SchmitzIT
Well-known member
No weaponry. You bring the water, I'll bring the board!
If you were KAM, who would you hire?
- Thread starter DRE
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No weaponry. You bring the water, I'll bring the board!
EQnoble
Well-known member
I got it....we could wait for an xf party and him to jump in the closet with some hottie and while he is whispering sweet digtial nothings in her ear she could be asking questions that we gave to her.......like....'where is that source code my dear?'
lol nah...he is smarter than that....and I am pretty sure if he is not going to release it....the worlds strongest dc power source , jumper cables and a connection to a place where the sun doesn't shine wouldn't help us
lol nah...he is smarter than that....and I am pretty sure if he is not going to release it....the worlds strongest dc power source , jumper cables and a connection to a place where the sun doesn't shine wouldn't help us
digitalpoint
Well-known member
It's slowly getting there... my marketplace thing for XF isn't a full time project. It's something I work on a few hours at a time here or there when I have time. That being said, most everything is working now other than the payment processing part which is about 70% done.
Stuff this IS done/working for it currently...
That being said, there's a bunch of really tricky things going on behind the scenes (especially for the payment processing) that requires us to go through a difficult review process through PayPal in order to allow us to even do them.
The addon uses the PayPal Permissions Service: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?...ent_ID=developer/e_howto_api_PermissionsAbout
It also utilizes the Adaptive Payments system to allow a single payment to have multiple recipients (for affiliate payments for example): https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_APIntro
Because of that (and some other things), the marketplace add-on is going to be for digitalpoint.com only, but of course anyone will be free to sell their stuff with it.
Stuff this IS done/working for it currently...
- Multi-tiered pricing (in my case a seller can sell things for a lower price to premium members if they wish).
- Affiliate program built in (a seller can optionally specify a percent as a payout commission for people referring others to their product)
- Watched items system (users can watch items).
- Hooked into XF Alert system so people can be notified/emailed of a new version being uploaded.
- Release Notes on a per uploaded file basis.
- Licensing system allows expiration of individual licenses (for example someone could buy something that costs $xxx.xx and they are entitled to free upgrades for xx months). After a license expires, a user can redownload anything that that was uploaded prior to their license expiring without needing to renew.
- Reviews system able to be used only by valid license holders (you can't have a bunch of fake reviews/ratings from people who don't have whatever it is).
- Hooked into Reporting system (you can report an item for sale for some sort of violation).
- Admins can permanently ban an item.
- Checks for duplicate files (if you upload something, it can't be the same file already assigned to something else) to prevent people from spamming with multiple entries of the same thing.
- Support/Questions URL can be set by seller on a per item basis to allow them to give offsite support if they want.
That being said, there's a bunch of really tricky things going on behind the scenes (especially for the payment processing) that requires us to go through a difficult review process through PayPal in order to allow us to even do them.
The addon uses the PayPal Permissions Service: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?...ent_ID=developer/e_howto_api_PermissionsAbout
It also utilizes the Adaptive Payments system to allow a single payment to have multiple recipients (for affiliate payments for example): https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_APIntro
Because of that (and some other things), the marketplace add-on is going to be for digitalpoint.com only, but of course anyone will be free to sell their stuff with it.
EQnoble
Well-known member
If I remember correctly you have to apply for each individual api feature and it is tied to one domain/owner. Right? So it is not like you wouldn't share it if you could and it made sense to....you literally can't because it would be useless for almost everyone as they don't just approve everyone for these features....am I correct in this?
Awesome for people wanting to sell products who don't have the ability to setup a payment gateway themselves so thanks for that....if I ever have something worth selling...I am going to give your system the first shot.
digitalpoint
Well-known member
Correct... Each individual API call for Adaptive Payments and the Permissions Service require an application and review/approval process from PayPal's side for it to be enabled on your account. The application process is no joke either... you have to submit things like "Industry Use Case Studies", business registration documentation, they want to go through the whole flow of everything on your site to make sure everything works properly, etc.
It's not *just* that... but the whole PayPal API integration is a big part of why this one isn't going to be released. There are other things like it having dependencies on some other things that are *mostly* unrelated, but a small part of those things are needed. For example I have a system where you (as a user) can link various 3rd party accounts to your account (most of which are for reasons specific to my website), but one of the account types it handles is linking your PayPal account. So if you merged the "Third Party Accounts" addon with the Marketplace addon, then you would end up with a lot of weird stuff in the Marketplace addon that simply doesn't make sense for it (like the ability to post your status updates to your Twitter/Facebook profile). So rather than make the Marketplace kludgey and weird by trying to merge in all it's dependencies, I'm just going to let it have the dependencies that I know I'll have on my site.
Rigel Kentaurus
Well-known member
Awesome, it is nice to see that someone is trying this.
I think if you execute it well, you can become de-facto marketplace for addons. I have been hinting at XenForo to provide this for a long time now.
Basically, I have several addons that I want to sell, but I do not want to run a website for it. That is akin to setting up your own store when really you are just looking for some position of the product. If don't mind giving a % of the sale as it is implied that the service is doing the distribution, updates, delivery, promotion, some marketing and it has an audience.
