Ta-daa! Soft launch for the win. We’ll be doing an official announcement next week. Right now we’re testing the heck out of all the realtime sales data to make sure it matches payouts perfectly (connecting all these system together is tricky and getting this data correct is crucial), then we’ll flip the switch and open up that data to sellers. It’ll be a tab to the right of the Tax Information tab. Really excited to bring that online, along with the new dramatically improved signup process. Previously, signing up for the Marketplace, doing all the legal and financial work, and updating your information could take from one day to several weeks. Now, it can be done in as little as five minutes. This has been in the works for months.
Still in progress is the Publishing Tool, which is a more advanced version of the new submission form that lets you upload different versions upon submit, make your own updates and changes to text and screenshots, upload updates, etc. The big change here is that normally the Marketplace team makes these changes manually in our catalog, but the new Publishing Tool puts that control in your hands instead. Power to the people! And on the Marketplace team’s side, we have a moderator view with a “to review” queue of submissions and updates, so we can double-check that everything looks good, and basically one click to publish it for us to test or go live with. Far less manual input for us, far more control for you. Massive speed increase here as well.
Finally, coming a bit later this year is bringing all the web Marketplace features to the launcher, like comments, ratings, search, and more ways to categorize content as we grow. This is all the stuff I’ve been hinting at but can finally talk about as it’s rolling out.
Hi, it’s great to see the introduction of an official Publishing Portal and the Seller Profiles. I’d like to know how the product updates are handled. Previously it was done through direct correspondence with the Marketplace team through email. Is that process going to be the same? Or is it handled through the content submission in the Publishing Portal as well?