Hi. I’m a novice web builder sans code wondering whether to buy Blocs. My project is for an artist who wants to display his paintings and sell them. I’ve discovered so far that I would need Blocs plus some sort of commerce addition. My hope would be for something that approaches simplicity. My previous limited experience is with Wix and Serif, so I’m very much a novice. Serif is being archived, Wix wants a costly subscription for commerce, and Rapid Weaver wants many additional purchases with apparently poor support. Any advice you can give will be much appreciated.
I am a bit too new with Blocs to give you an authoritative answer and hopefully somebody else will offer an opinion, but I think Blocs should be good for what you need as a novice designer.
In terms of building a nice looking web page and showing the images that should not be a problem. It would be good to decide on the billing platform in advance e.g PayPal or Paddle for example, since that will be a consideration in the design process. I sell online through FastSpring and it’s simply a link to a web page, but some systems appear to involve more complex plugins.
I have a lot more experience with Rapidweaver and it’s true you would be need various additional purchases before you could match what Blocs can do directly. It’s also true there have been a lot of performance issues and various complaints about lack of support. Rapidweaver can do some things that are not yet possible with Blocs if you spend enough money on plugins, however Blocs is developing at a much faster pace.
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Thanks, Flashman, I’ve taken your helpful recommendation on board and will look again at FastSpring.
FastSpring is a bit fiddly to set up in their control panel compared to some alternatives and not cheap, but in terms of features, payment methods and legal compliance they are really excellent. It’s made the accounting side so much easier than when I used PayPal in the past. FastSpring will actually build the billing page for you on their own servers in the same style as your site.
I don’t know if Gumroad handle physical goods or just digital downloads but they are cheaper than FastSpring and apparently somewhat easier to set up. I hear good things about Gumroad.
Gumroad is good… but I use selz.com at the moment to ship Pulse - it’s really good for selling digital files.
Another one to possibly consider is Ecwid. It can easily be embedded into any website and has a large number of features. Likewise its inclusive across platforms and all avenues of sale points. Quite impressive features and abilities really.
@norm, much like the various CMS integration, Ecwid may be a good candidate for E-Commerce Shopping Cart integration into Blocs. I suggest you at least check out Ecwid for consideration, if you are not familiar with it already. Given its easy setup I don’t think there would be much to alter in Blocs to ensure its usage. I know at one point you mentioned you were working on a “Code Widget" (Bric?)
All of your suggestions have been superb, thank you! Being a code free zone myself, I think I will run with Blocs and Fastspring, hoping I can figure out both of them (and my client likes the pricing of Fastspring).