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Need an E-commerce solution that works well with PW and offers the ability to sell digital music


n0sleeves

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Curious if anyone is doing this currently with Processwire. I would hate to use Wordpress for a project, but it seems for someone who isn't very talented at programming (I can hack through reading / googling), their plugin system may be my best bet as it seems they have something that will work for my needs. I just really hate managing / hacking Wordpress sites. 

I am taking a look at Foxycart, but unless I dive into it, I will not know if it will be what I'm looking for. I'm specifically looking for something that has: 

  • An integrated music player (not flash please)
     
  • The ability to sell separate tracks as well as the complete album
     
  • Integrates within the PW site itself instead of external 
     
  • Statistics showing how many downloads occurred for each particular artist / song as well as statistics for overall sales, etc...

I've been researching for days. Thanks everyone

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Been there. Unless you only want something simple, just a shop to sell in pw is not enough.

The longer your shop is on-line, in the end, you are going to need things like:

banner/product manager, categories, thick box, client base, who's on-line, statistics, client/sale history,

auto registration/account, email double opt, auto email to clients who registered but never bought anything,

currency, different payment gateways, secure digital download, auto email sale confirmation, newsletter, reviews. Banner/product manager can hold/play pics, music and clips.

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Been there. Unless you only want something simple, just a shop to sell in pw is not enough.

The longer your shop is on-line, in the end, you are going to need things like:

banner/product manager, categories, thick box, client base, who's on-line, statistics, client/sale history,

auto registration/account, email double opt, auto email to clients who registered but never bought anything,

currency, different payment gateways, secure digital download, auto email sale confirmation, newsletter, reviews. Banner/product manager can hold/play pics, music and clips.

:( What did you end up using?

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Curious if anyone is doing this currently with Processwire. I would hate to use Wordpress for a project, but it seems for someone who isn't very talented at programming (I can hack through reading / googling), their plugin system may be my best bet as it seems they have something that will work for my needs. I just really hate managing / hacking Wordpress sites. 

I am taking a look at Foxycart, but unless I dive into it, I will not know if it will be what I'm looking for. I'm specifically looking for something that has: 

  • An integrated music player (not flash please)
  • The ability to sell separate tracks as well as the complete album
  • Integrates within the PW site itself instead of external
  • Statistics showing how many downloads occurred for each particular artist / song as well as statistics for overall sales, etc...

1.) well the whole point of doing this in processwire would be that you wouldn't need an integrated music player; you would use whatever music player you want.

 I prefer soundmanager2. You would then have the ability to use PW's drag and drop uploader for files;

2.) selling digital assets is quite easy these days, there are many services out there, like fetchapp which for example can integrate with FC (http://www.foxycart.com/features/integrations/fetch )

3.) if you built it with PW, the system wouldn't need to integrate, it would already be integrated (? right)

4.) to maintain statistics would simply require reading the foxycart's XML feed and then creating or updating records within PW; a very easy thing to do;

Having said all that, and being quite sure you could build a very good music download store with PW at a fraction of what it would cost to write from scratch, i have not yet used foxycart and fetchapp for a downloads store yet; 

I have built 1 shop for physical goods and one for class registrations, both with Foxycart. The only thing stopping me from building a music downloads store with PW is the lack of funding from the labels i work with, and the fact that they both already have shops running on Joomla/Maian Media, which works well enough and doesn't cost anything in terms of monthly fees (whereas FC has not only a monthly fee, but you also need to have a merchant account for credit cards);

the next thing to consider would be to write a PayPal integration for for Apeisa's shop module, and somehow link into fetchapp, and thereby bypass foxycart and CC processing...

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What did you end up using?

@=>n0sleeves, something not mentioned here before: - abantecart -

http://abantecart.com/ecommerce-features

Don't even know where to start, a very impressive and still easy admin, it even has the

complete layout editable in the admin by letting you edit simple blocks of code, something

that I pointed at before, not so long ago. Very clean and clear coded. Supports hooks.

Self-hosted? yes - scalable? yes - extensions in separate folders? yes.

Templates easy editable to change the front to your personal taste? yes.

Forked or cloned from opencart? no. Has new engine, architecture and concepts.

A shop system dream come true for both designers and coders.

Is it really that good? yes - like the cms/cmf dream came true with processwire.

Foxycart - opencart - prestashop - xyzcart ? ? => all history with abantecart.

I know this will raise unbelieve and criticism, therefore I suggest to download,

install, and see it happen for your self. Let me know if this was useful for you.

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@=>n0sleeves, something not mentioned here before: - abantecart -

http://abantecart.com/ecommerce-features

Don't even know where to start, a very impressive and still easy admin, it even has the

complete layout editable in the admin by letting you edit simple blocks of code, something

that I pointed at before, not so long ago. Very clean and clear coded. Supports hooks.

Self-hosted? yes - scalable? yes - extensions in separate folders? yes.

