X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

Hi Everyone,

I am glad to inform the community that after several months of functioning in "testing mode" X-Cart Marketplace is announced as "launched officially".

X-Cart Marketplace is a section on X-Cart web-site where vendors can publish information about their solutions for X-Cart and merchants can find useful add-ons for their X-Cart based e-commerce web-sites. Apart from that, merchants can vote and post their feedback about products listed in X-Cart Marketplace. Please note that voting and commenting are available to registered X-Cart license owners only.


I beleive that good products and services need to be supported by their users, so I welcome all of you to rate, vote and comment for products listed in X-Cart Marketplace if you use or used them.


See more at
http://www.x-cart.com/news/xcart-marketplace-announced.html
http://marketplace.x-cart.com/pages.php?pageid=1

PM me if you would like to get your products listed in X-Cart Marketplace.

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

> I beleive that good products and services need to be supported by their
> users, so I welcome all of you to rate, vote and comment for products
> listed in X-Cart Marketplace if you use or used them.

I forgot to add that products which gaine some rating and number of votes within some period of time will get "Kudos from X-Cart users" award :D/

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how many votes, rating, etc a product needs to collect as I do not know the params myself. We hope to get some stats after this announcement and decide basing on them. So you won't see the award on your favourite products pages in X-Cart Marketplace within the nearest couple of weeks. But they will appear as soon as we enter params in X-Cart Marketplace configuration.

Thank you all for supporting X-Cart.

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

In the past I created a list with all adds-on and mods for X-Cart and I offered it to the community. One big problem - very difficult to keep it updated without support from vendors.

Your approach is excellent. Hope all the vendors will come and offer their products using this way of promotion. Of course, they will keep update their information.

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

Excellent addition!

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

There needs to be some sort of modification to the ranking based on stars. If a module gets 5 out of 5 stars and has only one vote, but a module with 4 out of 5 starts gets 100 votes, shouldn't the 100 votes weigh heavier than the 1 vote guy?

If I ask a guy does he like my site and he says yes, that's not the end of the research.
If I ask 100 guys, and 99 say yes, and 1 doesn't, doesn't the value of that 1 become closer to 0?

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

Yes, I should agree somehow with you. But this is more a drawback of "being in the very beginning" state. I mean there are not so many products which collected more than just a few votes in X-Cart Marketplace and as soon as more X-Cart merchants vote there the situation should change. Also, we added sorting by number of votes and preparing to add "Kudos from X-Cart community" feature which will take in account votes left within some period of time from the moment of page viewing.

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

I think sorting on a time period would be helpful. Not sure about the Kudos thing - are you talking about the people who click THANKS here in the forum and intergrating that into the marketplace also? If a developer isn't posting in the forums, or people don't thank them, that may be a negative mark against them for no reason too...

It's tricky to setup a list like what you're doing, and what you have in place is great - I'm glad you get to figure all the bugs out and I just get to evaluate and say Yay or Nay ;)

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

Great job. This will help sell my clients on X-cart's viability.

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

No, voting on X-Cart Marketplace pages is not related to this forum. The "Thanks" button is not related to X-Cart MP either.

In order to vote one doesn't have to visit the forum.

A merchant can vote once for a product, can vote for all products (once for each) in the Marketplace, cannot edit and remove votes. If a merchant changes his/her opinion about some product he/she voted for earlier they cannot re-vote for the same product until we remove their vote for the product. Votes are not published immediately as they are sent to us for review and approval.

The "Kudos thing" is going to be a special mark, an award image displayed on products pages which get some level of rating and numbers of votes wthin some period of time. Product makers will be able to publish this mark on their web-site pages as well.


We are not going to remove negative reviews unless they contain "bad" language or product provider proves that they are not based on true facts.

I should note that we are not going to remove true negative reviews at all. If you do something good, there will much more positive rates than negative ones. E.g. we are in the same situation with our HotScripts products pages and believe this is normal.

Conor's comment to this announcement made me think about changing the way ratings are calculated in X-Cart MP. I think we should add something like vote expiration. I.e. ratings should be calculated basing on votes left within some period of time, not life-time as it happens now. I'll request such change for the MP, but I am afraid I cannot promise it be done soon.
Our development force is very-very busy with something ;)

Re: X-Cart Marketplace officially launched
 

Hey Alex,

Was just thinking about a "HOT" type category or rating. This way you still have the calculation based on lifetime votes (since people usually install a module and forget about it, and have a HOT icon or something for a module that's getting a lot of recent attention.

I know my own modules that I've installed have been working for years without much tinkering around, so while I may have voted for a module a few months ago, it doesn't mean that the product is not as good now as it was then.

It's going to be a tough one to figure out how to rate it. There's definitely more weight given to a module that has 4.5 stars and 10 reviews, than there is a module with 5 stars and only 1 vote. How to factor that in however, that's your end ;) I've no idea how to give "X" weight to something. Maybe someone else here has some ideas on it?