Product Quality Guidelines

Every product is looked at technically as well as its presentation.After a product has passed the product review it will be available through the product listing page. Please allow a couple of business days for the product to be reviewed by our team. If you wish to request a product review before purchase, you can do so by clicking on the option “Request code review” located at the product page.

Warning:

As per the industry’s common coding best practice, never put API keys inside the source code programming language files.

PieceX uses a code insights feature to show a short preview of your source code. To avoid sensitive information regarding API keys being disclosed in the code preview, please use external files or any other mechanism so that sensitive information or API keys are not disclosed inside the source code (programming language files).

Scope

The scope of your product, meaning the amount of functionality contained in your product and how that functionality is expressed in code complexity, majorly contributes to its perceived quality.

A very useful code base will feature a lot of robust and flexible functionalities. Products, which are very narrow in scope and only solve a tiny problem with very little code, especially if the problem is obscure and/or on a little used platform or language, will be removed from the platform. The more complete a product is the better, unless it is an excellent, easy to integrate powerful module. Products that mainly consist of design work like html/css layouts are discouraged. Lines of code to factor in, generally, especially if inflated.

Shady themes: Certain use-cases and types of products will have a bad look and/or be only useful for illicit activities. For instance a hacking tool may be used by white hat hackers for intrusion testing, but for the majority of people such tools will have a bad look with the implication that it is being sold for illicit uses. Hacking, cheating, cracking, tricking systems etc.

Listing

Your product listing shall contain in-depth details of the technicalities of your product, its features, how to use it, problems it solves, how to integrate it, guiding, support and so on. Bad formatting, style, bad information, lack of information will reflect negatively on your product. Use text to convey information and use images for visual appeal. The stylistic look of your listing matters; it is your display where you sell the product. As such it shall look professional and appealing to buyers. Spellcheck, do not copy any text.

Disallowed:Never include direct contact information in your listing that circumvents the PieceX platform.

The cover image of your product listing and the title are the first thing anyone sees. This means these have to be fine-tuned and be professionally made. Besides the cover image, your screenshots should be illustrative and helpful. We also feature a video embedding to showcase your product.

What not to do: Wrong aspect ratios, simple screenshots, uninformative or unappealing cover images.

Your listing is an advertisement; Treat it with the appropriate amount of marketing effort and presentation quality.

Listing shall be in English.

User guide documentation

The user guide document is highly important as we treat this document as the official documentation your product comes with. As such it shall serve and include multiple types of information: User Manual information which explains how to use the product generally, how to change it, how to integrate it, what to look out for and its technical specifications.

Service Manual information which will talk about the code structure, third party code/dependencies, potential bugs and problems and how to fix them. Installation instructions detailing exactly how to build, compile, link, deploy and run your product, including credentials.

Usernames

Your username is the label, the brand, your product has. If your product has no or bad branding, there is a lack of customer confidence. So make sure to brand yourself and your products in a professional manner.

Interface

Unless your product is a bare module that cannot be used by itself, it will havesome kind of interface for the user or for other code to connect to and use.

This interface should be clean, clear, easy to use and designed in a modern attractive fashion. For example a desktop program that features an UI that looks and interacts similar to ancient design principles of the 1990s, your product will not be regarded well in this aspect. The same goes for API interface and such.

Easy of use and integration

You are selling a code base, How easy is it to launch, compile, run, integrate and deploy the code base you are selling. This issue is besides the product instructions. Even with instructions, the design of your product will be judged on how easy it is to integrate it into other products. How easy is it to use for arbitrary customers to integrate and change your product. How easy it is, in general, to get it up and running.

Binaries: Do not include binaries. This also applies for apk files and such. Since a binary can execute arbitrary code on a buyer machine, this represents a fundamental security concern. It is also not needed since the buyer should be able to easily build from source.

Readability

The source code must be in readable form, available for comprehension, interpretation, and execution. As such, we do not accept any type of code obfuscation, encryption, or technique that makes the code unintelligible.

Tests

You are encouraged to provide packaged tests and test cases with your code base, so that after running your code base, customers can easily run these tests and verify everything is working as intended. This is especially useful for modules and generally for integrations.

Maintenance

If you have not changed your product or listing in a long while, PieceX will notify you that your product has been marked for maintenance. In order to maintain our quality standards, products that have reached a certain age are marked for maintenance. These products require the seller to submit an update or to confirm that the current code is still operational. Lots of codebases depend on external data sources and APIs to function, which can change over time. If your product has been marked for maintenance, please check and edit your product or submit an update. Until this is done, products will remain marked for maintenance.