Digital Services Store To Join Marketplace Early 2015

The Digital Services Store, a place for government buyers to procure digital services in an agile way, is set to join the new Digital Marketplace in Q1 2015.

In February, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude announced that a number of government procurement frameworks would be merged together as one Digital Marketplace, a single stop shop for the public sector to purchase technology-related services.

Earlier this month, G-Cloud became the first network to offers its services via the Marketplace, which was officially opened by Maude.

“Currently there is no relationship between the Digital Marketplace and the Digital Services Store,” claims Ivanka Majic, Government Digital Service (GDS) digital commercial services service manager in a recent blog post.

“The content of the Digital Service Store will be migrated to the Digital Marketplace in the new year. We can’t confirm exact timelines at present but we expect this work to be completed in Q1 of 2015,” she adds.  

Fixing The Services Store

In the meantime, GDS claims to be addressing a “number of usability issues” with the Store over the next few weeks.

“There are all a number of differences between what data is available and to whom on the two different stores,” claims Majic.  

“The Digital Marketplace provides complete openness and transparency so buyers can clearly understand what’s available and how much it costs without having to create a login.

“The Digital Services Store restricts access so that only buyers can only see what’s available once they’ve logged in,” she adds.

According to the blog post, GDS has now released some changes that will improve the performance of the Store overall, as well as addressing the problem that was causing system emails to end up in Junk inboxes.

It has also completed a request for GOV.UK start page and finalised the content required for its own performance platform page.

“We’ve also started looking at the way our analytics are structured so we can combine that data with user research to improve the way the store works,” claims Majic.

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