The Pixel Manager has landed on the WooCommerce Marketplace !
TLDR
- The Pixel Manager for WooCommerce has landed on the WooCommerce marketplace!
Big News
We are excited to announce that after many months of preparation the Pixel Manager for WooCommerce has finally landed on the WooCommerce marketplace!
You can purchase it right from the Pixel Manager Pro for WooCommerce page on woocommerce.com
Why and How
After creating and publishing the first commercial version of the Pixel Manager back in April 2021, for us it was a natural progression to also try to list it on the WooCommerce marketplace. It is the largest plugin marketplace for WooCommerce plugins after all. And trust into the WooCommerce marketplace and its reach would benefit the Pixel Manager.
But listing a plugin on the WooCommerce marketplace is long way to go. We had to jump through many hoops to get there.
Considerations
Taking the decision to list the plugin on the WooCommerce marketplace took a lot of consideration in the first place. Taking the decision is not as clear cut as one would think.
We wanted to avoid to run into bad reviews from day one, so the code had to be squeaky clean. During 2021 the Pixel Manager went through a number of larger refactors to make the code easy to manage, fast to load, be compatible on as many browsers as possible and much more. And not every refactor went as seamless as expected. So we were afraid to publish the code on the WooCommerce marketplace while we were still planning more refactors. We added many pre-deployment tests to our workflow which not only massively lowered the risk of releasing the plugin with critical bugs, but it also enabled us to increase our release frequency significantly.
Another consideration was the WooCommerce marketplace revenue share. We wanted to keep selling the plugin from our own website, which meant until November 2021 that we had to give WooCommerce a revenue share of 60%. That was hard to bite, as we had no experience how well selling on woocommerce.com would go, and especially how much support we would have to give. Luckily in November 2021 WooCommerce lowered the revenue share to 30% at which point we decided to send in our application to list the plugin.
After a short period WooCommerce approved our application. So we thought, great, in a few days the plugin would be listed. But, from the approving the application to listing the plugin, there's a lengthy process that a new developer has to go through. I think showing each step of the process deserves an own blog post. Here are just a few bullet points that show what else needed to be done before the plugin finally got listed beginning of May 2022.
- We had to find a new name and rebrand the plugin as the old name was colliding with the WooCommerce brand policy
- Migrate the existing website, including the documentation to an entirely new framework (docusaurus.io), just because it is so much more fun to maintain and write new documentation with docusaurus.io
- Create new brand images
- Make the entire codebase compatible with WooCommerce's PHP_CodeSniffer rules (There are many. More than 10'000 lines of code had to be updated)
- Copy the entire documentation to woocommerce.com
- Create a new version of the plugin code just for the WooCommerce market, and make it easily testable and maintainable
- Set up a new support platform that fulfills the WooCommerce requirements
- Educate our support staff on how to deal with support tickets coming in for the plugin
- Go through a final business review, which in our case took a few weeks by itself
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Sign up to our monthly newsletter today.Finally the Listing
Finally, beginning of May 2022 the plugin was officially listed as Pixel Manager for WooCommerce on the WooCommerce marketplace.
Going through the process was very educational and was worth it by itself. There were many elements we learned along the way which are transferable to new projects. And listing another plugin will not take that much time anymore, maybe just a third of the time it took us for the Pixel Manager (which took us approx. 7 months).