Right now, surprisingly, there is no good service for that. I was using pulley for a while, and then I switched to ejunkie for the features. They do a fine job at delivering online goods and charging through paypal, and an extremely sucky job at delivering updates as in it is not possible at all. That leaves me the responsbility to either email updates to people that purchased the addon, or to setup a site for updates myself.
And I do not want to manage an storefront, every minute I spend hacking a paypal cart solution is a minute I am not coding a product I can actually sell.
Anyway, rant away, congratulations on your project. I'll be for sure uploading my add-ons on your marketplace as soon as it's ready.
digitalpoint
Well-known member
Yeah, basically exactly that... I've always thought there was a good COMMERCIAL addon marketplace missing for every platform I've needed addons for (vBulletin, XenForo, WordPress, etc.)
And I've always needed a way to handle distribution of my stuff (some of my stuff is totally free for everyone, some stuff is free for our premium members [multi-tiered pricing comes into play], and some stuff is simply commercial). So a big part of this all is because I need a *good* way to handle distribution/updates of my own stuff (I'm sure I'll be one of the biggest users of it). And as a passive side affect, others will be able to use it to sell stuff as well. And we are fairly well positioned for it I think since we have hundreds of thousands of website owners on our site every day. And a huge part of our site is already the buying/selling of stuff. For example, there are over 13,000 websites/domains for sale already on our site... http://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/ Which totally just reminded me, I need to integrate the domain/site sales into the new Marketplace (it's more than just digital items like addons).
And I've always needed a way to handle distribution of my stuff (some of my stuff is totally free for everyone, some stuff is free for our premium members [multi-tiered pricing comes into play], and some stuff is simply commercial). So a big part of this all is because I need a *good* way to handle distribution/updates of my own stuff (I'm sure I'll be one of the biggest users of it). And as a passive side affect, others will be able to use it to sell stuff as well. And we are fairly well positioned for it I think since we have hundreds of thousands of website owners on our site every day. And a huge part of our site is already the buying/selling of stuff. For example, there are over 13,000 websites/domains for sale already on our site... http://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/ Which totally just reminded me, I need to integrate the domain/site sales into the new Marketplace (it's more than just digital items like addons).
Digital Doctor
Well-known member
- Integration into What's New? (Marketplace items and their discussion) show up in What's New. This brings the Digital Commerce closer to the action of the forum$. (often a good thing for a site).
- How does an admin know a brand new item has been put up in the Marketplace (New item workflow) (or is adding new items admin only).
Sador
Well-known member
Who would bring the clowns?
SchmitzIT
Well-known member
Who would bring the clowns?
I'd just take off my mask
"There's balloons down here, Shawn! And they all float!"
digitalpoint
Well-known member
It doesn't integrate into the default "What's New", because the normal XenForo What's New is just a single content type (threads)... for example What's New doesn't show other normally searchable content types like Profile Posts.
That being said, marketplace items *are* searchable content types, and will show up in search results when someone does a search (either by searching everything or just marketplace items)...
Changing the "What's New" to show marketplace items probably doesn't have a whole lot of value in the end, because new marketplace items would be rolled off the first page of results in about 45 seconds anyway (since we get so many new posts), so instead I made the sidebar block that shows newest marketplace items.
There is no notice to an admin that a new item was added to the marketplace (it's not set up for pre-moderation of items), but an admin can block any item from showing up (for example if someone uploaded something they don't have the rights to sell) if they see it and normal users can Report any item.
BTW - sorry, this thread got so off-topic...
If someone wants to split it out, feel free.
Insy
Well-known member
You should rather post in the Suggestions: Tweaks & Small Features forumBTW - sorry, this thread got so off-topic...
John
Well-known member
@Shawn - is it safe to assume you are moving forward with developing for the XF platform for your future in spite of all the legal issues, drama, and general uncertainty? I'm not trying to get you to commit to anything publicly, but you do bring considerable weight to this genre we all love and your opinions and thoughts are well respected.
digitalpoint
Well-known member
- Legal issues - while I personally think they are unfounded based on evidence (or lack thereof) I've seen, they have nothing to do with me and really is not any of my business at the end of the day.
- Drama - I don't get sucked into it (and to be honest, I'm not even sure what drama you are referring to). If I've learned one thing from running an a large forum is that it's a waste of time getting sucked into other people's Internet drama.
- Uncertainty - There really is no uncertainty for me. At the end of the day, I don't need Mike or Kier (or anyone) to write code for me. The reality is that we went live with vBulletin 3.0.0, and since that release, there has been very little vBulletin has ever added that we wanted OR we didn't already build ourselves (often I had to spend time removing the code for things I built when they finally added something I already made). I've never been patient enough to wait for developers to build features I want.
John
Well-known member
I suppose what I was implying is that if you are moving forward (even if it's just at the experimental level) with the XF platform as a base when the future of the product is uncertain, then it 'could' be taken as a positive sign (whether you intend for it to be or not) to many others trying to map out a plan...I'd tend to think you wouldn't spend too much time on something that could realistically be going away, regardless of your joy of coding. I might be way out in left field with that line of thought, though.
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