Blocs v4.1 e-commerce

So the most popular choice in the recent feature vote was for some integrated e-commerce features.

To begin, I’ll integrate a new e-commerce interaction option so you can easily create buy buttons in Blocs.

I plan to support the following 3rd parties, let me know if there are any that you think are essential that I missed.

PayPal
Stripe
Paddle
Gumroad
Ewcid

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I use FastSpring on one site and I don’t particularly like it, but they are a fairly major billing option. Worth pointing out that within Ecwid you can set it up to use Stripe, PayPal and others. To be truly useful I’d like to see this work with Volt, so that clients can change their own products.

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Snipcart if you can please @Norm

Hello Norm
Are you going to integrate stock management?

Awesome, been hoping that would come along soon!

How about Square ?

To begin with we will make integration with 3rd party solutions easier.

So stock features inside of Blocs are unlikely.

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Hey Norm, this is awesome news.

I would like to recommend Mollie

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brilliant, cannot wait for this one

I’m going to be using my site to sell a novel I wrote. I’d love to be able to have a buy button that will then email them a link to download the book at.

If you use the Ecwid option it’s fully featured. Stock control, promotions, discount codes. I’ve been using it in websites for nearly 10 years and it’s so simple to integrate. Everyone has their favourite but Ecwid is certainly mine.

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Ecwid is great, but you need the subscription version to get downloads.

You could try Gumroad.

Has anybody used Opencart? It’s a self-hosted solution that I’ve only tested locally with MAMP so far, but like what I’ve seen . I even found a free German translation plugin for it.

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Are you aware on EU VAT on digital downloads sold anywhere inside the EU? This is why I felt compelled to use Fastspring for selling an eBook. They effectively become the merchant of record and assume all responsibility for legal compliance with the cart and sales.

The downside is obviously higher costs for you and forcing buyers to jump through additional hoops before making a purchase. The latest bit off fun at the shopping cart is PSD2.

I’ve been playing around with it once. You’ll need to put in a lot of time, patience and effort to get it styled. If you want to make your shop decent looking you’ll end up buying some templates. Instead I used Abante Cart. Also not friendly in setup but customisation feels a bit easier. If you want a simple solution and not the hick-up of monthly fees PHP Jabbers are offering a shopping cart solution for only $49. It’s simple and easy to install with just a simple code widget on your site.

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Yeah, I was thinking of running Abante locally to compare it to opencart. I was also considering PHP Jabber’s e-shop.

I have already installed their Event Booking system on one of my sites and like it very much. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, though there were a few ‘quirks’ I needed to familiarise myself with. Reminder to self: Do not change the Daylight saving settings without checking the resulting details on the generated tickets or you will have half of your customers turning up an hour early…which actually happened in November.

I run a city tour and their booking system has been a tremendous help during the pandemic.

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It looks like Paypal may need to be a standalone Bric, unfortunately from what I can see Paypal doesn’t let you create a custom transaction button like other vendors, Stripe, Gumroad, Paddle.

This means it cant be an e-commerce interaction which you can assign to buttons, icons and images.

Unless someones knows of another official way to handle Paypal payments without thier buttons?

Years ago I used a cart system called e-junkie and they allowed for custom cart buttons to PayPal. From memory there was an option to alter the link, so that the source input came from your custom button.

Ive had good luck just using their link url instead of the buttons. This way I can customize it any way I need to. So would probably make a good Bric, could even add their shopping cart to it. If i get more time I want to look into making some custom brics.

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@Norm that would be awesome then I and I am sure many others will be able to achieve some kind of store or shop

I agree, I’ve looked at many shop integrations that were suggested in this thread. They all look nice, with perhaps Ecwid as one of the favourite one…

The problem I have with most shop systems is their payment system. Here in The Netherlands iDeal is the most common online payment system. PayPal isn’t that popular… That is why I would really love the option to have Mollie as a payment system. Mollie can handle payments for iDeal, PayPal, Apple Pay, Sofort, Sepa etc.