Shop-for-ProcessWire (@Apeisa)

[diogo]

Pwired, you can start building one right now

[Pete]

pwired - see my comment here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/5208-a-website-for-university/#entry50233

The same thing I say there about forum software applies to shop software - to do something as complex as other ecommerce solutions requires a team of developers or someone with a tonne of time on their hands and probably a year's development time minimum. Not to mention all the headaches you get afterwards supporting a complex codebase (you'd have to constantly update a lot of the payment and shipping modules for example as vendors change their code) and all the other hassle that goes with it. Many other ecommerce packages will have similar if not far more lines of code than ProcessWire to give you an idea, and I suspect it took ryan a while to get to version 1, let alone version 2.

You can build anything you want in ProcessWire, but until someone turns up that has no need for an income and also has plenty of time on their hands I don't see a larger solution appearing any time soon.

It does all depend on what you want to sell though - Apeisa's module is perfectly fine for a lot of situations and you can easily create a product catalogue in ProcessWire and drop in some Paypal code if you want to do something even simpler and don't need anything in the admin.

[pwired]

Diogo, by the time I finish building a pro shop module with the same level of quality as something like prestashop, it will be 2015. I both don't have the time and the coding skills to come up with something like that. What I, and others here, need is a payed good module solution. All I was trying to say is that money is not only made with building and maintaining websites but also more and more with webshops. We all love processwire but there is simply a need for a good quality shop module. Especially in bad economy times where the economy on the internet is growing better and better. I don't know but maybe nobody has the time here to code it and it will not come for a long time. Maybe some people here can post how they run a webshop without processwire ?

[SteveB]

I've done shopping sites and there is endless variety and obsession over ways of doing discounts, taxes, additional charges, pre-orders, etc. Recoding my shopping cart logic in a way that makes sense for ProcessWire is a lot to think about in terms of how best to utilize PW, what's handled as a page, etc. My approach leans towards flexibility rather than simple/easy so it may not appeal to everybody. I'll post something when my thoughts are more settled. Would like to hear people's requirements.

[pwired]

Pete how you put it is I think how it is and I have to deal with that somehow. The right tool for the right job and so I better look for an ecommerce webshop. Try a few of them, shopify, prestashop, volusion, magento, opencart. Maybe some people here have already experience with one of these.

[Macrura]

What's wrong with Processwire + Foxycart? Working fine really well for one client of mine and soon to be integrated into another site.

from the foxycart site:

Use the CMS you already love.    

FoxyCart is built to complement your own preferred tools, and as such can be integrated into anything,
whether it’s hardcoded HTML, a dynamic CMS, or a custom framework. Use
the best tools for each specific job, not a one-size-fits-all system.

[Beluga]

Not to mention all the headaches you get afterwards supporting a complex codebase (you'd have to constantly update a lot of the payment and shipping modules for example as vendors change their code) and all the other hassle that goes with it.

I see modules for payment gateways as out of scope. These would appear on a per-need basis, built as people build their shops. At least for Finnish payment gateways, with their provided example code it takes a PHP dev a single day to build a working module. No comments on PayPal..

I'd like to see some kind of toolkit to work with these:

- building payment modules

- orders and order tracking

- customers and groups

- products/product combinations and categories

- stock management

- currencies and taxes

- discounts

- shipping price rules (destination, weight, dimensions)

If we look at an open source project like PrestaShop, the devs are working their butts off, but they are supporting a complete package and putting huge amounts of time into backend and frontend templates, marketing features, gamification (!!) and innumerable modules that are not the bare necessity. This effects the development pace of important features: for example their CSV import feature was released over two years ago and it still doesn't support all of their product and stock management features!

@Macrura: Foxycart is not open source.

[apeisa]

- building payment modules

- orders and order tracking

- customers and groups

- products/product combinations and categories

- stock management

- currencies and taxes

- discounts

- shipping price rules (destination, weight, dimensions)

I think that only three last ones are things that are not easily doable just by using some very basic ProcessWire methods (pages, fields etc) and with my Shop module. I myself don't see that much benefit building "out of the box" eCommerce solution. There are multiple solution for that, hosted saas, open source, commercial... What I would be happy to see is more low level "building blocks" that can be used in any PW site to power different kind of eCommerce need. At least that is how I intended when I build the shop module: it should be easy to implement to any PW site.

[Beluga]

What I would be happy to see is more low level "building blocks" that can be used in any PW site to power different kind of eCommerce need. At least that is how I intended when I build the shop module: it should be easy to implement to any PW site.

Yes this is what I was trying to say (and I guess have said in other threads)

[joey102030]

I've looked a lot into this also, and I agree the ProcessWire / FoxyCart combo seems to be the way to go.

What people are forgetting is the ever-changing market of payment gateways.

Anyone who builds a PW e-commerce module would have to keep these integrations up-to-date.

FoxyCart already supports a decent number of these gateways, and makes customising the user-experience very easy indeed.

[pwired]

Foxycart doesn't allow self hosted. Also in my case I found my very first customer asking me to setup a webshop,

so => time is very important! Not using processwire but Prestashop is for me the fastest solution in my case now,

but I will keep an eye on processwire using it for a possible second webshop.

[joey102030]

FoxyCart can be as self-hosted as you want it to be, you would normally call the shopping cart data into your own site through ajax.

