Since the start of “TYPO3 Inc.” (aka TYPO3 GmbH) creating the TYPO3 marketplace is one of the hot topics. It should / will be a one – stop platform for all services and products around TYPO3. Due to much (unexpected) work, the fellows at TYPO3 did not find the time to start the project. So a initiative was started by three agencies to fund and develop it independently.

Goals of the T3Marketplace

The TYPO3 Marketplace will be a one-stop platform for all services and products around TYPO3. If you hear that, you will probably think first about selling extensions and themes or templates. This is right, but it will not be limited to that. Also service level agreements (SLA), support and maintenance services can be sold and marketed via this platform

The second main benefit is to create visibility for the whole TYPO3 ecosystem. Right now everyone tries hard to gain attention and to create a revenue for his TYPO3 product or service. This is split between many platforms and service providers. With the TYPO3 marketplace it will be possible to reach customers who would not have found you otherwise.

Features

The first step is to create a minimal viable solution. The feature list of this version contains

• Seller Management including listing, badges and attributes
• Cart and order management for buyers and sellers
• Payments via credit cards and paypal
• Multi – currency – handling
• “Advanced” Reporting and a
• Q&A – Sections.

A second step could contain the handling of bundles, crowdfunding features and advanced seller features, like vacations and grouping them into gold, silver and bronze sellers.

Features, like daily deals, a voucher / discount system and a slider on a seller profile page, are part of a third possible stage. This may also contain a quote system, where buyers can ask for a quote for a certain service or product.

The “full blown solution” will have components, like event management, escrow and reconciliation services, recurring billing and a integration into the TYPO3 backend, just to name a few.

The features are described a little more detailed in the blog of the project. New posts pop up on a regular basis.

Funding

In order to be (financially) able to develop the TYPO3 marketplace, a crowdfunding campaign at startnext.com was set up. The four steps described above reflect also the funding and possible stretch goals. The initial funding goal is 55.000 €. The stretch goals for steps two to four are at 75.000, 95.000 and 125.000€.

If you want to sponsor the development of the T3Marketplace, you can choose between three types of rewards:

• seller packages, which offer a reduced commission fee for a certain amount of time
• buyer package, where you will get listed on the contributors page and
• coupon packages, where you get a discount on one or more products, when buying via the marketplace

The second part of the funding is a commission of 20% an every trade which is made via the T3Marketplace. This is needed to run the marketplace in the long term and to fund the TYPO3 Association and / or the TYPO3 GmbH in the future.

My first impression was that the estimates for the feature sets of the crowdfunding campaign are too low. I discussed that with Boris Hinzer on the TYPO3 Developer Days. The reason is, that mostly nothing has to be developed individually, because there are Magento extensions for each feature, which “only need to be integrated” into the marketplace. As I am not the only one, who had questions about the calculation, the team published their detailed calculations in a spreadsheet at Google.

Technical Basis of the TYPO3 Marketplace

The TYPO3 Marketplace will be based on the Magento 2 Marketplace solution. So there is no need to develop everything from ground up, but to integrate the various extensions into the Magento platform. There is already a working prototype, which was presented at the TYPO3 Developer Days. If you want to see it working, a video about it is available at Vimeo

This video also covers the background of the project and its founders.

Conclusion

It is nice to see that this topic gets now more spin and the three agencies pagemachine, web-vision and snowflake stepped in to develop a viable marketplace for TYPO3.

At a lot of discussions arouse lately on twitter about features and financing. Boris Hinzer answered in a blog post on startnext.com, covering many of the mentioned topics.

If you have any questions, you can ask them at the wall of the project or comment on one the blog posts.

Personally I expect a lot of this marketplace, especially in creating visibility, opening a new market for templates and themes, and helping freelancers to create a regular income.

Credits

I want to thank my supporters via patreon.com, who make this blog post possible.

This time, I want to thank Christian Kuhn (a.k.a. @lolli42) for his support as a bronze supporter!.

If you appreciate my blog and want to support me, you can say “Thank You!”. Find out the possiblities here:

I found the blog post image on unsplash . It was published by Jezar under the Unsplash license. It was modified by myself using pablo on buffer.