Any shop solutions for Kirby 3?

[moritzebeling]

Hi there,
are there any shop or ecommerce or payment solution ready for Kirby 3? I started setting up a small website where products are organised in families and have various variants resulting in various prices (stored in structure field).
From here on I will need a cart to put the products in (via form or ajax), of course a checkout (Paypal and stripe), collect the shipping address from customer and send him/her a confirmation mail.
Maybe I will have to partially blend the existing solutions from Kirby 2 like Cartkit, Shopkit, SCK.
Did anyone do something similar recently?
Or has ideas on how to do it?
Or if they are any existing solutions?

[luxlogica]

There are a few ready-made shopping cart solutions that can be easily integrated into any website - regardless of the CMS you’re using. I can recommend SnipCart, not just because it’s very easy to integrate, but also because they have great docs and support when you have questions. Also, they support a variety of payment gateways, integrate with shipping, and have lots of other features that make it suitable for a variety of projects.

[moritzebeling]

Sounds nice, thank you. I think main problem here is the 2% charge they put on every purchase on top of the gateway fees. I want to convince my client to move from wordpress+woocommerce as I really find it unbearable to work with it once you tried kirby.
So I am hoping to come up with something selfhosted.

[jimbobrjames]

Your going to end up paying something somewhere along the line because banks usually charge a transaction fee. I would also recommend Snipcart also, it’s really neat. They are actually open to negotiation. If you have a high turnover, and the 2% is alot of money, talk to Snipcart. They come up with custom plans in such cases.

[luxlogica]

Unfortunately, I have found 3 main problems with free, open source solutions:

1. They often impose a frontend design. Rather than limiting themselves to being “just a shopping cart”, almost all open source solutions want to provide you with a “complete shop”, which include a pre-baked frontend, using their own templates. That is not a solution I can use. I have never found one that implements a ‘plug-in cart’ like SnipCart, which just gets out of the way of your own design, and doesn’t interfere with your site’s functionality.
2. The licensing is often restrictive: beware of using GPL- or other copyleft-licensed code in your commercial projects, if you need to keep your code private.
3. Maintenance is a nightmare: e-commerce is a complex beast, with many moving parts that will break or behave in unexpected ways at some point. When e-commerce is a major part of the business, the client simply cannot afford to have a malfunctioning site, so support must be as fast and efficient as possible. Non-commercial open source projects, on the other hand, are often poorly documented, and have inadequate or expensive support options - which is a recipe for disaster.

IMHO, the super-stable, full-featured, unobtrusive, free open source shopping cart is a pink unicorn - I’d love to find one, but have only ever seen it in my dreams…

As @jimbobrjames mentioned, SnipCart pricing is very reasonable, and an incredibly nice company. The 2% surcharge is worthwhile for the time and headache that it will save you and your client - specially if the client is actually making money from the site.

[brooklet]

Just to chime in here, don’t overlook the fine print under SnipCart’s 2% fee: “For clients with monthly sales under $500, the 2% will be replaced by a $10 monthly fee.”

We’re using the “free” version of Gumroad at the moment (8.5% + $0.30 fee per sale), since our sales vary widely month-to-month, but would much prefer a good integrated Kirby solution!

[jimbobrjames]

Well, the only other alternative that I know of is Ecwid which does have an official Kirby 2 plugin. I guess its just a matter of time before they update it to Kirby 3. Perhaps one of their plans is more suitable.

[carstengrimm]

we had similar discussions before and most services offer you an pre-defined shop but want to comission at a percentage rate per sale.

whilest depending on payment processing you will have fees anyways…

• paypal 3,4% + 35 cent
• stripe 1,9% eu, 2,8 us% + 35 cent
• mollie multipayment
• manual “check your account for payments” free

if software or service, they will always want to get a piece from the cake.
it really depends on how much money are in the talk, obviously when your turn-around is in the ten-thousands each month you might not want to add additional percentage fees to the shop software yourself but you will have to invest in a custom / or any other development to adjust to your needs.

for someone starting out, there isn’t a budget to be placed in advance, so they are mostly fine giving up some percent of a sale to not have a hassle.

having friends tied to magento, while this is a free software, there are huge developers selling plugins and services as well.

In the end it really depends on your needs and everyone is very individual. A shop itself does not mean to be too complex…

• product page
• product list
• cart
• checkout
• after-sale
• order

that’s what i would consider the basics… obviously there are many things to consider.
if you were to find someone to code a shop to your needs, he wants to get paid and you’d have to calculate how many month the “2-8%” you are saving need to be invested until it paid off, and if further development then is required…

There are many different ways to attempt it and it all comes down on how much traffic the shop is generating, should it be flat file, database, should it connect to something existing? while having programmed something shop-like which suits my needs to at about 90%, there’s always the question how to improve it…

Modify Virtual Pages while keeping them virtual - Page Methods

I have been trying to use a virtual page within a session to somewhat make use the page methods to modify the data within the session however i quickly noticed that once i am doing any sort of modification such as $page->update() the virtual page gets written to disk. my thought has been (in the example of having a shopping cart with sessions) to be create virtual page which is essentially the session / shopping cart informations e.g. structure for products when adding a product to cart the v…

Will find() or similar get slower with a big collection?

