Web Stores and Shopping Carts

Web Stores and Shopping Carts

Date

Monday 16 July 2018 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Meetup Event

https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/250380630/

Location

Room 1301 -- Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd. N., Waterloo, Ontario Map

Event Announcement

Web Stores and Shopping Carts/Announcement 2018-07-16

Does your NonProfit organization sell things? Does it provide paid services? Do you need a web presence for your sales? Will you need a separate server for your web store? Or can you add a shopping cart to your existing web site? Or is it better to outsource all online commerce?

Meet our guest speaker Sam Nabi, developer of Shopkit, and let's discuss what a System Administrator needs to join a NonProfit organization to the world of web commerce.

--Marc Paré & Bob Jonkman

Resources

• Shopkit by Sam Nabi
• Shopify from TechSoup Canada

Meeting Notes

Introductions

• Where is everyone coming from? Sam Nabi will tailor his tour to our needs.
  • Nonprofit org wants online registrations with payment
  • Bookseller
  • Online donations
  • Goods and Services
  • Media Production (rental of cameras, lights, &c)

• Want to make things easier for sellers and buyers

Shopkit

• https://github.com/samnabi/shopkit
• Plugin for CMS called "Kirby"
• Sam sells code for other developers to use on their websites
  • Doesn't want to deal with the actual credit card processing
  • Or poor installations by those developers

• Self-hosted PHP-based solution
  • Sold as a subscription service
  • Sam would hold the code and provides the online webhosting

• Using Stripe and Square

• Sample sites:
  • an indiegogo type site: https://coblisher.com/shop
  • retail business: http://gourmetpassions.ca/kirby

• Sam provides the code, and can work it into the design of an existing web page

• Had an idea to pool resources for pooled shipping, delivery, advertising

• Sam started as a city planner, moved to a startup doing web development
  • Then, Sam bought a retail store (Full Circle Foods)
  • ...the inherited system is a series of linked spreadsheets :/
  • Full Circle has 90 suppliers. Seems a lot, but many are small, local businesses
  • Lots to be done digitizing the order system

• Sam is part of the Kirby CMS community
  • Didn't have an ecommerce plugin, but there was an appetite for it
  • Working over three years to develop Shopkit with the Kirby developers
  • Kirby is a file-based PHP CMS (we like that)
    • Files are written in Markdown, still accessible if Web connection goes down
    • But there is a good GUI as well (good for marketers)
    • UI is decoupled from the data

• Sam gives a quick tour of a sample installation on GitHub
  • https://github.com/samnabi/shopkit-sample-content/
  • Kirby has multi-language support, i18n, l10n
  • Also has categories, which Shopkit links to
  • It's a system of API hooks, launched from the plugin to Kirby
  • but Shopkit has all the templates for, eg. slideshows, created by Sam

• Purchasing flow:
  • Select product, increase/decrease quantity, totals are updated
  • Uses AJAX, but the site is not Javascript dependent
    • Jeremy Keith is Sam's inspiration, he knows about good design.
  • There can be different shipping rules, different tax rates for different localities
  • Add personal details (name, e-mail)

• Tour of the back end
  • Resetting passwords :)
  • Sam has tried to make it easy for front-end users
  • Adding products, adding categories
    • Products have variants with different prices, options that don't affect price
      • Small oversight: Options don't have different SKUs, no separate inventory
    • Changing the use of SKUs is not dependent on the purchasing process
  • A "Featured Product" is displayed in the sidebar
  • Feature request by developers: "Items Remaining In Stock"
  • Another request: Individual e-mails for restocking
  • Shipping Rules:
    • Can be different for all countries, one country,
    • Shipping rules UI created by Sam, but as part of the plugin (even though it shows in the Kirby UI)
    • Tax and shipping rules can be defined by the developer, but not through the WebUI
    • Sam take us for a deep dive into the shipping selection code

• Reporting in Shopkit
  • Done from the Shopkit backend
  • Invoices are created by PHP into PDF files using "DOM PDF"
  • Report invoices are generated dynamically every time, but from a static "transactions" file
  • Added some widgets on the dashboard, eg. "Abandoned, Pending, Paid/Shipped"
  • There are also site stats based on another Kirby plugin

• Payment Processing
  • Implemented at "gateways" in Shopkit
    • Each gateway has a "process" and a "callback"
  • Some processors (square) expect money values to be in cents
    • Performing only integer operations on cents seems to be best practice
  • There are thousands of processors, so Sam has created an open system for processor gateways
  • Payment processors provide an SDK for the gateway code
    • Each payment processor has its own API, unique for each installation.
      • This separates the payment processing from Shopkit itself, absolving Sam of dealing with payment issues

• Testing
  • No formal testing methodology
  • Tries new code on a test site, Sam's own site
  • Most bugs are caught by end-users (developers)

• Shopkit and Kirby aren't quite Free Software: Code is available for inspection, modification, but not necessarily for redistribution. But payment is on the honour system.

• There have been 200 issues logged in the Shopkit issue tracker; most are from Sam himself.
  • Top question: Can I add Shopkit to an existing (Kirby) site?
    • Not really, Shopkit is a standalone application,
    • Shopkit is a good intermediate between a simple button, and a full-fledged e-commerce system.
• Shopkit's changes to Kirby are mostly in the "snippets", which might conflict with another Kirby installation's snippets
• Shopkit is a full point version behind the Kirby, always on the stable version.

Shopkit is a kit, a standalone, turnkey application

• Kirby developer, Bastian Algere, is known for Zootool, and making a living off Kirby

Future Topics

• See KWNPSA Requested Topics
• Need a topic for Monday, 20 August 2018 (Bob can't do I2P)