some general questions about building a webstore with Rails

G

given

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Aug 2, 2013
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i'm going to be building a site with Rails 3.2 that sells things, and for as much as i know about building and branding a site, i don't know anything about how it's going to plug into a payment processor, what payment processors i should consider, or if there is any specific structure i should adhere to when building the database. i'm relatively new to Rails but have managed to build a blogging platform with users and validations, etc. That was for Rails ropes, but there is still more for me to familiarize.

if you could give me a finger in a useful direction i'd be grateful :thefinger:

probably important facts i left out:
there will be 1 seller and many buyers.
there will be upwards of 200 items, potentially 2000 items.
it will sell international
 
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Why do you want to reinvent the wheel ?

Go with a established ecommerce solution, concentrate on making money and be done with it.
 
yast said:
Why do you want to reinvent the wheel ?

Go with a established ecommerce solution, concentrate on making money and be done with it.
Click to expand...

i actually don't want to, i just thought i had to. since yesterday i've run into a few being braintree, piggyback, RoR Ecommerce, Spreecommerce, Stripe, Active Merchant. I'm guessing these are Rails solutions. Seems like a lot though, can anyone whittle this down? or, like i said in the first post, give me a general idea of what i'm going to be doing?
 
Braintree and Stripe are payment processors not eCommerce solutions by the way

Your requirements still aren't clear enough to give you much more information about what you need or what you're going to be doing

For some people, back-end development might be their strong point, in which case writing the code for an unsupported payment processor might be simpler than overhauling the UI and design of a solution that looks like shit.

On the other hand, if you are more of a front-end person, you might want to find a solution that already supports your payment processor of choice, or at least has a plugabble backend for payment processors to make the task simpler.

Once you know where your strengths lie and potentially which payment processor(s) you want to use, you can start searching for something appropriate to use.

If this still all sounds too complicated and the project is a "making money" one rather than a learning one, it might be time to look at one of the existing SaaS solutions like Shopify
 
that helps out quite a bit. the difference between payment processors, ecommerce solutions, and SaaS solutions is something i was only starting to feel out as i made this post.

it seems that the first step is deciding what payment processors might best suit the company based on sales frequency and price. i'm still waiting on that information. then it would seem that i'd need to find a suitable ecommerce solution... assuming there's considerable cost variation of different payment processors?

i've been meaning to get my hands dirty with rails for awhile, and after finding this forum some time ago i realized this company is sitting on some good marketable content and product. i'm using it to learn and they'll hopefully get a good looking store that costs less to use than ebay.
 
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