iThemes announced this morning that they are entering the eCommerce landscape with a new product called Exchange. Based on their announcement post, it seems the product will be a classical physical goods eCommerce product, in the same realm as WooCommerce, WP E-Commerce, and Shopp.
edit: as clarified in the comments, it actually appears their first competitor will be the likes of Easy Digital Downloads, as Cory says they will eventually make their way into physical goods.
They say the base plugin will be free. I assume it will follow the now-popular add-ons model. They’ve hired Glen Ansley and Lew Ayotte to “champion” the project, which is good. I’m interested to see how they differentiate themselves from other providers.
They’ve got a beta on the way, and promise in the announcement post to explain more about why and how they’re doing this project, so I guess we’ll learn more soon.
Brian, thanks for this … it’s the biggest collaborative project we’ve taken on in 5 years. I haven’t been this excited about a project since BackupBuddy. It unifies all we have been doing and will be doing for the foreseeable future.
As an ecommerce expert, I’d love to get you on the private beta list to get your input.
By the way … I wrote this post about competition an innovation as a primer when we started the project. 🙂
http://corymiller.com/on-competition-in-business/
I think it’s Digital Goods only. “Exchange is a FREE WordPress ecommerce plugin that will help you start selling digital goods online this summer. “
It actually says both, depending on which part of the post you look at 🙂 “You simply want to do one thing: sell your products and/or services online”
Maybe Cory can clarify for us!
Ah nice catch 🙂
Hey John — v.1 will be digital products and services but this will eventually take on the whole ecommerce enchilada. We’ve got a tentative roadmap but are going to listen to users and see what the needs are.