In theory, would it be possible to combine virtual pages with sessions to make use of a file-less cart and when it comes to a payment we can then copy/move the virtual page to filesystem? https://getkirby.com/docs/guide/routing#virtual-pages My thought would just be to have the (virtual) page ready while being able to edit and make use of most kirby functions and have everything set in comparision to extract everything from the session and dump it into a page.

[moritzebeling]

Thank you everyone for your replies! Sure, a good quality service or software wants or needs to be paid. Exept for WooCommerce
My biggest problem with the two options I tried to work with (Woo and Shopkit) was, that I find it really hard and annoying to integrate it into my existing design and content structure and make it function the way I want from a design and experience perspective. Also I hardly didn’t know any shop systems/plugins/… That’s why I was asking here.

I agree, a professional and rock solid online shop is a complex thing: Product variations and prices, maybe coupons, unplanned user behaviour, various payment systems, tax, shipping and regulations, user data, security, automated emails, … So probably it does make sense to spend another 2% to have all this sorted out. Or at least it is too risky and energy consuming to create something yourself just for the sake of it.

Out of my research through tens of services today, I think Snipcart and Ecwid are very promising and affordable as well. (For small shops, Ecwid is practically free, but limited to 10 different products).
What I don’t know is, how integratable these solutions are: can I set the style for the cart, checkout page, emails and can the client follow the shop activity via the kirby panel?

[jimbobrjames]

@moritzebeling

What I don’t know is, how integratable these solutions are: can I set the style for the cart, checkout page, emails and can the client follow the shop activity via the kirby panel?

In the case of Snipcart, it runs from a seperate panel hosted on Snipcarts servers. The cart is javascript added to the page. You can totally skin it to suit your design, it’s pretty customisable. They even provide a sass template to make it easier. Then you just tie it into you kirby templates with data attributes to tell it things like price, weight, color, size etc.

In the case of Ecwid i cant help much, I havent used it. But looking at the screen shots, it does look they made a custom panel inside kirbys panel.

[moritzebeling]

@jimbobrjames

tell it things like price, weight, color, size etc.

Do you tell Snipcart in advance what product (variantions) you offer and what they cost or how do they know that a filled form is not hacked and prices are correct?

[jimbobrjames]

@moritzebeling

Do you tell Snipcart in advance what product (variantions) you have and what they cost or how do they know that a filled form is not hacked and prices are correct?

I think with the higher paid plans you can do inventory management within the snipcart panel. But in my case, I made product blueprints to fill in the data attributes. When someone adds it to the cart and buys, it pushes that information in to the Snipcart panel, so the transaction will show up.

So a buy button looks like this, all of which can be wired into fields in Kirby…

<button
    class="snipcart-add-item"
    data-item-id="2"
    data-item-name="Bacon"
    data-item-price="3.00"
    data-item-weight="20"
    data-item-url="http://myapp.com/products/bacon"
    data-item-description="Some fresh bacon">
    Buy bacon
</button>

Dead simple really

[moritzebeling]

That really looks dead simple! Thanks. But as a hacker, can’t I change the html of the ready loaded page to data-item-price="0" before submitting the form?

[jimbobrjames]

There is no form. The cart picks up on the class on the buttons. I’m not a hacker so i’ve never tried to manipulate it, but I do know that Snipcart is very secure.

[sylvainjule]

They cross-check with your server that everything is legit before making the transaction: https://snipcart.com/blog/how-we-handle-security-at-snipcart

[brooklet]

One other affordable option we’ve considered: Shopify Lite ($9/mo), which gives you an embeddable “product card,” similar to Gumroad. Anyone here tried it?

[moritzebeling]

For completeness: When I met the client, they were excited about the Kirby Panel and everything I told them about Kirby, but nonetheless, and even if I don’t like it, we decided for WooCommerce. Not because it’s nice, but because it provides a solid shop framework just within the CMS, at no additional cost, with all functionality that on might need.
The site is far from being live and already overloaded with plugins, slow, backend is confusing and it’s hell to restyle everything that WooCommerce brings. On the other side, I don’t have to care about the functionality so much, it’s all inclusive. Well, we’ll see

[guidoferreyra]

I’ve used for Shopkit from @samnabi for a while and is a very comprehensive solution. Is true that needs some time and customization to integrate it with an existing site but when you understand how the plugin works it can be made.

Right know I have to start the development of a new e-commerce site and I can’t make it in Kirby 3 because Shopkit is v2 only

I think Sam anoounced that he is not going to make a v3 version, but maybe if he knows there is some interest he can make this big update to Kirby 3

[samnabi]

Thank you for the kind words @guidoferreyra, your bug reports and feature requests have certainly helped make Shopkit a better solution, especially for multi-language scenarios.

I would like to create a Shopkit v3, but quite simply don’t have the time to make any promises right now.

[klixx]

I would like to create a Shopkit v3, but quite simply don’t have the time to make any promises right now.

Any updates for Kirby 3?