What is marketplace?

What functionality are missing in public business AppStores such as AppExchange, Google Apps Marketplace, GetApp.com, Intuit Marketplace?

• App Stores are great to help business buyers in the discovery and buying processes of Cloud applications. What is currently missing for these App Stores to become even more useful?

• Answer:

  Most business application marketplaces lack a valid business purpose for existence.  By that I mean, first, SaaS applications generally do not require a marketplace to be purchased, unlike Apple's iOS App Store.  They can instead simply be bought direct from the vendor as well as from the marketplace.  And second, the integration value usually is not dependent on the marketplace.  AppExchange is an exception -- it is not just a marketplace, but it also the optimal integration point to integrate your application into Salesforce.  But most business appstores do not feature real value-add at the application level, and that value generally via APIs can be provided off the marketplace as well (i.e., inside the business app).  Finally, most marketplaces don't do billing integration right, unlike again App Store.  The point of billing integration should be to make purchases easier for all parties (end customer and app vendor).  Instead, they often have the opposite effect, and are burdensome on the app developers too, who have already had to develop their own billing systems, and then are forced to develop parallel systems for the app marketplace, which is much more than twice the work, with little benefit to the app provider.  By contrast, the iOS App Store does all the work for you in billing by requirement and design.