Chris Cyvas

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a LONG, LONG time and I figured that the only way it was going to happen was if I started it, so this is the start.

It hasn’t been what I would call smooth, but we got to 3.0. Not bad for a January release. But it’s out, and it’s done and now we can move on to new stuff.

Before we get to any discussions of new stuff I wanted to say thanks to several people, and some companies for helping the project:

First, Yitzchok and Naz have been instrumental in bringing some great functionality to dashCommerce. Please show them some gratitude. Other’s, listed on the home page, have offered up dashCommerce translations. Please show them some respect as well, and if you are from their country, or use their translation, please send them a word of thanks. In addition, MaximumASP provides hosting for our site, free of charge and I am very grateful for that.

Is dashCommerce a successful open source e-commerce platform?

This is one of those things that obviously concerns me a great deal, because at the end of the day, if people can’t use the product to sell stuff and make money then it’s all for naught. Some folks determine the success of a project by the number of downloads. To me, that’s a pretty misleading number. So how to determine the effectiveness of dashCommerce? Well, that’s pretty easy - who’s making money and how much?

This is where PayPal has been great in helping us out - getting some of the numbers together. When I took the project over in early 2007 I had no idea how successful this project had been, even though there was plenty of forum activity (not always a particularly good thing), there was no visibility into the numbers. So, when I took the project over, I asked PayPal if they could compile some sales numbers for me for 2006, 2007 and then, recently, I asked them for the 2008 numbers.

The good news is that dashCommerce is definitely moving in the right direction. In all of 2006, there were about $850,000 worth of transactions pumped through PayPal. All of 2007 saw steady growth and with the release of dC 2.0.1 and dC 2.2, there were considerable upticks. Now, with the release of dC 3.0 and dC 3.0.1 we are pumping through over $2 MILLION A QUARTER. That’ll work out to over $8 Million a year. So in the last year and half we have seen 10X+ growth. Also, keep in mind this is only PayPal transactions. For all the other payment providers out there that people use - well it stands to reason the numbers are considerably higher.

There are also other measures of success of the project, but they are more anecdotal and less concrete. Now that dashCommerce is localizable, there is an uptick in the international forums and there is a steady flow of translations coming in from community members (Polish is coming!). Also, community contributions are up and people are continually offering up patches. Patches are key to an open source project - you need that community involvement and we are getting great contributions from community members. I am actually behind in applying some of the patches, but they will get applied for the next rev. Also, there has been some activity in folks offering up partial patches for features that people would like to see. While these won’t get applied (because they are partial implementations), I think it is very positive that there are folks out there willing to help other community members by offering up partial patches - it definitely gives you a head start.

Finally, the long terms success of an open source project of this size depends on financial support from the community. Donations have not been a successful avenue (in general) for dashCommerce, so we started dashCommerce.com to offer hosting and additional products for the platform. These efforts have been more successful and the product offerings continue to grow. One thing I am particularly excited about is that we have 10 vendors that have signed up for offering add-ons and providers for dashCommerce. This is a key part of the dashCommerce strategy as we understand that if an open source project is going to seek a revenue model, then the project will be even that much more successful if we share that revenue model with the community. It just makes good sense that many could benefit from this model. With that in mind, I’d like to call your attention to the dashCommerce Tax Web Service and the new dashCommerce Currency Rate Web Service. Both of these products have their markets and they provide very important functionality in their respective markets for a great price.

So that’s were we are right now. Everything is moving in the right direction and there is always more to do!