Other Digital Goods Marketplace

[digitalpoint]

Now that the migration of my site has been settling down, I've been cleaning stuff up, and I think the digital goods marketplace is more or less ready to roll full steam. A lot of people saw some screenshots when it was a work in progress last year over here, and now it's open to the public.

https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/

The XenForo area is one small category of it (it's an overall digital goods marketplace), which you can see a few things of my own I've added here: https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/xenforo.12/category

So what is it exactly?
It's a system to allow people to sell digital goods like addons, and the system handles everything about the transaction. You create the product page, upload the latest version and you more or less are done.

Things it handles...

• Payments (via PayPal)
• Licensing (license period is set by seller) along with optional license renewals
• Distribution of product once purchased
• Reviews/ratings
• Optional built-in affiliate program
• Multi-tiered pricing (for example you could give discounts or make it free to premium users)

It also does some fancy things...

Fully supports product, review and offer microdata, which means people finding your product page via Google search results will see things like the rating and number of reviews right in the Google search results (attracts extra attention). Example: http://www.google.com/webmasters/to...formula-make-money-within-hours.14/item&html=

You can see analytics for your product page for the last month... where traffic is coming from, how many page views, etc.

What is it not?
It's not a "resource manager" like here at XenForo... it's main purpose is selling digital goods (while you can give stuff away for free as well, that's not really what it's designed for). You can't upload articles (well unless you packaged it as a PDF eBook or something) for example. It's also a much bigger scope than just XenForo stuff, so it's not purely a XenForo thing (it does addons for other platforms as well as completely different things like eBooks, Scripts, Templates, etc.)

Anyway... glad to finally have the site migrated to XenForo so I can start building the fun/interesting stuff now (like this).

 

[Chris D]

Great work as ever, digitalpoint.

One day... when I'm all grown up... maybe I'll be able to make something like this

 

[erich37]

so what is the difference in "digital products" versus "physical products" ?

Could it be turned into something like this ?

http://www.alibaba.com

http://www.mfg.com

 

[digitalpoint]

so what is the difference in "digital products" versus "physical products" ?

Could it be turned into something like this ?

http://www.alibaba.com

http://www.mfg.com

It could be, yes... but it's not going to be. Not interested in dealing with shipping or physical goods.

 

[erich37]

well, Alibaba is not doing the shipping at all... neither does MFG.

I am merely asking this from a technical perspective and generally speaking about the differences of a Marketplace for "digital goods" versus "physical goods".....

 

[digitalpoint]

Maybe someday... but not in the short-term.

 

[3rd AnGle]

ahemmm... is this a hint that it's gonna be released soon?

What does "more or less ready to roll full steam mean".. ?

 

[digitalpoint]

ahemmm... is this a hint that it's gonna be released soon?

What does "more or less ready to roll full steam mean".. ?

It means people can sell stuff in it now.

No plans to release it... it requires a PayPal account with special permissions to run the backend anyway, so very few would be able to run it on their site anyway.

 

[Miner]

Very interesting and i think the 'View demo' option is missing on product page?

 

[digitalpoint]

If people have a demo available, they can link to it straight in their product description.

 

[Shelley]

It means people can sell stuff in it now.

No plans to release it... it requires a PayPal account with special permissions to run the backend anyway, so very few would be able to run it on their site anyway.

Have to ask. I provide free based stuff and likely to for some time yet, I'm not asking for you to but rather is it possible to strip out the paypal stuff and accommodate your add-on for free based items? Or is it tightly integrated with other stuff it's simply not worth it?

I'm just more curious than anything.

 

[digitalpoint]

Have to ask. I provide free based stuff and likely to for some time yet, I'm not asking for you to but rather is it possible to strip out the paypal stuff and accommodate your add-on for free based items? Or is it tightly integrated with other stuff it's simply not worth it?

I'm just more curious than anything.

It's possible... but it's not it's primary intent. But I use it that way for a few of my things. For example the Digital Point Ads plug-in: https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/digital-point-ads.882/item

It still requires the PayPal link, but in that scenario it would never be used for anything (really just because it does assertions when you are creating something that you have a PayPal account), and trying to manage edge cases without a PayPal account is just more work than I feel like messing with (again, since it's not really intended as a freebie giveaway place). Like if something starts out as free, but then they set a price after the fact, we'd have to build routines to make them link their PayPal after the fact (can't charge for something without any way of paying... at least not in this system).

 

[Andy.N]

I dig the microdata for rating. Pretty nice and love to see it implemented more widely among other XF addons.

 

[Shelley]

It's possible... but it's not it's primary intent. But I use it that way for a few of my things. For example the Digital Point Ads plug-in: https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/digital-point-ads.882/item

It still requires the PayPal link, but in that scenario it would never be used for anything (really just because it does assertions when you are creating something that you have a PayPal account), and trying to manage edge cases without a PayPal account is just more work than I feel like messing with (again, since it's not really intended as a freebie giveaway place). Like if something starts out as free, but then they set a price after the fact, we'd have to build routines to make them link their PayPal after the fact (can't charge for something without any way of paying... at least not in this system).

Yeah, I thought other stuff was tied in as well it just wouldn't be a digitalpoint add-on/project otherwise, I was more curious about it all and the depth of how deep the add-on compliments other features you've coded into it, more the complexity of it all. Well, amazing job with it all.

One last question: Can you tell us something about the add-on that you haven't been asked? That you felt your proud of with it?

 

[digitalpoint]

One last question: Can you tell us something about the add-on that you haven't been asked? That you felt your proud of with it?

Just the fact that was even ABLE to get my PayPal account approved for their adaptive payments system at all.

It literally took 11 months and more hours of my time than I care to remember to deal with that whole review process.

And then their adaptive payments API is absolutely retarded... for example you can't even read in results via normal PHP variables because of the idiotic way they give results back... instead you have to read the raw PHP stream, build a system to parse the incoming variables, etc. It's really stupid whoever designed their API. But functionality-wise, you can do some really neat stuff once you get approved and wrestle their API into submission. lol

 

[agison]

just see the title then think Digital Point going to release his Marketplace addon

 

[jadmperry]

just see the title then think Digital Point going to release his Marketplace addon

I totally understand that Shawn can't release this "into the wild" as an add-on....still, I also read the title as something that instantly grabbed my attention.

No pain or angst about this....I figure that it is true that hardly anyone could replicate the environment necessary to run this other than dp.

Overall, I am glad to see the work going to migration to XF....nothing about this is other than good for XF, overall.

 

[DRE]

Can you release this and more addons just in case? Just saw that fbi/ebay article.

 

[Forsaken]

Can you release this and more addons just in case? Just saw that fbi/ebay article.

It means people can sell stuff in it now.

No plans to release it... it requires a PayPal account with special permissions to run the backend anyway, so very few would be able to run it on their site anyway.

 

[DRE]

Oh yeah. Just remembered www.x.com