You built the integration. You wrote the listing. You got approved. You told the board it was a growth channel.
Then nothing happened.
This is the single most common disappointment in accounting software, and it comes from one misunderstanding: a marketplace listing is a shelf, not a channel. Shelves don’t generate demand. They convert demand that already exists — and if nobody is walking down your aisle, a beautifully merchandised shelf does nothing.
Here’s how the marketplaces actually work, and what makes the difference between a listing and a pipeline.
What the marketplace is really for
The platforms — Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, MYOB — aren’t running app stores out of generosity. They’re running them because every integration a firm adopts makes the core ledger harder to leave. Your app is a control point for them, the same way your integrations are control points for you.
That alignment is the thing to exploit. The platform wants apps that:
- Increase stickiness on their ledger
- Solve a problem they don’t want to build themselves
- Look good in front of accountants at their events and in their partner programmes
- Don’t generate support tickets for their team
Build for that and the platform becomes an active participant. Build a thin integration that ticks a box and you get a listing and silence.
Three kinds of traffic — only one of them is search
Vendors optimise for marketplace search. It’s the smallest of the three sources.
1. In-product discovery
A user hits a limitation, clicks through to the app store from inside the ledger, and browses. This is high-intent traffic and it’s driven by category placement, not keywords. Being in the right category, with a clear one-line promise, beats keyword stuffing every time.
2. Direct arrival
Someone heard about you elsewhere — a peer, a webinar, a conference, a podcast — and came to the marketplace to check you’re legitimate. This is the majority of your marketplace traffic and almost nobody plans for it.
For these visitors the listing is a trust check, not a discovery surface. They’re asking: is this real, do other firms use it, does it actually connect properly, will it break my data? Reviews and screenshots do the work here, not your description copy.
3. Platform-driven placement
Featured slots, category spotlights, newsletter inclusion, partner-programme recommendations, conference presence. This is where the volume is, and it is almost entirely relationship-driven. You get it by being a good partner to the platform’s team, not by filling in a form.
What actually moves ranking
The platforms don’t publish their algorithms, and they change. But across the ecosystems the same signals consistently matter:
- Install volume and, more importantly, retained installs. Apps that get installed and disconnected within a month get buried. This makes your onboarding a marketplace ranking factor.
- Review volume, recency and rating. Three glowing reviews from 2023 are worth less than a steady trickle of recent ones.
- Connection health. Failed syncs, token expiries and API errors are visible to the platform. Sloppy integrations rank worse and get less goodwill.
- Listing completeness. Screenshots, video, pricing clarity, support links, region coverage. The boring fields matter.
- Category fit. Being the sixth-best “practice management” app is worse than being the best “BAS preparation” app. Specificity wins.
Reviews are the whole ballgame
If you do one thing, do this.
Accountants are risk-averse buyers making a recommendation they’ll be blamed for if it goes wrong. Reviews from other firms are the single strongest conversion lever on your listing, and most vendors have a handful of reviews they collected once during launch week.
What works:
- Ask at the aha moment, not at renewal. The right time is immediately after the customer gets the outcome you promised — which means you need to know when that is. (If you don’t, that’s a time to value problem first.)
- Ask a human, personally. Automated in-app prompts underperform badly with this audience.
- Ask continuously. A small number every month beats a burst every eighteen.
- Answer the bad ones publicly and well. A vendor who responds properly to criticism reads as more trustworthy than one with a suspiciously clean sheet.
Integration depth is positioning
“Connects with Xero” is not a differentiator. Every competitor says it.
What differentiates is what the integration does, described in the language of the job:
Weak: “Two-way sync with Xero.” Better: “Pulls your Xero client list, matches it to your engagement letters, and flags every client whose scope has drifted from what they’re being billed for.”
The second one tells a practice owner what changes on Monday. It also naturally contains the words firms actually search for.
Depth matters commercially too. A shallow integration is easy to replicate and easy to abandon. An integration that becomes part of the firm’s workflow is a control point that makes you very hard to remove.
The multi-platform question
Should you list everywhere?
Not at first. Pick the platform where your buyers concentrate and go deep. In Australia that usually means Xero. In the US, QuickBooks. In the UK you’ll face a genuinely mixed estate of Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and IRIS, which is one of the real differences between those markets.
Going deep on one platform gets you featured placement, partner-team relationships and conference presence. Spreading thin across four gets you four mediocre listings and no advocate inside any of them.
Expand when the first one is genuinely working — not when a board slide says “multi-platform”.
The part that actually generates installs
Here’s the uncomfortable summary: your marketplace listing converts demand, it doesn’t create it.
The vendors who get real volume from marketplaces are running everything else too:
- Webinars co-hosted with the platform or with firms
- Content that ranks for the problem, then points at the listing
- Conference presence where the platform’s community gathers
- Partner firms recommending them, with the listing as the proof point
- Reviews accumulating steadily from happy customers
The listing is where all of that lands. It is not where any of it starts.
A sensible order of operations
- Build the integration properly. Reliability is a ranking factor and a trust factor.
- Write the listing in job language. What changes on Monday, in the words a firm would use.
- Get the boring fields right. Screenshots, video, pricing, support, regions.
- Build a continuous review engine. Ask at the aha moment, every month, personally.
- Fix your onboarding so installs retain — retained installs are what rank.
- Get to know the platform’s partner team. They control the placement that actually drives volume.
- Point your other channels at the listing so there’s demand to convert.
- Only then consider platform number two.
Do it in that order and the marketplace becomes a compounding asset. Do it in reverse and you get a very well-designed shelf in an empty aisle.
Marketplace strategy sits inside our channel and partnership work. Related reading: building a partner program, control points, and why firms churn in the first 90 days.
