I don’t think this is quite a feature request (in that I doubt there’d be enough call for this to justify making a module of it), but this looks like the closest category. In short, I’m interested in running an online shopping cart on my Neth server, and interested in suggestions. Considerations include capabilities; cost; ease of installation, administration, and customer UX.
To drill down a little more on what I’m wanting, I’m looking at starting a long-arm quilting service, powered by my wife’s new sewing machine that costs more than my first new car (hand made by elves in the Swiss Alps^W^W^W^W on the shores of the Bodensee). Since these services are generally priced by the size of the quilt, I’d need a way to have a customer enter dimensions and have the system calculate a price based on that.
I’ve played just a little with OpenCart (installs easily on Neth, pretty much the same as any PHP web app), and it looks like it could be made to do what I need it to with a few paid plug-ins. Any other, or preferred solutions for this?
Description:
■ Installation and configuration of WooCommerce, the world’s most widely used extension for e-commerce.
■ The creation of a free PayPal account to collect your payments and verify the operation of the purchase of your items using the “Sandbox” and then “Live” modes.
■ Creating a free Stripe account, PayPal’s main competitor, installing its payment gateway and verifying that your item purchase is working using “Test” and then “Live” modes.
Chapters:
General description. Prerequisites. Essential pages. Paypal account. PayPal sandbox. WooCommerce. Configuration. Physical products. Downloadable products. Regeneration of Images. Shopping in the sandbox. Real purchase. Closing a PayPal account. Stripe Account. Main Menu. CSS and footer adjustments. Updating WooCommerce. LOCAL server. Tutorials & video. Introduction to the editor vi.
As I was looking through a number of options yesterday, I saw that a PayPal plugin for one of the systems did seem to work that way–all the authorization was done behind the scenes. But yeah, ordinarily there are going to be API keys and other authentication credentials.
My point was more that the installation itself didn’t seem to involve any work at the CLI, once Wordpress itself is installed (which itself takes only two commands, one to install the stephdl repo and the other to install Wordpress itself). If you want to run it in a vhost, which you probably would, two more commands for that. But after that, installing WooCommerce itself, and all the configuration, happen via a web GUI. Compare that to, e.g., OpenCart, which is easy enough to install (it’s a PHP web app–drop it in a directory served by a suitable PHP version, create a database, and go), but it’s still all CLI work.
…and obviously I hadn’t heard much about WooCommerce if I wrote this.
That’s one of the main reasons I suggested using WordPress as a Basis.
As the most used Web-CMS on the planet, it is pretty secure (Plenty of users testing!).
It is very easy and quick to set up.
The Plug-Ins are also a breeze to set up.
Handling is so easy, any user can use it once it’s set up.
It’s also VERY easy to make a nice starter page, which is not always so trivial when using a dedicated shop solution…
I run a shop using Opencart and it is fairly rock solid.
I’ve tried a Prestashop installation and it wasn’t too bad, can’t remember why I chose OpenCart over Prestashop. I think it might have been the cost of the addon modules I wanted to use, the Opencart ones I found where either free or a slight bit cheaper than the Prestashop one. However Prestashop has one or two nice features that Opencart does not have.
WooCommerce requires WordPress, I have tried to set this up and its a bit more difficult and tricky to setup than Opencart. Requires a bit more still and you also need to spend a lot of time and installing extra addons and do more configuration to ensure that it is secure. (I work for a managed solution provider and I’ve seen from the sidelines how insecure Wordpress can be and its scary to say the least.
With all of the PCI DSS and GDPR rules in play, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Woocommerce for any Ecommerce site.)
I’ve tried Magento which is another big name Ecommerce package and its like a Sherman tank baked in cement, it requires a high-spec machine to really work properly.
Even without that, WordPress installation isn’t all that tricky–certainly not any more so than Opencart. And from there, WooCommerce is installed like any other plugin, i.e., through the WordPress web GUI. Installing other plugins is also just a matter of point and click, so I’m not sure I see the concern on that side. Configuring those plugins properly is a separate issue, and may well be tricky–I’m far from a WordPress expert, so I don’t think I’d be able to say.
But as to the addon modules, those seem to favor WooCommerce from what I can see. The custom/calculated pricing module I mentioned above is free for WooCommerce; though Opencart has such a module available, it isn’t free. A sales tax module for Taxcloud is ~$70 for Opencart; it’s free for WooCommerce. Not a deal-breaker necessarily, but a point against Opencart.
I’m in .us and would be dealing with others in .us (I’m not intending to ship internationally), so GDPR is (thankfully) not a concern for me.