Zoho marketplace review
Zoho marketplace was launched in 2016. In 2020 there were more than 1000+ extensions. How things are going now? Is it a driver behind Zoho' success? Does it make sense to build on top of it?
Why Zoho marketplace?
Zoho is a huge company with 12K employees and almost 700K followers on Linkedin. The company provides customers with 9 products and one unified marketplace. The user base grew from 60M in 2020 to 75M in 2021, which means 25 growth for a company in operation since 1996.
All of this means that there are users, products and extensions. All the basic blocks are available to attract independent developers and bundle a new functionality increasing retention for existing users. Let’s dive into numbers.
Numbers
To understand how good the marketplace performs we need to see basic metrics, such as developers, apps and installs on the platform:
~200 developers
~1,1K apps
~1,2M installs
7.2M visits per month for zoho.com
54 categories
27 products
Deep dive
Generic numbers are good, but what makes this marketplace unique?
Structure
Let’s start with the structure of the marketplace. There are 2 major dimensions - products and categories. So the app in the marketplace can only belong to one category and one product.
Products define parts of the Zoho platform such as Books or CRM.
Categories from the other side are represented by Finance, Analytics and etc.
Independent developers
An Independent developer is a vendor which creates applications for the marketplace. There are different motivations for creating apps, but one of them is to make money. Zoho marketplace allows the distribution of paid apps through the store. With almost 32% of paid apps in the store.
The developer is the biggest number of paid app installs is Ulgebra with 27 apps in the portfolio on the marketplace(Ulgebra’s page is here). Ulgebra was founded in 2020 and has 9 people, according to LinkedIn page.
It does make sense to say that the marketplace is dominated by the company itself. 97% of all installs belong to Zoho apps.
From this perspective, there is plenty of space for independent developers in the marketplace.
What can be done to improve the marketplace?
Demos - there is a video which you can embed on your app’s page and screenshots, but having a demo page is a game-changer. Take a look at demo stores by Shopify.
Versioning history - there are the latest release date and publish date, which is ok to quickly identify dead apps, a better approach is to provide release notes somewhere and push developers to fill them every time a new version is released.
Multi category apps - introducing this will slightly improve installs
What other stores can learn from Zoho?
Featuring - featuring is available on the home page and on product pages too. Featuring is a way to support independent developers, that highly increases chances for installation.
Prices are embedded on the app’s page - that’s really good that I can buy from the marketplace
For developers
The biggest advantage of the marketplace is a huge user base, taking into account that Zoho is growing pretty fast it might be the best time to start developing apps. From what I see making 10K+ monthly is absolutely possible.