E-commerce functionality

[HarryWilliam]

Hello guys,

I am newcomer and I have been exploring the capabilities of ProcessWire. I am interested in creating an ecommerce website for a small business that sells electronic books, tshirts, and other products across a few categories. I need the website to accept payments via credit cards (Visa and Master) as well as PayPal. I haven't found a specific solution for developing an ecommerce website using ProcessWire. I am wondering if there is a specific module available or in development. If not, would it be feasible to integrate independent ecommerce modules such as Magento, Shopify, osCommerce, or Prestashop with ProcessWire? Although I am new to building websites with ecommerce functionality, I am determined to use ProcessWire due to the flexibility it offers with custom templates. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I acknowledge that I may be a novice in this area, and I am thankful for any assistance.

Thank you!

[da²]

Hello @HarryWilliam

It looks like padloper is a e-Commerce module.

[bernhard]

Hi @HarryWilliam and welcome to the forum!

E-Commerce is a huge topic and there are many ways how to do it - unfortunately or luckily ...

Option 1: Payment Buttons or Links

Very simple solutions are payment buttons that Platforms like Paypal offer. You can see an example here: https://www.boukal.at/work/catalogues/catalogue-do-you-also-have-pretty-motifs/

Another option would be payment links that payment providers like stripe or mollie offer: https://www.mollie.com/gb/products/payment-links

Pro: Very easy to implement

Con: You have to manage different buttons/links for different products on your own, place them in your markup (for example with a textformatter), keep them up do date and you have very limited possibilities for customisations (like different options etc).

Option 2: SaaS Shop integration

The next option would be to add one of the SaaS solutions to your PW site. One option would be to use Snipcart, which is very simple to add to your site, at least in theory: https://snipcart.com/blog/processwire-ecommerce-tutorial

Pro: Easy setup, working shop out of the box, they maintain and develop the product continuously and long term (hopefully)

Con: You usually pay for it per purchase and/or you have a monthly fee. Snipcart for example costs at least 20$ per month if your sales are < 1000$. That's 240$ each year. https://snipcart.com/pricing

Con: You need to add products to your SaaS shop. That means you can either not manage products directly from within your ProcessWire backend or you need to develop a bridge that keeps products in sync.

Con: Using a SaaS Shop means you are locked to the features that this shop provides.

In PW we have this module, but I'm not sure whether it's still maintained or will see any updates in the near future.

Option 3: A custom PW shop

This is maybe the most advanced solution.

The benefits are that you get a fully integrated solution. You can manage all your products, all your users, all your orders etc. directly from within your PW backend. You can add hooks wherever you want and you can customise everything to make it work 100% the way you or your client wants. Imagination and your skills are the limit.

The con is that it will likely be a more complex setup, as you need to understand the basic workflows of E-Commerce and you need to setup everything the way you want.

As far as I know we only have Padloper 2 by @kongondo at the moment. I don't know the price, though, because the shop is down at the moment.

I'm developing RockCommerce at the moment and it will hopefully be released during this year. The basic version is already done and you can see it in action on my website baumrock.com where I use it to sell my commercial modules, for example RockForms.

As you can see on my website it can already be used to sell single products. It comes with a checkout (live example) but it has no cart functionality at the moment. But it already has a nice Dashboard with filters and charts, at least ? 

Also, it can already create fully automated and 100% customisable invoices directly from within PW/PHP (using RockPdf) - which is something that not all shopping carts do for you, keep that in mind when evaluating those products!

Thanks to the integration into the PW system it can send 100% custom emails to your customers, where you can make sure that you comply to your local legislation (for example in Austria we need to attach terms of service to that email):

In this example it's a nice looking mail because I use RockMails, which is another module in the pipeline ? But as it is 100% ProcessWire you can simply send an email with some lines of code as well:

$m = new WireMail();
$m->from('office@your-company.com');
$m->to('your@client.at');
$m->subject('Thank you for your oder!');
$m->body('Congrats, you are now a ProcessWire hero!');
$m->send();

So while it is not yet 100% it can already be already a great option!

If you want to get notified about the release you can subscribe to my monthly developer newsletter: https://www.baumrock.com/en/rock-monthly/

I'm quite sure there are 100 more options, but I tried to give an overview ? 

 

[da²]

About using Paypal for payment, better solution than using payment buttons is to use Paypal checkout SDK. Then you can dynamically create any order you want and validate the payment.

EDIT : this SDK is now deprecated and replaced by REST API.

[millipedia]

Depending on your requirements, the Stripe payment processor for FormBuilder might be worth investigating.

You can set Paypal to be a payment option in Stripe so that users can pay using PayPal but you can keep all your transactions on the same plaform.

Out of the box FormBuilder might not do everything you need (if you need a basket etc) but it is possible to hook into the module to update line items / prices etc.

We recently built a basket system for a site that we'd wired directly into Stripe but then shifted over to hook into Formbuilder instead because it already did a lot of the heavy lifting in using the Stripe API.