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 tell both on the example of our products and the modules developed by other studios.

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

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


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How to set the price?

The price is one of the decisive factors allowing the client to decide on the purchase of the solution. A good price for a solution is a price that is slightly lower than the cost of developing the solution functionality for freelancers / companies. The price should be such that it is more profitable for the customer to buy a solution than to order development. It is not worth much to wring the price: the sale of modules worth from 5,000 rubles is only 14% of total sales.

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

Here's how all the sales in MarketPlace are distributed:



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

We have no solutions worth from 5,000 rubles, therefore, conditionally, we divided the decisions into price groups “Up to 1,000 rubles”, “From 1,000 to 2,000 rubles” and “From 2,000 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 quite recently.

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

According to data courtesy of MarketPlace CEO Denis Donchenko, the most frequently purchased solutions cost 500 rubles. The average price of the solution sold (the ratio of the amount of money MP spent by customers to the total number of sales) is 1,200 rubles.

Do I give partner discounts?

Affiliate program MarketPlace allows you to set an affiliate discount for any solution. By doing 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 it is a lot, however, partners must give discounts. And that's why:



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

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

Do you make free decisions?

When MarketPlace was just launched (with the possibility of payment), new modules began to appear in very large numbers and among them were a lot of free ones. It was logical, since partners got a lot of points for making decisions that allow them to get a better status (and this is a big discount when buying Bitrix) and to rise in the rating of partners on the Bitrix website (and these are new customers). By giving a lot of points for solutions, Bitrix encouraged developers to fill in a new, empty MarketPlace as quickly as possible.

Now in the MarketPlace more than 650 solutions. Of these, a lot of free - 44%. But the policy of awarding partner points has changed: now they are given less and releasing free solutions only because of the points may be too expensive for the company.

Yet sometimes it makes sense to release free products. This can be done in the following cases.

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

The second case is the release of frequently used functionality. If on each project you use any functionality acquired by programmers, you can design it as a module and put it into MP. This will save time for developers (no need to copy files, create folders / tables, etc. - all this is done by the installer of the module), and also allows you to conveniently update the functionality. If, for example, a bug was found in the functional, and it works on 20 client sites, then it will have to be edited on all sites. If the functionality is designed as an MP module, then you can release one update. Administrative solutions, solutions for developers, utilities that, logically, are not tied to a specific site: DbgTracer , Live Api , “ Infoblocks, tools ” are related to this case.

The third case is solutions tied to a service. For example, you have some external service (it can be paid) and you want to add its support to the popular CMS. Examples of such solutions are: “ JivoSite Online Consultant ”, “ Delivery through PickPoint Postamats ”.

And the last, fourth case is the work for the PR of the company, that is, the release of a high-quality, popular and free solution. The best example is the DEFA SocialMediaPoster module, “ Sharing materials ”, and I don’t hesitate to name a couple of us: Twitter feed and the Vkontakte comment widget.

What decisions to do at all?

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 monitor trends (observe which functionality is increasingly found on websites), monitor quality and “beauty” (the solution should be easy to use, with simple installation), and also find the optimal price.

For example, we have the most popular solutions - “ Order a call ” and “ Tree comments ”.

The call ordering module has hit the trend perfectly (it is becoming more and more common in online stores), is missing from the typical Bitrix functionality, is very easy to install and use, and is inexpensive. By the way, not a single update has been released for the module yet - customers are not asking for it, everything suits them.

There were more problems with the tree comments module that came out earlier. He undoubtedly got into the trend, since similar functionality is popular, but there are comments in Bitrix itself, and among other solutions in the MarketPlace also occur. I had to focus on the “beauty” of the solution: in the module there are a lot of convenient trifles, two design templates, etc. etc. All this allows you to perfectly sell the module for 1990 rubles. But letters with questions and wishes from clients constantly come, therefore we have some expenditure of working time for the release of updates for the solution. By the way, this module was inspired by the comments of Habr  :)

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



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

Perspectives

It should be noted that the development of "1C-Bitrix: MarketPlace" does not stop. Plans for the near future: paid module updates, bundles (solution sets) and much more. Also constantly held various promotions to attract customers, and competitions for developers.

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