Solidus Roadmap

Market Trends

Market Trends

Admin

  • Headless CMS
  • GDPR
  • i18n
  • Reports (sales/user activities)

Market Trends

Business Growth

  • Voice search
  • Subscriptions
  • Social Shopping
  • Chatbots
  • Mobile Friendly/App
  • Modern Payment Methods
  • Automating Operations
  • Omnichannel

Market Trends

Tech

  • PWA
  • JS Front-End
  • API-driven (mostly GraphQL)

Market Size

Market Size

Last updated on April 11th, 2019

Market Size

Market Size

# companies x max(range of revenues)

(Optimistic)

 

# companies x min(range of revenues)

(Pessimistic)

 

Market Size

Market Size

From Pipecandy’s study we can obtain how the market is distributed per revenue ranges and where Solidus revenue average is within the distribution.

Market Size

Average Solidus stores revenue

Market Size

How?

- Our clients

- Surveys

- Online financial statements

- Owler.com data

 

We are only considering stores that do 100% web sales

Average Solidus stores revenue

Market Size

Current Solidus adopters are in a market zone that has a lot of opportunities.

No resource to compete with <$1M platforms.

We are not doing wrong.

It's ok to target big stores.

Which features do they want?

Do big stores start as <$1M?

Free Rambling

Competitors

Competitors

Direct

Open-source; No Saas; code-quality centered; active community; custom-ecommerce-centered

  • Spree
  • Shopsys
  • Saleor
  • ReactionCommerce
  • Sylius
  • Workarea

 

Indirect

Got a pricing model for custom eCommerce/Saas; plug-in system; straightforward retail experience

  • Shopware
  • Shopify
  • Magento
  • Prestashop
  • Woocommerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Squarespace
  • Salesforce
  • Spryker

Competitors

Competitors

We can't consider everything!

 

How do we choose?

Competitors

features.each do |feature|
  if Competitor.indirect.with(feature).size > 4 or
     Competitor.direct.with(feature).size > 1
    feature.take!
  end
end
   

Competitors

Examples

Competitors

Examples

Communicate Success stories/case studies

 

indirect: 9

direct: 4

👍

Competitors

Examples

Multisales channels and omnichannels

 

indirect: 2

direct: 0

👎

Competitors

Competitors

Examples

Free Trial/demo on the website

 

indirect: 4

direct: 1

👍

Competitors

Examples

Theme Store

 

indirect: 7

direct: 0

👎

Survey Results

Who is using Solidus?

Who is using Solidus?

Medium-Big companies

Can probably spend on development

High-volume stores

Who is using Solidus?

Why?

Development firm decision

RoR Background

Open source allowed our company to let our small development team focus on company specific features while leaning on the open source community to support our general eCommerce needs.

We needed something easy to customize.

Who is using Solidus?

Why?

No one mentioned a specific feature (promotions, shipping, inventory)

A lot of Spree migrations, because of the community 

Tech Roles have a high impact of the decision

Are users satisfied?

Are users satisfied?

Pretty much, but we need to improve

Are users satisfied?

What can be improved?

  • Abandoned ecosystem that leads to poor backward compatibility & unsolved bugs: 5

  • Poor documentation: 5

  • Lacks out-of-the-box features: 4

    • integration with ERP system

    • integration with LTL freight shippers

  • No tutorials available (frontend/backend): 3

  • Bad UX/UI Admin: 3

  • Too complex: 3

  • Heavy codebase: 2

2
  • ​​​Weak community: 1
  • Lacks out-of-the-box B2B support: 1
  • Not easy to scale: 1
  • Lacks starter front-end themes: 1
  • Lacks data import/export: 1
  • Not a headless eCommerce solution: 1
  • Poor loading performance: 1
  • Poor internationalization: 1
  • Poor set of APIs: 1
  • No CMS: 1
  • Poor performance with a large number of orders: 1
  • Lacks a roadmap: 1

Are users satisfied?

Where are we doing well?

  • It’s flexible, scalable, and customizable: 14

  • Active community: 8

  • It’s based on Ruby on Rails/Ruby: 7

  • It’s open-source: 6

  • It’s solid, performing, and mature: 6

  • A lot of high-quality extensions: 5

  • Easy to understand and approach: 4

  • TDD: 1

 

What core feature are we missing?

