coderedcorp
E-Commerce
Goals
The goal would be to provide a simple e-commerce experience that works out-of-box but can be easily customized by the developer. This feature would primarly be used for smaller clients who need custom business logic that would be difficult to program with online paltforms like Shopify. We seek to have a simple system that would be a suitable (and better) replacement for something like Woocommerce + WordPress.
Target website would be small business e-commerce, or digital goods. Large retailers dealing in high volume would probably defer to a more specialized system.
Basic requirements
- Product management/pages in wagtail admin.
- Product category management/pages in wagtail admin.
- Support subscription products and recurring billing/auto-pay. Either through the payment gateway or something like a simple cron job or management command.
- Cart functionality (can be turned on or off if not needed)
- Payment gateway (I am fine with supporting Stripe exclusively at first).
- Confirmation and payment error email management in wagtail admin.
- Super basic order management - in the form of an order summary email for customers, and order status/notes in wagtail admin. No customer login/dashboard is required at this time, but that would be a need in the future.
- Super basic shipping calculations. We could look to other ecommerce systems for inspiration here.
- Basic tax calculations. Tax laws are complex, so we could support a flat tax-rate out of the box, and provide a hook for doing any more complex calculations. That way developers can easily program this or integrate with a 3rd party tax calculator service based on each individual website's needs.
Implementation
Most obvious solution would be to integrate something like Longclaw or Oscar. I'm not the biggest fan of Oscar although it is extremely robust. Longclaw looks appealing - perhaps we could join forces with longclaw team and contribute upstream, or fork the project to ensure we can provide professional support and timely code changes as needed. Open to other Django-based solutions as well.
I envision this being either a separate pip package, or an off-by-default feature. If many large dependencies are required, then a separate pip package would probably be more ideal.
I believe you guys should focus more on building CRCMS as a better alternative to WordPress and let the eCommerce folks focus on what they know best. CRCMS is still at a very early phase and I really appreciate what you have done with Wagtail. I've built similar Wagtail packages to allow for such functionality but CRCMS is by far the most complete solution I've come across. I would love to see it become something even more intuitive especially with streamfields. WordPress' new modular block editor is quite similar to streamfields but more user friendly. Anyways, I'm digressing. Let's focus on eCommerce. Id be happy to help in any way I can!
Thanks for the high praise @wulaaf . I'm glad you find it a good solution. Regarding ecommerce, we have built ecommerce sites using django-oscar and shopify before (and have managed many terrible woocommerce setups), so we have some experience in the field. However we have not yet had a client or sponsor who has needed ecommerce in a CodeRed CMS site. Once we have a sponsor we will build that feature, that is how most of our new big features get implemented (or when someone decides to go on a coding spree 🐱💻)
If you want to help out with ecommerce, we would certainly appreciate seeing a prototype or experiment in a PR or separate GitHub repo. There are hundreds of good ecommerce packages available and evaluating which to use (or deciding to roll our own) is always the biggest hurdle. So trying out different packages in various test projects would be a useful exercise.
Hi there, I was wondering if this project had been progressed? Has anyone implemented an example of the embedded block suggest here? Is this the recommended best approach? Are there any payment gateways with embed finder - would it be a case of writing one based on an existing api e.g. for sumup/stripe etc?
I have had many, many, many discussions with other Wagtail developers about e-commerce. One possible idea has been that we might do a Kickstarter to fund an official wagtail e-commerce package (and we would of course provide an easy integration with CRX).
But there are no concrete plans right now.
Thanks @vsalvino that is clear. It seems a very valuable feature - running a Crowdfunder does sound a great idea because as well as seeking to raise funds, it would validate the need and get the word out there about CRX.