WooCommerce announced on an internal blog post they are increasing their revenue sharing with third party developers from 50% to 60%. This means third party developers will get 20% more revenue per sale than they did previously.
In return, developers are now required to perform all support, including tier-one support. Customer feedback will show directly on developer product pages in order to incentivize quality support.
Customer support requests will be redirected to extension developers as well. WooCommerce will send a follow-up to the customer after three days to ensure they received support and to survey them. Those survey ratings are what will show up on developers’ product pages.
Third party partners will be able to edit their own product pages within the WooCommerce marketplace too.
After these changes go into effect, WooCommerce says they’ll explore “a more consistent and speedy process to submit extensions, have them reviewed, and launch new products.”
With these developments, WooCommerce is acting more like a traditional marketplace. Prospress, SkyVerge, and SomewhereWarm are all beta testers for the new setup; all three companies have posted support jobs on the Post Status job board. That makes sense, as they are now responsible for more direct support.
The 20% increase in revenue will surely be welcome. However, a 60% revenue share is still less than the 70% Shopify offers their app developers, and it’s less than Envato’s rate for top-tier authors. Over time, I wonder if there will be room for a higher margin, or a tiered system like Envato has.
These changes may lead WooCommerce to open up its marketplace more as well. They have not accepted new third party partners for quite a long time now, and it would surely benefit their marketplace (as well as those sellers) to get exposure through the official WooCommerce site.
I’ll be interested to see if these changes have a significant impact on third party sellers or buyer experiences. I’ve heard WooCommerce support loads have been extremely high, especially after major releases.
