One of the major items on the roadmap for us this year is making it simple and easy for our customers to purchase applications in our App Marketplace, and for those app developers to easily specify their app price as well as collect payment.
We've begun working on this recently, starting with an internally-built application (Webinars), so that we can work on collecting money, but we don't yet need to worry about paying out 3rd party developers. This went reasonably well, and customers have been purchasing the application in production since January.
The next step is figuring out revenue sharing, accounting, user experience, and the back-end implementation for 3rd party billing. We've been researching how other marketplaces do it, e.g. Apple's App Store, Google's Android Market, Salesforce.com's AppExchange, eLance, and more. They are all over the place with various approaches.
What do you think?
If you are a developer reading this blog, have you ever charged for an app in someone else's marketplace? If so, what was your experience? What did you like? What did you dislike? Did they have revenue sharing? If so, what proportion did you get to keep, and was this reasonable?
If you are a customer (or prospective customer) who has bought an app in someone's marketplace, what did you like (and dislike) about your experience?
We are trying to make this simple and easy for both app developers and customers. We'd love your ideas, thoughts, comments, and suggestions, including what to avoid or NOT do.
