19 Patron ?!

[lesley]

@Briljander Have you tested them? We have very high compatibility with most modules. I do know that store manager works and warehouse with the prestahome blog.

[Adik]

@briljander said in 19 Patron ?!:

@dynambee I do have a lot of different modules which are not supported here from

emagicone (Prestashop store manager)

Prestashop Store Manager is fully suported by thirtybees:

https://forum.thirtybees.com/topic/423/store-manager-for-prestashop-v-2-29-1

I have a version 2.39 build 1861. Check more accurately before you write the wrong information.

@briljander said in 19 Patron ?!:

@dynambee I do have a lot of different modules which are not supported here from

Linea Grafica

Regenerating Thumbnails - Regenerate your Images v1.0.6 works great with thirtybees, I use it.

[DavidP]

I agree with @Traumflug that open source is not free source, people have to spend time and money on these things. With Patreon though you're introducing a subscription service whereby some pay and some don't. Either introduce an overall subscription service or find another form of making money because people won't like paying for something when others don't.

PrestaShop survives from large investments, a support service and taking a large cut from modules - with the 1.7 they've removed a lot of functionality from the core, which will be catered for by paid modules. The problem they've got is 1.7 is riddled with bugs from various platforms like symfony, bootstrap and js libraries being hacked into it in a piecemeal attitude so it's just a mess. The main thing though is they don't care about the quality of the software as long as they make money from it.

Other open source comparable solutions are just crap TBH, Magento 2 open source pales in comparison to the cloud / enterprise edition and no amount of modules will ever make it as good as them - that's their intention, they made that mistake on Magento 1 and they won't make the same mistake again. OroCommerce, which is from the founders of Magento focuses heavily on B2B though is still in it's infancy. It also has an open source free edition, which is also very limited and not worth looking at as you'll soon hit a bottleneck - both these platforms are like $20-35k per anum just to get started on the good quality software!

Shopify has a reasonable paid service but the good features are in their more expensive solutions at £300 ish a month then you need to spend monthly subscriptions on various modules, which can easily bring you up to the $20k a year for your store.

There's other solutions out there like WooCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, BigCommerce, 3Dcart, Pinnacle cart, volusion and others I've forgot and I've looked at them all as an alternative to PrestaShop 1.6 and unless you're willing to spend big $$ you're going to get crap support / software.

With all that's available there is a gap in the market for a platform that's subscription based of around $20 to $30 a month for the software licence where the main features / modules that people need aren't expensive but are covered by this fee and the modules you need to buy are not mega expensive and don't cost a fortune to own.

Thirty Bees could easily fill this gap and be one of the best low cost solutions available as PrestaShop 1.6 is a fairly good platform and far superior to many of the other offerings available. You just need to sort out a fair pricing model and I've even go as far as stating you might want to hire a business manager to set it up.

Everyone wants TB to work but at the moment you don't know how to make it work in the long term and that's what's worrying a lot of people. If I could afford 35k a year I'd go for OroCommerce or Magento 2 but I can't as can't thousands of others but I can afford $300-$400 a year so you such pitch TB along these lines and forget about this 'a few $ here and there' to keep you tiding over.

[dynambee]

The problem with charging a subscription is that once you start doing that people understandably expect a certain level of customer support. In order to provide that level of support the subscription fee needs to be more than $20 or $30 per month. At that point 30bz would be competing with some major & very well funded players like Shopify.

There are many websites and YouTube channels that survive mostly on Patreon contributions, even moderately sized channels. People who want to contribute do so, those who don't want to contribute (or can't afford to) do not. It's not a perfect system but it works well for many people.

I think 30bz is on the right path. Next step is to get the store launched to provide more income and to attract more users.

[DavidP]

@dynambee that's why I stated $20-30 with no support and being able to buy support hours at $$ - there's still the community to help you out with advice so you only pay for the hours if need be. In fact the jobs board could be used for people to offer their services on the support, like the people per hour platform.

The thing about Shopify though is it's hosted by them and not self-hosted, which is part of their cost. Shopify also suffers from the problem of most the modules being a monthly subscription as well so you can easily get into the $200 a month for many features.

The other problem with Shopify and many platforms out there is that the software itself is very basic; getting something that can do advanced stock management with multiple warehouses, volume discounts on product combinations, loyalty discounts & offers and multiple currencies / languages is very costly (I've looked a lot and the closest you're going to get is PrestaShop 1.6 even if it is broken). TB has got a good base for all of this with most of it fixed and could surpass all those other solutions.

With regards to the Patreon thing, it's also a very short term viewpoint - you want to hire 1 developer on an OK wage, what happens when he wants holidays or goes off sick, who stands in? What happens when the work is too much for him and you need other developers, do they get a cut of his pay or do they work for free?

