The ServiceNow Store marketplace offers integrations, apps, and service partners to enhance and customize the already vast capabilities of the ServiceNow platform.
So it’s no surprise that the ServiceNow Store gets over 6K visitors per month: Customers shopping for apps, integrations, and consultants that work directly with the ServiceNow platform.
And a platform it is! ServiceNow is a fantastic example of an ecosystem platform in the SaaS space with entire companies built to create solutions around their tool. As such, they’ve clearly invested a lot of resources into their app store.
Let’s take a look at the ServiceNow store’s design and functionality.
In this post we’ll cover the top 10 highlights (plus a few things they could improve). Use this post for inspiration when designing your own app store or partner marketplace.
What is ServiceNow?
ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that offers a suite of tools designed to improve and automate business processes, particularly in IT service management, IT operations management, and IT business management. It's essentially a one-stop-shop for managing various aspects of a business's technology and services.
Companies use ServiceNow to transform how their business operates, enhancing efficiency, and driving digital transformation across the organization.
Check out the ServiceNow Store for yourself
Want to do your own analysis first? Open the ServiceNow Store in a new tab and see if your highlights match up to ours.
ServiceNow Store reviews
The ServiceNow Store is so important it has its own G2 category. So check out what people had to say about the ServiceNow Store:
What do you like best about ServiceNow Store?
“1. Simple and Elegant UI.
2. User-friendly Application.
3. Provides multiple solutions in a single place.
4. Pool of applications.
5. Optimal filters for advanced search.”
—Anonymous Reviewer
“The ServiceNow store is very easy to navigate, and has tons of apps that you can add to your ServiceNow instance to enhance your system's capabilities further.” —Laurence T.
“I use [the ServeNow Store] to request new software in our company. We can practically integrate this tool with any other tools.” —Praveen J.
10 things the ServiceNow Store got right
If you’re on the ServiceNow Store looking for apps, integrations, and solutions, you might (or might not) notice the seamless design and functionality that makes it easy to navigate their 1000s of listings.
But since we live and breathe marketplaces at Partner Fleet, we have noticed. So if you’re looking to create your own marketplace, here are some highlights to consider.
We’ll start with the marketplace itself: homepage, navigation, and filter options.
1. A promotional banner carousel
At the top of the store homepage, ServiceNow includes an automatically rotating banner of content and images.
Here they can promote product suites, individual apps, relevant content, popular categories, and more.
Whether you feel a rotating carousel is on brand, any kind of promotion on a page with this much traffic is a fantastic idea. After all, adoption starts with awareness and this can be the best spot to make customers aware of all they have to offer.
We recommend thinking about how to best use your own marketplace as a tool for awareness.
2. Useful & intuitive filters
Several of the ServiceNow Store positive reviews mention the UI – and a lot of that likely comes down to their filters and categories. With so many apps to navigate, filters and categories can help the user find what they need quickly and easily.
Our favorites are the:
- Free vs Paid filter
- Offered By Partners vs ServiceNow filter
- Ability to Select All subcategories
Think about which filters and category functionality would be most useful for the customers and prospects navigating your marketplace. It can make the difference in someone easily installing more integrations and becoming a much stickier customer.
3. Default sorting by highest star rating
Once you’ve selected your filters and categories, you see a list of the apps that fit. Sometimes there are still hundreds to choose from.
ServiceNow does something cool when showing these to you. Instead of sorting them in alphabetical order or by newest or oldest, they default to sorting them based on reviews.The most popular and highest quality apps and integrations are given highest priority.
This review sorting does a couple of clever things: First, an integration with more 5-star reviews is likely to be more popular already, and will show above-the-fold for people looking for it. Second, this sorting incentivizes app creators to build better integrations/tools and seek out reviews for it.
We haven’t seen this sorting method in a lot of marketplaces – but we like it!
4. Keeping the top-level nav simple
There’s already a lot to look at on the ServiceNow Store homepage. From filters and categories to view options to the banner to pre-loaded listings, you can get overwhelmed. So a top-level navigation with 9 options could be too much.
