devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

Sales Reports Are Now Live for ExpressionEngine Add-on Developers

June 28, 2010
by Ryan Masuga

Over the weekend we quietly enabled a new Sales Reports feature for add-on developers who sell add-ons on devot:ee. Developers who are enabled for sales will now see a couple new links on their main member account page: Sales Reports and License Keys.

Sales Reports

Earlier this month we enabled opt-in email notifications for add-on sales, which sends an email to a developer whenever one of their add-ons is sold. The new reports area is more concerned with the Big Picture. The main sales page defaults to showing sales info for the current month including total items sold, gross sales, purchased add-on details, an item breakdown (which is nice if you offer more than one item), and (of course) your profit. You can easily view past months, or view sales for the year or even by day. We're excited about this new Sales Reports area for developers. A quick login and click over to your Sales Report page will show you what's going on for you this month. Again, this is available now, so log in and see what kind of activity you've had.

License Keys List

Requiring license key generation is optional per add-on, and many developers take advantage of this feature. Visiting the License Keys page will show you a list of keys for those add-ons that require a key. There is very basic information in this list: the name of the addon, the date it was purchased, the license key, and the customer name and email. Taking this one step further, you can see this information in JSON format by clicking the "JSON format" link or simply appending /json/ to the URL. The list is ordered by title first, then by purchase date. Sample (bogus!) JSON output:

{ licenses: [
{
  item: 'Low Reorder',
  purchase_date: '2010-05-17',
  license_key: '123ab123-1234-1a23-1ab2-101234567789a',
  customer_name: 'Davey Jones', 
  customer_email: 'davey@site.com'
},

{
  item: 'Low Variables',
  purchase_date: '2010-06-14',
  license_key: '123ab123-1234-1a23-1ab2-101234567789a',
  customer_name: 'Bob A. Booey', 
  customer_email: 'baba@site.com'
}
]}

We hope this is a good start towards helping those developers who wish to import the license info into their own systems for keeping track of their customers.

Just the Beginning

This is just the first go at the reports. We have some other half-baked thoughts on what we can do in this area, but suggestions for making this easier and better for you are certainly welcome. Just contact info@devot-ee.com.