Templates easy editable to change the front to your personal taste? yes.

Forked or cloned from opencart? no. Has new engine, architecture and concepts.

A shop system dream come true for both designers and coders.

Is it really that good? yes - like the cms/cmf dream came true with processwire.

Foxycart - opencart - prestashop - xyzcart ? ? => all history with abantecart.

I know this will raise unbelieve and criticism, therefore I suggest to download,

install, and see it happen for your self. Let me know if this was useful for you.

I was looking at abantecart a while back as it looked really interesting but didn't really test it out properly.

I think I will kill a little time playing around with it now.

pwired, how is abantecart for you compared to prestashop or opencart?

Why did you choose abantecart over other solutions?

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pwired, how is abantecart for you compared to prestashop or opencart?

Why did you choose abantecart over other solutions?

1.

Prestashop, opencart, and most others continue on the same old path with the same old momentum.

Abantecart is open with it´s layout, templates, extensions, code blocks, details, etc. all directly

accessible from a very powerful admin I have never seen before. They really haven´t forgotten anything,

it´s all there and it all depends on how deep you want to go in the admin and modify what is there.

The full install let´s you modify everything out of the box, for the shop you need.

http://demo.abantecart.com/

2.

Much of it follows the same philosophy as processwire.

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@pwired

'never seen', I'm not so sure, it looks pretty much OpenCart to me, they sure got the idea from over there IMHO.

Nevertheless, it looks pretty good, but I see some things missing

- Wishlist [paid option, not much, agree, but still]

- compare options

I do see some pro things, like generate SEO title, easier category choosing... 

It seems the folder structure is even similar to Opencart. I haven't been looking to the source BTW... 

Maybe I'll install it later, so far, not sure.... I have a cart system in mind for my own, maybe I'll use it and report back...

Still, useful link I must say.... 

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You got me curious, but it looks so much like Joomla...

'never seen', I'm not so sure, it looks pretty much OpenCart to me, they sure got the idea from over there IMHO.

There is an old discussion on the opencart forums about this . . . . .

Joomla ? por favor . . . .

Opencart is very clear about this:

It is an open cart spin off with new engine, archi, concepts and improvements.

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I had some new solutions that look interesting but still didn't have time to check them. This seems like a good time to drop them here in the forum :)

http://sylius.org/

https://www.sellvana.com/

http://getfwd.com/ (MongoDB)

Streamlined API, developer-centric design, customize with ease.. I like what I'm hearing!

As a PHP newbie, developing for PrestaShop has been quite tiring because of how it is designed. Endlessly digging inside classes and database tables trying to figure out what does what. Oh how I have yearned for a PW-like design where I don't have to juggle 5 different db tables to achieve some small thing.

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How about this question:

If you had to build a ecommerce website today from scratch for a budget of about $4,000 USD, what to use?

(ex. Processwire+ FC, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce etc. or any solution mentioned here..._

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Whoa, Abantecart looks very promising! I thought I searched all of the internet, however I didn't see any mention of this shopping cart. Great reply!

I've been diving into the Foxycart documentation more deeply and even received a reply from the developer.Apparently, it will accomplish everything you could ask for in terms of a music store and it seems like the "keeps out the way of your CMS" philosophy is even more appealing. So this may be where I lean for the moment. Even though there is a cost, it almost seems worth it. 

Macrura - I wish I could get even $4k for this. This client isn't even on a budget. When I say no budget, I mean it's like $300 :o Yeah I know....sad. Only reason I am even thinking about doing it is because of a possible future return (cut of the action) sort of thing - long story. 

What is everyone's thoughts on "piece of mind" using the ecommerce software / platform. Do you look for a company that has been around a long time, has a lot of users, reviews, etc... or do you use whatever will work. I am just wondering because it seems like whatever you choose, it takes a bit of time and work to get it all setup in the end and you wouldn't want to repeat the process again, right? 




 

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I mentioned Prestashop yesterday and I have to come back and say we just discovered some pretty crazy behavior with Presta's Advanced stock management feature. Quantity imports resulting in negative quantities, some random products causing errors when trying to decrease quantities. It just screams "not ready for production" so we are switching to the "classic" quantity management. Product packs also don't work with the Advanced stock system yet.

Likewise their carrier handling code is crazy with changing the ID everytime you change something (a lot of cruft in the DB at the very least, imagine having a 100 price rules and they are left behind and created anew in the DB every time you make some change).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Cartalyst builds framework agnostic composer packages for developers. They recently released a shopping cart package featuring multiple instances, item attributes and Conditions (it has optional Laravel support).

Demo: http://demo.cartalyst.com/cart/

They are supposed to release more ecommerce packages.

Btw., found a recently compiled massive list of ecommerce platforms: http://www.reddit.com/r/ecommerce/comments/21i2af/lets_create_a_massive_list_of_all_ecommerce/

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