate discounts. And without them, it makes no sense to sell the solution to the client - we will not earn anything on such a sale.

Do free decisions?

When MarketPlace was just launched (with the possibility of payment), new modules began to appear in a very large number and among them there were a lot of free ones. This was logical, since partners received a lot of points for decisions that allow them to get the best status (which is a big discount when buying Bitrix) and to rise in the ranking of partners on the Bitrix website (and these are new customers). By giving out a lot of points for decisions, Bitrix encouraged developers to fill up a new, empty MarketPlace as quickly as possible.

There are now over 650 solutions in MarketPlace. Many of them are free - 44%. But the policy of scoring affiliate points has changed: now they are given less and issuing free solutions only because of points can be too expensive for the company.

Nevertheless, sometimes it makes sense to release free products. You can do this in the following cases.

The first is to practice and gain experience (prepare for the release of a paid solution). It cannot be said that the development for MarketPlace is very different from the simple development of modules for Bitrix, but there are still some differences. It is unlikely that the client who paid the money, and when installing the module for some reason, everything began to appear in the wrong encoding, will be pleased.

The second case is the release of frequently used functionality. If on each project you use some functionality developed by programmers, then it can be formatted as a module and put into MP. This will save developers time (there will be no need to copy files, create folders / tables, etc. - all this will be done by the module installer), and it will also allow convenient updating of the functionality. If, for example, a bug was found in the functionality, and it works on 20 client sites, then you will have to edit it on all sites. If the functionality is designed as an MP module, then you can release one update. The same case includes administrative decisions, solutions for developers, utilities that are not logically attached to a specific site: DbgTracer , Live Api , “ Infoblocks, tools".

The third case is solutions tied to a service. For example, you have some external service (it may itself be paid) and you want to add its support to the popular CMS. Examples of such solutions: " JivoSite Online Consultant ", " Delivery via PickPoint Postamata ".

And the last, fourth case - this is work on the company's PR, that is, the release of a high-quality, popular and free solution. The best example is the DEFA SocialMediaPoster module , “ Sharing materials, ” and I ’m not ashamed to name a couple of ours: “ Twitter feed ” and the “VKontakte” comment widget .

What decisions do you make?

This is undoubtedly the most difficult question, and a clear answer to it will not work. To release a popular paid solution, you need to follow the trends (observe what functionality is increasingly found on sites), monitor the quality and “beauty” (the solution should be easy to use, with simple installation), and also select the optimal price.

For example, the solutions that were most in demand with us were “ Order a call ” and “ Tree comments ”.

The call ordering module fell perfectly into the trend (it is becoming more common in online stores), is missing from the standard Bitrix functionality, is very easy to install and use, and is inexpensive. By the way, no updates have been released for the module yet - clients do not ask, everything suits them.

There were more problems with the tree comment module that came out earlier. He undoubtedly fell into the trend, since such functionality is popular, but there are comments both in Bitrix itself and among other solutions in MarketPlace, too. I had to focus on the “beauty” of the solution: in the module there are a lot of convenient little things, two design templates, etc. etc. All this allows you to perfectly sell the module for 1990 rubles. But constantly letters come with questions and suggestions from customers, so we have some expense in working time for the release of updates for the solution. By the way, it’s Habr’s comments that inspired me on this module :)

It is worth noting that a niche that is not at all occupied is the release of modules for the actively developing “Corporate Portal”, currently there are only 15 solutions for this product. For example, our “Bonuses” have already been sold, despite the fact that they were recently posted and have not the most low cost.



I believe that typical sites and stores should sell well , but, unfortunately, we have no experience here (the first one is just being prepared for release), so we will talk about this in future articles :)

Prospects

It is worth noting that the development of “1C-Bitrix: MarketPlace” does not stop. Plans for the near future: paid module updates, bundles (sets of solutions) and much more. Various promotions that attract customers and contests for developers are also constantly held.

If the post is interesting to users, we will be happy to tell you something more about MarketPlace in the future, so ask questions.