TB may have started out as a nice project due to PS dropping it but it needs to be run as a viable business because merchants want stability, they don't want to invest in something that they don't know is going to be around in a years time - Patreon is not a viable business plan.

@lesley forgive me here, but I don't understand how an affiliate channel will bring in money if TB is free, what exactly are they selling? Also for the store, again, I'm not sure what it is that's being sold, is it the mugs etc from the demo store? When you say 'once the store is up and running' - it's been 10 months since TB was announced, what's preventing the store from already being live?

[dynambee]

It's very possible to have a Patreon account earning $10,000 a month or more. It's all a matter of having a large enough community willing to donate a few dollars per month each.

The Patreon account isn't the only method for 30bz to earn money either. The main income earner will be the addon store which hopefully will be launching soon. 30bz will get 15 to 20% of the price of each module sold. This is less than PS or other similar stores charge but still enough that as the community grows so will the project's income. The affiliate channel you mention is related to sales from the addon store, I believe.

I don't think there are any problems with the way 30bz plans to conduct business.

[wakabayashi]

@DavidP with the "store" he means a store for modules!

@alwayspaws it is no problem, if you can't support with money. You support with a lot of acitvity here, reporting bugs and so on. Thats very helpful for all here! The discussion is about merchants who make 1000$/month and just don't support in any way.

[dynambee]

@dynambee that’s why I stated $20-30 with no support and being able to buy support hours at $$ - there’s still the community to help you out with advice so you only pay for the hours if need be. In fact the jobs board could be used for people to offer their services on the support, like the people per hour platform.

So you want people to pay $20 or $30 per month for something with no support and no hosting when they could pay $30 a month to BigCommerce that includes hosting and support? That doesn't seem like a great way to attract a large community. In fact it seems like a sure-fire way to drive away potential new users. There is no way for ThirtyBees to compete with Shopify or BigCommerce today.

I think once 30bz gets to a big enough size they may wish to offer a "cloud version" where people can pay a monthly subscription if they wish, or they can download the free version and host it themselves if they wish. That would be following a very well understood path along the lines of what Magento has done. Speaking of Magento, the reason v2 has gone the way it has is that they were bought by eBay. eBay has always had code quality problems and been overly profit-driven so it doesn't surprise me at all to see the free parts of Magento going to shit.

[vincentdenkspel]

@dynambee said in 19 Patron ?!:

I think once 30bz gets to a big enough size they may wish to offer a “cloud version” where people can pay a monthly subscription if they wish, or they can download the free version and host it themselves if they wish.

I totally agree. This model is also used by erpnext and from what I read (i think in a blog post of them) on the forum quite successful

[DavidP]

@wakabayashi ah okies, I missed that bit about the store as I only read a few posts :)

The 1000$/month isn't quite the issue, the company I work for makes over 20x this a month (@dynambee this would put us on the $249 a month plan on BigCommerce) but their viewpoint is they're paying me to provide the website support / service so I've got to justify expenses to them for ROI, it was a hard fight getting 3 months SemRush use! If you're on 1000$ a month then you're fine with the likes of Wix and Weebly tbh.

The fact my company makes 20x that amount though doesn't mean they're making a lot of money because from that there's building running costs, my wages plus two others, product costs, transport costs, storage costs plus other business costs. I couldn't justify spending $35k a year on the OroCommerce solution even if it provides us with the necessary requirements.

The Magento cost of M2 isn't just because of Ebay, it's because they've now got investors who want a return on their investment. Ebay started it off but it's gone well beyond their plans of how to make money. It serves their investers to make the open commerce version of M2 a pile of crap. OroCommerce see that as a good plan and also introduced a similar version of crap free with good paid solution.

Be careful on the free or paid cloud version approach, Magento tried that with Magento Go and that didn't work out too well for them!

[dynambee]

@davidp Interesting with the BigCommerce sales tiers. I don't think they had those limits when I last looked at them. I'd need to use their "Enterprise" tier, lol. Not bloody likely! Volusion is another one I looked at long ago and they don't seem to have those limits.

Still, at the $30/month level they'd have to compete with Shopify. As long as the store uses Shopify payments there are no transaction fees, and most small to medium sized stores would probably be fine with that or even prefer it.

My point really is that if 30bz was to start charging a required monthly fee it puts them into an entirely different market. Not only would they still have to complete with all the free options out there but now they need to be able to compete with all the well funded options that are also charging ~$30/month.

Regarding Magento cloud, I think a lot of the problems were because it was quite feature limited. There were good reasons for that (much easier to support) but it also limited their success due to the lack of many important features. Imagine though a 30bz cloud system with ES already running and all the key modules to be able to compete or beat Shopify, but at $50/month with no transaction fees. That would be an appealing option to a good number of people. It's a long way away still but it's certainly not impossible.

