Today we are pleased to announce the launch of the AppShop, which will become the place to go to find all the best Magento extensions.
Check out the great launch video by The Buzz Lab to see what its all about.
Why Launch the AppShop?
People have asked me why WebShopApps is launching this when we have Magento Connect. Well there are a couple of main reasons:
- We get a lot of requests in for us to build extensions in areas that are already covered or just non-strategic and we have nowhere to refer them to
- Our customers have complained that its hard to search Magento Connect to find extensions, and even harder to find extensions that are of good quality, maintained and fully supported
The motivation by WebShopApps here is not financial, we have a profitable extension business and we have our own work to get on with. We really hope that by launching the AppShop we can clean up the marketplace a bit and improve the standards not just for extensions in the AppShop but also outside.
Have your Input
We are presently in the process of identifying and signing up extension providers. We aim to have between 50-70 paid extensions on the site by end of October, and a similar amount of free extensions. We are also looking at how we can bring on board subscription based extensions which we know are increasingly popular.
But what are the best extensions? Who are the extension providers you trust? We really need your input into the first ever survey on magento extensions. Please take the time to enter our survey, you may also win a great prize in return! We will be publishing the survey in full on our blog and also approaching the providers you recommend and asking them if they wish to join the AppShop.
Interested in Participating?
If you would like to get your extensions on the AppShop please by all means drop us a quick mail to appshop @ webshopapps.com. The AppShop program is at present invitation only but we are keen to hear from good quality providers who wish to be considered. We are also keen to hear from Saas based extension providers, and those of you that think you have a great free extension. Get involved too on Twitter and our Facebook page and join the discussion!
Great idea Karen! Magneto Connect is pretty much unusable these days, so this has the potential to be huge. 🙂
Looking forward to see it in action!
Hey, awesome idea!
I was thinking about doing something similar a long time a go but we dropped the idea due to not having enough time to do it right.
My idea was a bit different. It was to have a certain quality standard, but also to have all of the extensions added put on the same Magento installation and make sure they all work normally together. This way we’d create a batch of extensions that you can simply install on your store and not worry if it will crash anything or if it will work in combinations with some other extensions from this batch. As long as you take from the batch it would be simple plug-and-play 🙂
Thats a great idea, we do expect to expand with such features, for this initial launch what we really want to do is get the extensions up there, and then start tackling stuff like this as I agree it would be a great add-on. The other big one being fed back is the need for rollback scripts to uninstall easily.
We would encourage all to fill in the survey so we can get your feedback on extensions – http://webshopapps.wufoo.eu/forms/webshopapps-extension-survey/