Why Merchant’s Edition?

Why staying with the brand thirty bees was not an option.

thirty bees, while being an enormously more stable and more reliable software than it’s predecessor, had quite a rocky ride on the business side over the years. As of this writing, it looks like it tries to enter its third restart.

By Markus “Traumflug” Hitter

Not washing dirty laundry

One might ask why this effort now coming along as Merchant’s Edition wasn’t integrated into the company behind thirty bees. Major part of the reason is, the brand thirty bees was pretty much always and probably still is kind of a cue ball of business oriented people (aka. “Investors”), trying to fool, or at least take advantage of developers. One developer after another eventually recognized this and walked away. Still these business folks repeatedly managed to pull in another new developer face somehow. Works somehow, still a pretty inefficient way to move a project forward.

Enter Merchant’s Edition. Here we have no investors. All of the company is shared between those actually doing something, actually creating value and serving you, our fellow merchants. The more they do, the bigger their share, a great motivation.

No initial investment??? No problem! Working on a reasonably matured software like thirty bees or PrestaShop, contrary to most startup business guides, needs no big investments. Merchant’s Edition as a company may be a startup, but the software project it deals with is not. Expenses for infrastructure are less than € 100 per month. Rather than money, one needs a stable, friendly and trustworthy work environment. And one needs a commodity PC anyone can afford easily.

There is no risk to loose the base project either, because it’s open source. Should development stall under the thirty bees brand again, we can fork it. Merchant’s Edition has the expertise on how to do this. Here we know which background tasks and which web services are required. All we can loose is this brand, software works under a distinct name just as well.

This way Merchant’s Edition is now safe from interruptions by quirky business people. Developers are happy with working by their own ideals and goals. And of course for the advantage of you, our merchants, our customers. Serving merchants is the whole point of existence of Merchant’s Edition.

Expect a bright future and ecommerce software pushing the envelope!