In the meantime, the addon store will be a big help in earning the project money and as the community grows so will the number of people who contribute to Patreon. Right now most users don't even know the Patreon page exists. That will change after it's displayed during the install process and in the back office. It will still take time to grow but I'm sure that as the number of users grow so will the number of supporters.

[Briljander]

@lesley Nope, I haven't tested them.

And my concern is not actually what works today, it's what will work in the future.

I don't want to sound too negative because I wouldn't support a project (even if it's a small sum) without actually using the product if I didn't believe in it.

[lesley]

I would not worry about larger packages like store manager, its something we ensure there is going to be support with. Some of the smaller module makers might not support us in the future because a lot are leaving the ecosphere of making modules currently. We cannot prevent that though.

If there are companies that you rely on, list them, I will reach out to them to see if they can join our compatibility program.

[Briljander]

@adik I think you should read more accurately, I haven't stated that these modules don't work on TB. I just told my concerns about changing platform and answered a question about which modules I am running thats not officially told to be supported.

As I said in my former post, I wouldn't support a project if I didn't believe in it without running the actual product.

[alwayspaws]

@wakabayashi said in 19 Patron ?!:

@DavidP with the "store" he means a store for modules!

@alwayspaws it is no problem, if you can't support with money. You support with a lot of acitvity here, reporting bugs and so on. Thats very helpful for all here! The discussion is about merchants who make 1000$/month and just don't support in any way.

Thank you very much, @wakabayashi :) I appreciate it.

[Briljander]

@lesley My biggest concerns are actually my local shipping and payment modules for example:

https://www.hygglig.com/foretag/presta/

http://www.prestaworks.com/sv/betalmoduler-till-prestashop/62-collector-checkout.html

Many of the other modules can be switched but that do also mean new cost for buying them. But the main concern is what will happen in the future if I change platform.

[wakabayashi]

@Briljander Yeah I believe local modules like shipping and payment are the most critical. Since there is often just one dev.

@lesley is it no idea to break compability in parts. Let's say some theme related modules will be broken quite soon, but payment and shipping modules will longer be compatible?

[lesley]

@wakabayashi I don't understand what you mean, can you rephrase it.

[wakabayashi]

One problem of TB is, that it should be compatible with PS 1.6 modules. This makes a lot of wishful changes in the core impossible, right? I wonder, if its possible to transform in steps to "no compability".

Pamyent modules are very important. So this modules should be compatible as long as possible. But there are modules which aren't very important or which can be easily rewritten. Development of TB shouldn't be hindered of any stupid "facebook like box" module. You get my question now?

[lesley]

Ahh I get it. Ideally we would break everything all at once on the front end. By that time we should have a large enough eco system that developers would just make the required changes.

[roband7]

Technically it's quite possible to program a new core, while still leaving a compatibility layer for PS 1.6. Developers hate making stuff like that, but if there's a business case for it, it's sure doable.

[lesley]

It can be done, yes, but you give up a lot. We are planning on redoing the front end next year so it will be more stable and offer the best possible performance and ease of editing for users. Its not a small task. Shimming everything so front end modules would still work would pretty much negate any front end performance we added in. This would be a totally separate version of thirty bees, 2.0.0

[30knees]

This is an interesting discussion.

I think it's difficult for the people behind thirty bees to please everyone. I know I've been annoyed a couple of times in discussions about the project and features / changes I think are important, but I'm not the driver behind the project and I try not to get dissuaded from contributing.

I think the most important thing to keep the community and contribution spirit alive is to explain carefully why one rejects a contribution, a suggestion, etc. No serious effort to improve the project should be rejected without an explanation.

Also, I don't think it is good when people like @eleazar leave the project because of some dispute and where, at least to an outsider, it doesn't seem like there's much of an effort to keep him or try to rectify a misunderstanding.

Finally, while I think Patreon is a brilliant idea, I would rather spend my money on developing modules I think are useful, or even core changes, and have them become an open source part of the project. I hope that thirty bees is open to this approach.

[dynambee]

@briljander said in 19 Patron ?!:

But the main concern is what will happen in the future if I change platform.

These days PS is on rather shaky ground on many different fronts. There is no guarantee that staying with PS will result in a stable future.

[lesley]

I think it has to be pointed out as a community dies, the toxic complainers are left sometimes to feed on other toxic complainers. My first exposure to @eleazar in the thirty bees community was of him trying to remove open source translations from the German version of thirty bees because he did not want to be associated with the project. My second exposure was of him bashing thirty bees on a thread in another forum. Then he came over for awhile, participated, and then took his ball and went home again when things did not go the way he wanted. We honestly don't have the time for that. I want everyone to be happy, but I don't want to bring toxic community members over, they drain the life force of a project.