The Marketplace primarily targets users from the manufacturing sector. The successful concept of the App Stores for mobile platforms is transferred to the domain of the manufacturing sector, where specialized applications (zApps) in combination with the ZDMP platform result in easily deployable applications for various kinds of use cases and all kinds of infrastructure need a central repository for zApps.
The Marketplace fills this need by enabling users and administrators of manufacturing companies to search for existing applications based on many characteristics such as category, price, type of payment (demo applications, one-time fee, pay-per-use, monthly or yearly licenses, etc) and obtain licenses for their company. The purchase process includes the entire flow of selling: negotiation, order, invoicing, payments, post-selling services like technical support and keeping tracking of application usage. For users, a collaborative system for presenting ideas and requests towards 3rd party developers is included so that users can make clear what kind of solutions they are currently missing, stimulating developers to create more zApps. In addition, users can rate and review zApps as well as view existing ratings and reviews added by other users.
The backend provides 3rd party developers a content management system for organizing and populating metadata for the different applications. The different possible licenses as well as the pricing can be managed in the backend, and also managing in-App advertisements and affiliate marketing is possible.
