Re: GNOME Web Store

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi Brian,

Brian Cameron wrote:
> One often-suggested program would be to set up a GNOME Web Store,
> where the GNOME community could sell GNOME-branded merchandise to the
> public.  Other free software communities seem to be doing a good job of
> capturing this sort of market [2].

Just for information, last I heard KDE essentially made no money fron
their merchandising. They request ridiculously small amounts of money
before they list a merchandiser on their list. Looking at their reports:
http://ev.kde.org/reports/ they have not declared any merchandising
revenues at all for 2007.

It looks like they've now taken the decision to have a very small range
of products and a bigger cut of revenues, which is good news, and a
model we should probably follow.

> Things might move forward if motivated people from the GNOME
> marketing-list were interested in getting more involved to make things
> happen.  I am interested to hear if anybody in the marketing-list
> community has any suggestions or ideas that might help.

I think part of the problem with doing this on marketing-list is people
(1) don't really know what you're expecting as a response, and (2) don't
know how much of a mandate they have to explore options.

Are you looking for ideas for merchandise, contacts for merchandise
producers/resellers, volunteers to help boot-strap something?

Your starting point could be to revisit my conclusions and assumptions
from a few years ago:
http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MerchandisingAgreement

There are several options for a low-overhead store: CafePress, Zazzle,
lulu for books, ...

There are a couple of options for a self-run store, if we think there's
enough money in it to pay someone to take care of it part-time.

Software: osCommerce, zencart
Producers: In the quantities we'll be producing, a local supplier to
whoever is taking care of the store is probably best

Sub-contracting: we could run the store as a franchise, and get 10% to
20% of the gross, depending on how well we negotiate & how much risk
we're willing to take (stock buy-back clause, financing initial stock
production, etc). When I looked, there weren't many people interested in
taking this on. I talked to the people handling Mozilla (they also
handle other big accounts), we're too small for them. And the Open
Source Factory, our choice, went bust :(

In any case, you need to decide who produces designs, what quality
control you have, and agreeing financial conditions. And once you've
decided you need to get designs, finance production somehow, and get a
site up.

> I think it would be handy if people with past experience working on
> this sort of project shared their experiences with the rest of the GNOME
> Marketing team, so we do not end up re-inventing any wheels.

I more or less summarised my experiences (except for the end) of my
experiences on that wiki page:
http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MerchandisingAgreement



-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org