But actually there's no reason to use their shopping cart service at all, you can simply create your own cookie-based persistant cart and pass all data to FoxyCart at checkout.

Of course if you have an SSL certificate, are fully DSS compliant, and have a specific reason not to use a hosted solution then FoxtCart won't be for you. 

[teppo]

@joey102030: correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't PCI DSS important only if you're handling the payment directly through your service and/or storing credit card information or other related sensitive data about payments and/or your clients? Unless I'm mistaken, this isn't really much of an issue when you're using external service, such as PayPal, Paytrail (Finns mostly) etc.

Handling just about any user information securely (over HTTPS, using proper certificate etc.) should be considered an absolute requirement, but obviously this isn't always the case, which is another reason why for most projects (where money or sensitive data are somehow involved) I'd strongly suggest using external service that pretty much has to do it "the right way."

[Macrura]

foxycart is not self hosted, but you can use a cname record to have the cart look like it is on your domain. the whole reason to use FC is so you don't need to host anything.

it is true that you could use the shop-for-processwire as a cart and then at checkout FC allows you to pass all of those items to their cart and proceed to their checkout page, so if you design it all right, it could be completely seamless, and then you would have the ease and low cost of your processwire site, and the security and robustness of the foxycart system;

i'm considering that option, namely using the shop for processwire as a pre-cart and then at checkout having the button pass all of the data to the foxy(cart), but haven't tested it yet.

reading back the transaction details from the foxycart XML feed to processwire has been solved in this thread http://processwire.com/talk/topic/4997-foxycart-xml-datafeed-integration/

[SteveB]

I agree that payment should be handled offsite by a service (for security etc) and that if a third party system matches up well with what the client wants it makes sense to use it.

Often clients have very idiosyncratic ideas about shipping and discounts or are otherwise unsatisfied by off the shelf solutions. What's worked for me in the past is to have my own very flexible catalog, shopping cart and checkout system, usually with with import/export processes on either end (products in, orders out). Then my hands aren't tied by a third party system who's mission is more about doing what most people want.

ProcessWire is well suited to an approach like that where the overall architecture is in place but the level of detail can be dialed up or down for a particular project.

[joey102030]

@teppo: That is my understanding too. I would consider a true self-hosted solution one that needs to be DSS compliant.

FoxtCart by it's very nature is not self-hosted, but your shopping cart page does not need to be hosted with FoxyCart, you have the option of simply calling-in data through ajax to your own self-hosted shopping cart page.

@Macrura: I would question whether you even need a separate module for the shopping cart in that situation. At it's most basic level all you need to store in a session is a reference to a product and the quantity, the shopping cart page itself just displays this data. Of course it gets more complicated when you start adding discounts etc.

I'd be interested to find out how you get on.

[jploch]

If you need a complex shopping solution it is probably better to use a combination of PW and a trusted Ecommerce System like FoxyCart or Shopify.

Iam currently working on a project, where the customer wants a small image/branding website with the option so sell products. They just got 3 Products with some options to choose from. Also the budget for this porject is quite small. In this case I feel like most of the existing shopping solutions are a bit of an overkill.

So for this case it would be cool to have a working lightweight shop profile for the less tech savvy people here

Edit: FoxyCart seems to be rather simple to implement, maybe I will give it a try.

[apeisa]

jploch: don't be afraid of the current module, it is very easy to implement. If you know how to build product catalog (well, with three products you don't need even that), then it is pretty much plug and play. What payment methods you are looking for?

[Macrura]

if there were a simple paypal payment integration it might cover a lot of smaller site needs!

[pwired]

if there were a simple paypal payment integration it might cover a lot of smaller site needs!

Macrura => something like this ?   https://github.com/thenbrent/paypal-digital-goods

I am also digging inside open source zen-cart to see if I can find any php classes or scripts

that can be ported to processwire. With open source that is legal isn't it ?

http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?199322-Roadmap-for-v1-5-and-beyond

[Macrura]

Macrura => something like this ?   https://github.com/thenbrent/paypal-digital-goods

@pwired - great find... i will check this out for the next smaller ecommerce integration, using s-f-p

[jploch]

jploch: don't be afraid of the current module, it is very easy to implement. If you know how to build product catalog (well, with three products you don't need even that), then it is pretty much plug and play. What payment methods you are looking for?

paypal and probably credit card payment would be great, if not allready supported.

Iam an absolute beginner when it comes to PW and PHP (just build a small site with it).

I tryed to intall the shop modules with a local mamp installation of PW, but I cant get it to work.

If someone would have the time to build a small shop-profile with some example products, it would probably be a lot easier for me and others to build shops with PW.

Anyway thanks for the quick reply!

[apeisa]

Ok, i just build paypal module, will release it soon after little testing. Will also test everything with shopping cart that alll work with latest PW.

[Beluga]

Btw. I want to thank you, Antti, for releasing also this payment module: https://github.com/apeisa/PaymentSuomenVerkkomaksut

I built my own PrestaShop module for Checkout.fi payments last year

[apeisa]

I actually have build also payment module for https://www.maksuturva.fi/, but that is not for shopping cart, but more like general payment module for PW. Looking for a way to drop shop dependencies from payment modules - meaning that this paypal module would be usable without shopping cart too. It shouldn't be too hard though, just something I didn't plan when implemented payment methods for shopping cart.