At this moment, rating of CS-Cart developers depends on amount of products which developer added to MarketPlace. We don’t think this scheme is sensible.
That’s why. If you take a look current list of developers, you will see WebSiteSkin in the top (after Simtech development surely).
We apologize before WebSiteSkin. It is just example to explain our view.
Lets investigate products of this company. If you go to company detailed page, you will see, that WebSiteSkin has 98 products for selling.
Lets continue and look products which WebSiteSkin offers:
As you can see there are templates for selling. Lets investigate 12 of top templates:
Please let me explain the current logic of rating calculation.
As you know, Marketplace has been launched not long ago. And the main idea was to publish as many add-ons & themes on the Marketplace as only possible. That was the reason of such “unfair” rating.
We are open for discussion. Please write your thoughts on what parameters should be taken into account and the weight of each. Even if we are talking about reviews - what reviews should we count: developer reviews/rating or add-ons reviews/rating, or both?
Please keep in mind that the main priorities are: happy customers, happy developers and a lot of add-ons & themes:)
P.S. In the near future we are planning to add filters by developer specialization, country/language
You could provide a way for customers who purchase to provide a rating in the marketplace that is based on quality, value and support.
You could provide a key when referring to a site that a developer could use to provide access in a link to a customer for them to provide a rating and/or a review. But this will complicate things to no end.
Trouble with just using reviews is that they are mostly solicited and are therefore mostly biased. I don't know of any developer who requests a dissatisfied customer to submit a review but I know many who followup and ask customers to provide feedback in both the forum and to provide reviews in the marketplace.
Personally, I think you should get rid of the rating all together and simply go as a search by category or type. Just make it a resource versus a shopping site.
[quote]We are open for discussion. Please write your thoughts on what parameters should be taken into account and the weight of each. Even if we are talking about reviews - what reviews should we count: developer reviews/rating or add-ons reviews/rating, or both?[/quote]
We guess it must include both ratings. But, tbirnseth is right, developers asks leave good reviews. But, strongly dissatisfied customers could leave bad comment. It is not problem find place where they can leave comment.
Ideally solution, it is monitoring of all developers once per month for example. Check reaction of support, take into account rating (may include rating on forum), amount of products, but [color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]but this will complicate things to no end ([/font][/color]tbirnseth is right again[color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]).[/font][/color]
[color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]So, another easy solution, we can offer: take into account amount of products, reviews of developer and reviews of products, views of product (but it is necessary exclude ability [/font][/color]artificial cheat[color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]), may be to use information from Forum such as amount of messages, how long time developer on the forum, [/font][/color]on how often developer posts on forum (posts per day may be). Also, forum has reputation points, but we don't know how it is counted.
There's a lot more (in my experience) in working with a developer than the result. The process is many times more important to the customer than the result. For example, using cs-cart helpdesk usually has a satisfactory result But fot the vast majority of times, I can't wait the week to 10 days it takes to get a solution when there is one message a day exchanged.
This should be a resource site. You might want to identify the count of reviews for a compnay who is posting products/services and that could be a link to the review pages. But “ranking” of businesses will always be biased (just like it is now) and the goal of a “marketplace” is to be unbiased and a way for someone to determine what options they have for getting their needs met.