Hello to Amasty blog readers!
Do you produce feature-rich extensions that help customers and merchants leverage the Magento platform? Are you eager to share your plugins with an ever-growing community of Magento users? Then you should definitely check out the Marketplace.
Magento Marketplace is an official application store that brings together merchants and qualified developers of Magento solutions and this way helps all parties thrive. After Magento closed their Connect, Marketplace became the only platform for selling both Magento 1 and Magento 2 extensions.
Read on and find out how to upload your Magento 1 and 2 extensions to Marketplace.
4 reasons to sell Magento extensions via the Marketplace
First, let’s figure out why you may want to submit your Magento plugin to Marketplace.
- Marketplace is an official Magento store. In addition to many platform benefits, Magento users trust Marketplace and plugins listed on it.
- Marketplace testifies that its plugins are viable and useful. To strengthen their brand and build a premium quality plugin ecosystem, Magento organized a multi-step review process. So just by being on Marketplace, you increase your brand’s credibility.
- More purchase-ready Magento users are likely to browse for and find your plugins on Marketplace than somewhere else on the Internet.
- You get a centralized interface to manage your products and an informative dashboard to track all the needed metrics. Working with such essentials as shipping, order fulfillment, payments, and taxes becomes much easier.
Now, let’s move on to the technicalities of entering the Marketplace.
Create a package
A package is a Magento module, theme, language pack, or meta package. Marketplace by default uses a special Dependency Manager for PHP, aka Composer, and requires all packages to be built with the help of it.
The package you submit to Marketplace has to meet the Composer packaging and format requirements. For example, it should contain a composer.json and a registration.php files. Other must-have files regard the module, theme, language pack, and metapackage.
For more information on how to package Magento extensions, read the official guidelines here. Also, to speed up the submission process, consider using some tool that automatically verifies the extension packaging.
Sign up for Marketplace
To submit an extension to Marketplace, you have to be a registered user. So, first, go to marketplace.magento.com and create an account. Marketplace will ask you to provide some basic information, such as your company type and your role (a merchant or a developer).
Once you finished the registration, you can move on to a package submission.
Submit a package to Marketplace
After checking that the package meets all the requirements, you are ready to proceed with the submission itself. For this, go to Marketplace and navigate to My Profile -> Developer Portal -> My Products and click on Add Extension, as shown in the screenshot:
Step-by-step instructions below will guide you through 4 submission steps.
Step 1: State the extension basics
After clicking the Add Extension button, you will get a short form to specify basic characteristics of a new extension, including:
- Platform version
- Extension title
- Additional services, if any
Note that, even if you mark that your extension goes without additional services, the fields with price rates for customer support will be still available.
This is how the form looks like on Marketplace:
Step 2: Go through business review
Write a paragraph featuring how your extension will help merchants and customers grow their business. Say what they miss by not using your extension. Highlight the main features and clarify how they bring value.
In the next field, state clearly why your extension is unique. There are many vendors out there in the Marketplace community, so say exactly what your extension brings to the Magento ecosystem.
After submitting the Tell us about the extension form, you will have to wait for Marketplace to review your information. You will see the “In Business Review” marker under your newly added extension.
When the review is complete, you will get a notification and the marker will change to “Approved after Business Review” as shown below:
It’s time to proceed with a technical review.
Step 3: Get ready for technical and QA reviews
A technical review is a quick autotest that usually takes approximately 10 minutes. To initiate the process, click the icon of the approved module that you want to submit for the review. Below you can see the screenshot of the form you will get:
Provide the module name here, specify the version, and upload the package.
Note that, while you have to provide .tgz archives for Magento 1 extensions, submitting a Magento 2 module requires a .zip archive.
In the Magento Edition Version section, mark the editions and versions with which your extension is compatible.
In the Documents section, add user and installation guides, reference manuals, and other docs that will help customers quickly run your innovative functionality on their Magento.
Perhaps your extension consists of several plugins or should be based on other extensions that you uploaded before. In this case, click Choose existing shared package and mark extensions that you want to include in the package.
If you add a shared package, remember to specify appropriate dependencies in the composer.json file.
That’s it. Now just wait for Marketplace to perform the review and return results. In reply, you will either receive a Reject after Technical Review (a reject report with guidelines on what issues to resolve), or the package status will change to Awaiting for QA Review. A QA review can take up to three weeks so arm yourself with patience.
If an extension was rejected after a QA review, you can view the technical report and re-upload a revised package. Hopefully, the technical review went well and now you can start marketing the extension.
Step 4: Get through marketing review
Finally, your extension got the Ready for Marketing Review status. It’s time to design an engaging product page.
In the short description field, you have just 170 characters to describe the main strengths of your module. So be concise and make every word tell.
Then fill out a long description with a detailed copy featuring your extension. Use the editor widget to style your text - specify headings, font, alignment, lists, etc.
After completing descriptions, you can also provide or update other information, such as:
- Product thumbnail and extension screenshots;
- Relevant categories. You can specify up to three categories to simplify the extension search for merchants;
- Magento edition and versions;
- Documentation, such as manuals and installation guides;
- Installation details;
- License information, including type, name, and URL;
- Prices for the extension, support and other services.
When you are ready, hit the button to submit your extension for a marketing review. When the marker under the extension icon changes to Released in Store, you’ve done it! Now your extension is on the Marketplace, so get ready for working with customers, their questions and reviews... well, that’s another topic to discuss.
For now, hope you have a complete picture of selling your extensions via the channel. Anyway, feel free to ask questions and comment below.