The idea of thirty bees
thirty bees was born out of need. Need for a better e-commerce platform in the marketplace. A platform that is not heavily commercialized, where features are limited because there is a commercial opportunity in charging money for functionality. At thirty bees we strive to create the fastest, most stable, feature rich e-commerce platform. In doing this we have to listen to our merchants and provide the tools that they need to be successful. Sometimes it is a hard balancing act, but its something we are getting better at.
Open Source
Not only do we believe heavily in open source at thirty bees, we rely heavily on open source as well. From our underlying Smarty framework, to our Javascript libraries, our mail libraries, to most of our frontend libraries. Open source lives and thrives in thirty bees, and we have not forgotten our roots. thirty bees is a bit different company than most. We are 100% open source. We will never sell any code we develop. If we come up with a new an awesome e-commerce idea, it will be yours for free.
How it all fits together
Being a 100% open source company presents an interesting set of problems that we are working to overcome. The main problem is revenue. We believe in being transparent with our merchants, while at the same time generating revenue. Sometimes this can be a hard task. This is why we are relying on alternative funding methods such as Patreon. We feel that being funded by the community does not put us in the position for making deals with companies that are not in merchant’s best interests. This is why we need our community to support us, why we need you to support us.