Web Stores and Shopping Carts
Contents
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
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
- Adding products
Future Topics
- See KWNPSA Requested Topics
- Need a topic for Monday, 20 August 2018 (Bob can't do I2P)
