Tag Archives: Marketplace

Gatsby WP Themes Launches New Marketplace – WP Tavern

[ad_1] The Gatsby WP Themes project has launched a new marketplace for developers who are building WordPress-powered sites with Gatsby on the frontend. Originally founded by Zac Gordon and Alexandra Spalato, the commercial venture is now primarily managed by Spalato and Paulina Hetman. The team’s first project involved porting the Twenty Twenty WordPress Theme to a Gatsby WP Theme. They are now focused on creating commercial themes targeted at developers and agencies who can use them to save time when building clients’ sites. Gatsby is more well-suited to sites that don’t have a lot of dynamic content, such as marketing or documentation sites. Gatsby WP Themes is launching with several starter themes with different styles for each child theme. They include designs suitable for blogs, personal sites, businesses, restaurants, and portfolios. Gatsby themes have several distinct advantages over just grabbing a starter or boilerplate Gatsby site from GitHub. Spaloto identified a few reasons why developers might opt for using a theme: Gatsby themes allow Gatsby site functionality to be packaged as a standalone product for reuse. All of your default configuration lives in an npm package. Themes are versioned packages that can be updated like any other package. If you created multiple sites using the same theme, you can just update the central theme to push changes across all of them. Themes are composable: You can install a blog theme alongside a notes theme, alongside an e-commerce theme (and so forth). All themes in the new Gatsby WP Themes marketplace include built-in support for dynamic comments, search, Mailchimp integration, sitemaps, Google analytics or Google Tag Manager, and various widgets. The marketplace also includes Gatsby plugins that make popular WordPress plugins more compatible with Gatsby frontends. The current offerings add support for Contact Form 7, lightbox functionality, and Yoast SEO. Spalato and Hetman are aiming at connecting with WordPress users who don’t code, those who don’t know React but want to use Gatsby, agencies, developers, and marketers. They have not promoted the marketplace much but already have more than 800 subscribers on Mailchimp. The team plans to release new themes and/or starters frequently as they continue building up their catalog of products. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Alex Denning and Iain Poulson Launch FlipWP, an Acquisitions Marketplace for WordPress Companies – WordPress Tavern

[ad_1] Alex Denning and Iain Poulson launched FlipWP today, a private marketplace to facilitate acquisitions for WordPress companies. WP Engine’s recent published research, which estimates the WordPress economy at $596.7B, has inspired confidence in the ecosystem. An increasing number of acquisitions announced over the past month is also reinforcing the need for a more centralized marketplace for these opportunities. “Iain and I started talking a lot more regularly a year ago, when he started Plugin Rank,” Denning said. “He was getting people asking him for acquisition opportunities, and with Ellipsis I was getting clients asking for help evaluating acquisitions and with sales. There was no go-to marketplace, so in March we started talking about working together on solving the problem.” Sellers can list on FlipWP privately for free and buyers handle their own sales, with no exclusivity obligation. The site doesn’t charge for listings and it doesn’t take commission from any sales. The $299 membership for buyers opened today, which offers access to FlipWP’s email list of acquisition opportunities. Listings include business data, such as ARR and monthly profit, the asking price, and commentary about the opportunity from FlipWP. Buyers can reach out directly to sellers with no middleman involved. In the past, finding a buyer for a WordPress company required having a wide network, knowing the right people, or posting on various marketplaces like Flippa and MicroAcquire. “Every week I was hearing about another acquisition, getting an email from someone looking to buy a plugin business, or emails from developers asking the best way to sell,” Poulson said. “The need for a WordPress specific acquisition marketplace became more and more apparent.” The Acceleration of Acquisitions in the WordPress Ecosystem There is a lot of buzz on Twitter lately, questioning whether an active acquisition market is a healthy development. Some have expressed concern about small, independent tools getting bought up by larger companies and worry that consolidation will lead to lack of competition. Eric Karkovack wrote in a post speculating on the future of plugin acquisitions, entertaining the possibility that “a few big players simply set the rules for everyone else to follow:” Frankly, it’s becoming a lot harder for solo entrepreneurs or small development shops to manage a popular plugin. Supporting a large userbase while also focusing on the future could become overwhelming. Thus, it’s not surprising to see that some of these products are being sold off to larger firms. We saw something similar happen with internet providers back in the early 2000s. The more mature the market, the harder it became for a small company to carry out its mission. Pretty soon, they were just about all bought up by corporate interests. While that may not fully reflect the case here, it seems to at least be trending in that direction… It will take some time. But there might come a day when a typical business website runs plugins from perhaps only a few big development houses. Not everyone shares this same bleak outlook on the potential effects of consolidation. During Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A at WordCamp Europe, Brian Krogsgard asked what these acquisitions mean for the health of the WordPress economy. Mullenweg sees it as a positive development that should spur more creation: It’s a really exciting time because it feels so robust and healthy. The fact that these exits are happening then creates more incentives for something new to be created, either from the alumni of these companies or by people that know that they can get something to a certain point and sell it to one of these companies. It’s actually not very different from Google and Yahoo and all of these companies that buy up lots of startups. Guess what, that created way more startups, some of which became Airbnb and Uber and challenged the tech giants. That’s the beauty of how the ecosystem works. Poulson and Denning are also optimistic that FlipWP will open up more opportunities for business owners to get connected and accelerate the process for all parties involved. “The acquisition trend is indicative of WordPress maturing,” Denning said. “If WP Engine thinks the WordPress economy is worth $597 billion dollars and the biggest public companies in WordPress are worth ~$20bn, we’re about $577bn short. A lot of that number will be made up through the small businesses we see getting sold, and until now they’ve not had a way of selling other than ‘post it on Slack.’ If that study is right, then the one-most-weeks rate of acquisitions might actually be significantly too low, and those businesses are being undervalued, too. We can make it much easier for buyers to find quality WordPress listings, and we can make it much easier for sellers to get the best price.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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The Best Service Marketplace Theme In 2021?