Luckily the ServiceNow Store designers understand that and make their menu prominent with an obvious icon. Simply hit the icon and you’ll get additional options like connecting with the community, going to ServeNow’s main website, developer tools, etc.
Okay, we’ve covered the ServiceNow Store navigation. Now let’s take a look at their listing pages to see what works there.
5. Detailed app descriptions
We went through dozens of listing pages on the ServiceNow Store and they all had high-quality detail sections. This is essential for SEO, viewer education, and overall trust in the marketplace’s quality.
6. Screenshots
Imagery on listings truly helps paint a picture in the viewer’s mind about what they’re getting. Whether it’s imagery of the app in use or screenshots detailing integration installation, we consider imagery an essential part of all marketplace listings.
7. “Now Certified App” badges
Certified badges can help your customers gauge quality. When you offer certification to partners who complete courses, certain levels of testing, and/or other thresholds, you can include more partners on your marketplace while highlighting those who are likely to be of higher quality.
8. Anonymous, verified reviews
Getting enough relevant, high-quality reviews is difficult for any product, service, integration, or company. You obviously want as many reviews as possible – especially for integrations – but you don’t want any fake ones creeping in.
ServiceNow makes this easy. You don’t have to log in to review, but you do have to prove you’ve used the integration with a domain email address and ServiceNow URL.
Fewer hoops means more verified reviews. It’s a total win.
9. Installation CTA
This may seem obvious, but it’s often overlooked: You need a prominent CTA on your marketplace. If you have a marketplace of apps and integrations, allow for a sign-in and installation flow from your public marketplace.
And make your CTA button prominent, just like ServiceNow does.
Now that we’ve covered the ServiceNow Store navigation and listening pages, we wanted to mention one additional feature we found super useful.
10. Developer profile page
ServiceNow offers a separate profile page for developers who have created multiple apps or integrations.
This allows viewers to look for additional apps like the ones they already have (and enjoy). But it’s also a great resource for developers who have built a company around ServiceNow. They have a page to point to from their own marketing and get a strong backlink to their site.
This feature is simple, and not found on a lot of other marketplaces, but we think it’s a fantastic feature and indicator that ServiceNow is truly a platform.
5 recommendations to improve the ServiceNow Store
Although this is truly one of the best-visited marketplaces out there, and a testament to good design, there are a few things we noticed that could be better.
1. At 7+ seconds load time, the ServiceNow store is very slow
We understand why – there are thousands of listings that need to load. Nevertheless, in a time when people start to get frustrated after 3 seconds-to-load, the ServiceNow Store may want to consider an update that allows for faster loading.
2. There are too many categories in the sidebar
The point of categories is to make shopping for new apps easier. But with 25 categories and hundreds of subcategories, the experience is too overwhelming.
We would recommend reducing the sidebar options and offering subcategories on deeper pages.
3. The store needs friendlier URLs
Here’s the URL for the Feedback App listing we’ve been using examples of above:https://store.servicenow.com/sn_appstore_store.do#!/store/application/b1b464e20fb00300c1098b9ae1050e6c/2.3.1?sl=sh
Oof. That’s bad for readability and SEO. And it’s simply not what people are used to these days.
4. Who’s using the “Dependencies” tab on listings?
As far as we could tell, not that many people. Yet it still has prominent real estate on listing pages – right next to the reviews tab.
ServiceNow may want to reconsider how important that information is, and offer it lower on the page and as an optional field only for the apps that need it.
5. Hard-to-read review formatting
We’re sticklers for good review formatting. The ServeNow Store could work on theirs.
With the name, company, date, and version all on the same line in the same size and font, it can be a little hard to scan reviews for the one that’s most relevant to your business.
Conclusion: Nice Store, ServiceNow
All-in-all, ServiceNow is among the top in marketplace UX, number and prominence of reviews, and ease-of-installation. If you’re looking to make improvements to your marketplace or just get some inspiration, we recommend navigating through their pages.
Looking for more help or an out-of-the-box marketplace to drive integration adoption? Book a demo of Partner Fleet.
