SellWP is a brand new service created by John Turner, who is also the developer of SeedProd. The goal of the service is to eliminate the stress and hassles of selling WordPress products allowing the developer to concentrate on the product itself. Some of the most difficult aspects of running a business such as licensing, memberships, refunds, secure download links, and refunds are handled through SellWP.
SellWP Is Not A Marketplace, But A Managed Solution For Selling Products
While I initially thought it would be a marketplace to sell themes and plugins, Turner informed me it’s not a marketplace at all. “The user markets the theme or plugin on their site and when the customer clicks buy now, it takes them to the hosted solution. The customer and license is then managed through SellWP.” While marketplaces can take anywhere between 20-50% of a sale, SellWP only takes 1.9% + 15¢ per charge in addition to the Stripe Fee.
By outsourcing the product management side of the business, you’re counting on the fact the site will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If SellWP experiences downtime, it could result in lost sales. The site is hosted through Fortrabbit, a service dedicated to providing developers great PHP hosting environments. SellWP is transparent about the fact that their uptime is dependent upon the uptime of Fortrabbit.
SellWP Takes Most Of The Worry Out Of Selling Products
Sellers don’t have to worry about being locked into the service since they can obtain CSV files containing customers, orders, licenses, products and coupons. The service also creates daily, weekly, and monthly backups hosted at an offsite location. SellWP takes care of SSL certificates by using CloudFlare’s flexible SSL certificate. This certificate is used to secure the seller’s shopping cart and membership areas. Back filling of customer data is not currently supported but will be available in an upcoming update.
Turner compares SellWP to VaultPress in that both are managed solutions to a problem:
If you want WordPress backups you can use BackupBuddy, a self managed solution, or VaultPress a managed solution. SellWP is a managed solution for selling WordPress products.
I asked Turner if he will only allow GPLv2 or compatible licensed products to be sold through the site. His response: “Yes, I believe in the GPL and intend to enforce it in the system. The terms are actually from WordPress’ boiler plate terms but this will be added once I get some time.”
If you want to see what the service looks like behind the scenes, watch the following video.
Try It Free Until April 1st
SellWP is another service in a long line of managed solutions for WordPress. I think what the service has to offer will appeal to a lot of developers, especially those who don’t already have an established system in place to sell their products. The service is free to try til April 1st, 2014. Once the beta ends, sellers will be charged the standard fees per transaction.
Does SellWP look like something you would use? Will existing sellers outsource this area of their business to a third party? Place any feedback you have in the comments as John Turner will be monitoring them to answer any questions you have.
It looks good but I don’t think the problem that it’s supposed to solve is that big that you would need a managed solution for it.