[ad_1] Want to build a task marketplace like TaskRabbit, Airtasker, or Thumbtack?  Great idea! In just a decade since its inception, TaskRabbit has empowered 148,000 individuals to grow their income and skills. Airtasker creates over 1.4 million tasks each year. And Thumbtack is doing its own thing to help local professionals find work. ExpertHive is a clean, modern WordPress theme that wants to make it easy for you to launch your own on-demand task marketplace – one that offers a similar experience and functionality as these task sites.  The theme’s developers claim that it’s already packed with all the features needed to build an on-demand services marketplace, so you won’t have to buy anything else to get your site going. This made us curious to try it out ourselves. Is ExpertHive as complete as its creators say? Does it deliver a marketplace with all the necessary bells and whistles? Can it really help me build a site like TaskRabbit?   We’ll be answering these questions and more in this comprehensive ExpertHive Review. ExpertHive On-Demand Services Marketplace Theme Review ExpertHive is a lightweight yet feature-rich WordPress theme for building a two-sided services marketplace. It allows you to create a site where buyers can post their job requests and sellers can list their services. The theme is powered by HivePress, the multipurpose directory plugin that’s already used by 3,000+ active WordPress sites.  Key features include: Requests & Offers to facilitate customers in posting their requests and enabling experts to list services they offer. Commissions & Payouts for setting up a default commission rate and a payout threshold for taskers and experts.  Messages & Reviews to help customers communicate with taskers and leave reviews about their services. Custom Fields & Categories that make it easy to customize the marketplace to your liking. WooCommerce integration to help you process payments.  And more. Besides, you can use any of the premium or free add-ons available for HivePress to expand your marketplace’s functionality.  Article Continues Below Unlike other themes, ExpertHive saves you the need to download expensive third-party extensions or plugins. You can combine different HivePress extensions to create a niche marketplace with unique functionality.  ExpertHive costs $79 for a lifetime single-site license. The purchase also includes 12 months of premium support, automatic updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the sake of this review, we purchased ExpertHive so that we can give you a full scope of what it’s capable of.Easy Installation and Handy Plugins  ExpertHive installs the same way as any other premium WordPress theme. You simply go to your WordPress dashboard, select Appearance > Themes, click Add New > Upload Theme, and then select the ZIP file. Once installed and activated, ExpertHive will suggest installing some plugins, such as HivePress Blocks and HivePress Messages. We installed all of them, as they’re meant to complement the site-building process.  And to further simplify things, ExpertHive developers have recorded a screencast about how to import its demo content. Although it’s possible to start designing your marketplace from scratch, we actually recommend using pre-made content so that your site starts off looking exactly like the live ExpertHive demo. ExpertHive suggests using the free one-click demo import plugin for importing demo data. After installing it, navigate to Appearance > Import Demo Data and then click the Import Demo Data button, as seen in the screenshot below. Site Customizations Being a modern theme, ExpertHive is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor and customizer. Know what that means? It means you can tweak everything using drag-and-drop and the familiar WordPress blocks. Also, whatever you edit will reflect on the front-end of the site.  With the WordPress customizer, you can switch fonts, change the main colors, background images, customize menus, and so on. Additionally, ExpertHive allows you to build your own layouts depending on the page functionality and purpose. You can do this by adding a new page from your WordPress backend. The theme offers the following blocks by default: Article Continues Below Listings Listing categories User registration form Vendors Vendor search form Requests Requests search form Listing tags Reviews ExpertHive also offers shortcodes for those using the Classic TinyMCE editor. These give you more control over your site’s design. If you’re a more advanced user, you can customize ExpertHive directly from the CSS. Marketplace Features Although ExpertHive’s site customization features are great, it’s the marketplace features and monetization capabilities that make it truly stand out. For example, ExpertHive and HivePress plugins combine to offer you: Listings Allow any registered users to list their services and feature specific listings on your homepage, as well as add, edit, or remove the existing listing categories. Paid Listings With the Paid Listings extension, you can create and sell various listing packages with different options so experts can pick the best option for listing their services. Vendors Manage individual expert profiles, including adding new custom fields and search filters (such as location). Requests Allow customers to create their own requests with extra details like budget, due date, and time range. It’s also possible to add custom fields and search filters in the same way as for listings or vendors. Messages Let buyers and experts communicate with each other. Tags Allow experts to create category-based tags to make it easier for buyers to find relevant listings. Favorites Enable customers to compile a list of their favorite listings so that they’re encouraged to come back and order services from the same taskers Article Continues Below Testimonials Display testimonials from experts to grow trust in your marketplace. WooCommerce ExpertHive is integrated with WooCommerce for processing payments and managing orders, so you can use any of the payment gateways available for WooCommerce. There are also more free and premium ExpertHive extensions, but these nine should be enough for incorporating key marketplace functionalities into your website. Commissions & Payouts One of ExpertHive’s best features is that it allows you to apply a default commission rate. You can set one overall commission rate for all experts or offer a slightly higher commission to taskers

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