Interview with Ryan Masuga of devot:ee

Yesterday, devot:ee launched a new add-on store. Now you can buy select add-ons right on the devot:ee site. I caught up with devot:ee creator Ryan Masuga to learn more about the new store.

Q. Congratulations on launching the devot:ee add-on store! Can you give us an overview of what the store is?

A. Thank you! Over the past year, devot:ee has consistently gained more visitors and repeat traffic to our add-on library, which is now over 800 entries. ExpressionEngine users are already on the site viewing, bookmarking, favoriting and rating the add-ons, so we thought it would be enormously convenient to just offer them for sale as well. Some developers can and do still sell items on their own sites - this is just another (and we hope better!) avenue for them. And it may be the only avenue for devs who don’t currently have a way to sell their work.

Q. This seems like a natural step for the site. Is it something you had planned all along or only after you saw how the site was received and used by the community?

A. This was not planned at all from the beginning. In the beginning it was just myself working on this, so I never, ever would have had to the time to manage commerce. A shout-out here to Jacob Russell for his hard work in help maintaining and improving the site.

I think the site has found its way over the last year, and that means “concentrate on add-ons and anything add-on related.” In that sense, selling commercial add-ons is definitely a natural step. A fire was lit to get this done when I started a new project a couple months ago and had to go to five different sites to purchase everything I needed. It would have been better to get all those in one place, in a single transaction.

Q. You started off with a nice list of add-ons. Are you planning to add more in the near future?

A. That’s really up to the developers. I certainly hope any devs who aren’t represented now will eventually see that it makes sense to add their items to the catalog. I, for one, would love to buy User, Low Variables, Bucketlist, Better Meta, and Playa/Matrix all in one place at one time. Boom, done.

Q. A central add-on store seems to lower the barrier of entry for selling your add-ons. How do you see this impacting the EE developer community?

A. I don’t see a downside. You could be a great developer with an awesome ExpressionEngine add-on that might never see wide release because you don’t want to give it away for free, but you also don’t want to spend time and effort setting up a store. One goal of the add-on store is to bring those people out of the woodwork. I think we may see a lot more commercial offerings, and possibly even conversions from free to paid (because it is so easy to sell on devot:ee), but developers will have to remember that even if their add-on fills a niche, if the support is non-existant and the add-on itself is buggy, no one is going to pay for it.

Q. How can an add-on developer get her add-on in the devot:ee store? Is it a similar model as the Apple App Store?

A. We are not policing the commercial add-ons other than asking for a little information before you can sell. The process to sell an add-on is really pretty simple. There are three steps:

• Request that your member account be “hooked up” to edit your add-ons listed on devot:ee.
• Fill out a few new form fields in your member area: Agree to terms, give us info so we can send you payments.
• Update the info for the add-ons you’d like to sell: add a price, upload a file, you’re done.

A developer (Stephen Lewis of Experience Internet) added two items for sale a few hours after we opened the store, and I had no idea until I saw his tweet about it. You could literally write an add-on and have it for sale in a few minutes.

Q. Will you also host and make available free add-ons?

A. We actually do host many free add-ons now. For free add-ons a developer can either upload a file or provide a GitHub repository name which we use to construct a download link right on devot:ee.

Q. Finally, I see that you have Cartthrob listed as one of the add-ons you’re selling. Are you also using Cartthrob to run the store? If so, what was your experience using the new e-commerce add-on?

A. Yes, we’re using CartThrob for the store, and it was a great experience. We spent months messing around with another commerce add-on that just was not working out. I met a developer at SxSW this year who was in the CartThrob beta and we started talking about e-commerce. He said I had to contact Barrett Newton and get in the Beta for this add-on store. So I called up Chris Newton, told him what I wanted to do with devot:ee, got in the beta program, and didn’t look back.

E-commerce is not something I’m a fan of, if I have to execute it. I typically avoid any e-commerce in client work. However, I felt very confident using CartThrob, enough so that I might reconsider blindly passing on projects that involve commerce. The support from the guys at Barrett Newton was outstanding, from fixing my bug reports to implementing feature requests to offering helpful explanations and code samples. The add-on store would still not exist if CartThrob hadn’t come along when it did.