  • Bulk Actions: 3
  • Reports: 2
  • Better return process: 2
  • API: 2
  • GraphQL: 1
  • Selling digital and downloadable products: 1
  • Headless eCommerce: 1
  • Out-of-the-box support for payment gateways: 1
  • Better support for shipping integrations: 1
  • Clearer/easier store upgrade paths: 1
  • Configurable roles and permissions via UI: 1
  • Better order states management: 1
  • CMS: 1
  • Shipping and tax calculation based on postal/state/country: 1
  • Multi-user support: 1
  • Ability to add user credit cards/addresses/etc.: 1
  • Multiple shipments: 1
  • A new frontend framework: 1
  • REST API: 1
  • DDD: 1
  • Subscription-Based Business extensions: 1
  • Services like Wombat: 1

What extensions are we missing?

  • CMS: 5
  • Official payment method integrations eWallet (Paypal, Mollie, Braintree, Adyen, ApplePay ...): 4
  • Customizable subscriptions: 2
  • Analytics integration: 2
  • Internationalization: 2
  • Segment: 1
  • Larger email service provider: 1
  • Shipping systems: 1
  • ERP: 1
  • Accounting: 1
  • Inventory: 1
  • WMS: 1
  • Marketing oriented stuff (starter kit): 1
  • Multi-domain: 1
  • Rich editor: 1
  • Sitemap: 1
  • Product feeds: 1
  • Marketplace: 1
  • Rewards program: 1
  • QuickBooks Online: 1

Is it easy to customize?

Is it easy to customize?

Is it easy to customize?

How can we improve?

  • More tutorials and examples/case studies, and better documentation: 8
  • Increase the ability to configure Solidus by plugging in custom service objects/classes: 4
  • Easy-to-install extensions (Worpress/Magento style): 2
  • A better solution to modify views than deface: 1
  • Splitting methods into smaller methods (so that smaller parts can be overridden in a prepended/included module): 1
  • Use Stackoverflow as an info repository: 1
  • Use React for FE and BE: 1
  • More service objects and less logic in models: 1
  • Improve documentation around customization: 1
  • Adopt Prependers and improve customization tests: 1
  • Encourage people to split modules by functionality: 1

Other relevant things

More tutorial/marketing material

Blog posts, screencasts, etc.

 

More StackOverflow/Knowledge base

Google Search, FAQ

 

More active development

Core, Extensions

SWOT

SWOT

Strengths

🎯 Helpful to achieve the objective

🏠 Internal origin (attributes of the organization)

 

Weaknesses

⚔️ Harmful to achieve the objective

🏠 Internal origin (attributes of the organization)

Opportunities

🎯 Helpful to achieve the objective

🌏 External origin (attributes of the environment)

 

Threats

⚔️ Harmful to achieve the objective

🌏 External origin (attributes of the environment)

SWOT

  • Transform Weaknesses into Strengths ( ⚔️🏠-> 🎯🏠 )

  • Transform Threats into Opportunities ( ⚔️🌏 -> 🎯🌏 )


     

Connect Strengths to Opportunities ( 🎯🏠->  🎯🌏 )

to make them selling points in the market

SWOT

Market Trends

Market Size

Competitors

 

Survey Results

SWOT

SWOT

Example

SWOT

Competitors

 

Survey Results

Missing demo on Solidus.io

SWOT

(Weakness)

 ⚔️🏠-> 🎯🏠

Task
Add a demo

on Solidus.io

Tasks

Next Steps

Are tasks okay?

Do we want to add more tasks?

Do we need a process to add tasks?

Next Steps

How do we prioritize tasks?

💡

One vote per stakeholder?

Weighted vote based on OC contribution?

Next Steps

Who will complete tasks?

  • Hire people: let's watch Roadmap tasks to understand which kind of hire we need to complete the roadmap.
  • https://issuehunt.io/
  • "Internal" (community) issue hunting

 

Next Steps

Next Roadmap?

  • When this one will be completed
  • Predefined scope (2020/2021?)
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