Re: [SRB] Possible Solutions for a E-commerce site in Rails

[Meng Weng Wong]

On 27 Sep, 2012, at 4:55 AM, Gabriel Lim <gab...@gettingrail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if any of you here have experience in developing e-commerce sites in Rails, and what solutions do you all normally use?
>
> I am looking to develop a simple ecommerce website selling digital products which can be downloaded, and I am toying with either using Spree commerce or rolling my own using Active Merchant. Do you guys have any other suggestions?
>

This is an interesting question and I'd like to know the answer too.

I'm planning a Hello Frog curriculum which is pretty much Hello World for business.

During the course, participants will:
- register a company,
- open a bank account,
- write a basic app that has only one big red button, which says "PAY".
- When pressed, the app transfers one dollar into the company's bank account.
- construct basic financial statements reporting the above transaction.

I plan to offer this sometime in November/December over weekends – does that sound interesting for anyone?

[Benjamin Tan]

+1 For Spree. 

No point reinventing the wheel. However, it is super likely that you'd have to dig through the source code (which is for most parts pretty well written). The super slick admin doesn't hurt either.

You probably also have to implement stuff like custom calculators, payment method etc but shouldn't be a huge barrier. The examples provided should be sufficient to get you started. Also, if you get stuck, first check out the specs in github.

Ben

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[Andras Kristof]

I would be interested in the follow-up courses, if any planned. I need to pick up business skills to be able to run a startup.

András

[Andy Croll]

Solved problem I think... no need to code even, which as we know is the best kind of code.

To take payment you can use Shopify for an online shop kinda thing...

http://www.shopify.com/?ref=deepcalm

…but for a single download you can sell straight from, and deliver the digital download using, FetchApp

http://app.fetchapp.com/signup?ref=goodscary

It also integrates with Shopify if you later have multiple products.

...affiliate links included ;-)

This is the system the guys at http://www.abookapart.com use.

[Paul Gallagher]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Andy Croll <andy...@deepcalm.com> wrote:

Solved problem I think... no need to code even, which as we know is the best kind of code.

To take payment you can use Shopify for an online shop kinda thing...

http://www.shopify.com/?ref=deepcalm

agree. And while it's very easy to use shopify as a "plug-in cart" within a rails app for example, make sure you really need that "other site"  - I recently tested just how far you can push shopify itself. There definitely are things you want to try and avoid attempting, but overall its pretty amazing how much you can squeeze out of their liquid templates and judicious javascript. 

…but for a single download you can sell straight from, and deliver the digital download using, FetchApp

http://app.fetchapp.com/signup?ref=goodscary

Nice. I'm particularly impressed with Cavender's as a reference site - omg, downloadable cowboy boots??!!

[Carl Coryell-Martin]

We've used spree on a couple of production projects and we've reviewed
and rejected spree on a couple of occasions. The spree datamodel is
solid, but we have not found the code to be well written and we got
tired of tripping over security holes so now we write our own stores
usually with something like the spree datamodel.

-ccm