Easiest way to sell stuff and track inventory - e-commerce

on my website I sell unique items. I have programmed it so that on the selling page, users can select any amount of these items, and it calculates the cost. The key is that I only have 1 of each of these items. So I need the shopping cart system to not allow the payment to go through unless it is available.
I've been searching for a good quick/easy/cheap solution and can't find one. I don't expect this site to make a lot of money (the transactions are a few bucks), so I didn't want to need a ssl certificate.
The only way I know of not needing an ssl certificate would be to use paypal or google checkout. However, I do not think there is a way of using these services and making paypal's server run a script to check how many are available on the site. Any solution?
Thanks

I was thinking about it more, and I think the problem is that once the user gets to the paypal payment screen, I have no control. I guess I could do something like they click the buy it now link, a php script updates it to sold, then they go to the paypal screen, but then they might not continue the purchase...

If you use PayPal Website Payments Standard (using a cart rather than 'Buy Now' Buttons) then you could use IPN or PDT (see the paypal docs here) to get PayPal to call back to you with the status of the payment.
The work flow would then be to set status to reserved when the item is added to the cart, and then wait for the IPN/PDT call to come back with the payment status, and mark the item as sold.
You would still need to check and reset to available any item that had been reserved for longer than say 2 Hours. (You could do this before serving a page to a user so that they have the latest availability and you don't need a cron job or long running process)

If you could provide a little more information about how you have implemented ur shopping card, it would have been more easier for other to assist! If you are using any ecommerce solution then it should be there already in the track inventory section. But Provided that you have implemented d shopping cart manually, why don't you add little bit of codes that checks the inventory status first before letting your customers check out?

Related

How can I get tax details from my personal webserver and display on the checkout page in shopify?

I want to create a shopify app that can fetch tax and HS code details from my website and display that to checkout page of the user as soon as user adds a product to cart. How can I build this?
You can use an App Proxy at the cart level to show off information. The proxy serves as a secure way of contacting your server and returning results. In checkout itself, you can offer up information too, with checkout scripts post-purchase.
Note that without integrating a tax service into Shopify itself and using that, none of the tax data or numbers you show off will have any use in the actual order calculations, meaning all your work is simple convenience of showing off an estimation to customers. The tax numbers the customers may actually see will be done by Shopify and/or the integrated tax solution your merchant account uses.

What steps should the add to cart operation go through?

I am planning to make an e-commerce site and there are some steps that I need to think about.
For example, I will add a product to the cart. In your opinion, what stages should this process go through in the background in order for me to take this action? Which checks should be done in what order? For example, if I assume that I will do stock control, should I do this stock control through a separate stock microservice? Other than that, what kind of steps and checks should it go through?
Here's what I'm planning. I have a frontend application and from here I will send a request to my cart service (a rest api) via an ApiGateway when the user presses the add to cart button. The addbasket method of this service will be run. Here I will first check stock from my stock micro service. If there is stock, I will add it to the cart. If not, I'll be back.
What else should I do here? Also where should I store the basket? Should I consider a database or a different option?
Actually, what I want to ask is what steps should I go through and what controls should I do to develop the add to cart operation. At this stage, where should I store the products in the basket, etc.?
Could you please explain what is the best way to make this work?
thank you everyone

How do I access Shopify data without advanced account?

All I'm wanting to do is track sales of certain products from a certain date. My company is wanting to add a banner to track sales goals for raising money for charities. So basically, we'd tag a few products as being part of that goal, set a goal, and then need to update the goal progress by a certain amount every time a sale is made on one of those products. As far as I can tell, without access to Shopify's analytics API, this is not possible. How can I do this?
What you want to build is perfectly possible. However, you need to generate Private App Credentials, so you can use Shopify API. It doesn't matter if you have an account by yourself, someone else can follow these steps and send you the credentials your way.
If you don't actually need to modify anything through the API, you could have them set a webhook (Settings -> Notifications -> Webhook) on Order Creation (or similar) that posts to your server and you can check what product got sold and see if it has got the tag.
The "easy" way to do this is to create an app that receives order webhooks and can check on tagged products and keep a sum of target items sold.
Then the app should have use a script tag to insert a simple script with the current value into the web page at a configured place by css selector
OR the app could update one or more snippet files that you could include until the promo is done.
I'd tend to go with the script tag option since that's a bit more flexible and you should be able to change your theme when the promo is over to report results without having to touch the app again.

Big Commerce Integration for custom Email Invoice

I've looked into different ways to put or get order info from BC to different systems including the BC API, BC Webhooks, Zapier, and other systems like Shipworks.... in the end what I need to do is this:
We need orders placed on BigCommerce to send out a special invoice to the customer. The items that the customer purchased will have custom attributes, a "Tier" and a separate "Unit QTY" which is not the same as the item quantity.
We need to group the items by Tier, and show subtotals of the Unit Qty and Cost. Send this in an invoice as soon as the order is placed on the website.
We are already syncing to Quickbooks online, which does not have the functionality.
Looking for suggestions on different platforms/languages/email services like mailgun/and even shipping integration tools like shipworks, ordoro etc. that might have the ability to code a custom email template like this.
My customer is keeping bigcommerce, no option to switch this out.
I am mainly a Salesforce developer so my strong suit would be to sync the orders to SFDC and code in apex, send the invoice. But before investing in the time, wanted to see if I'm missing some quick potential solutions.
Anyone use Zapier Javascript/Python code platform?
Apologies if this is too open-ended. I feel that this could be a good reference for others in the community about options and best practices.
Hmm your question is pretty broad. Maybe a few links to API documentation could help?
Bigcommerce API - https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api
Ordoro API - https://www.ordoro.com/developer
Send this in an invoice as soon as the order is placed on the website.
I think what you need is a Bigcommerce webhook for store/order/created. See https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/webhooks-getting-started.
Alternatively, you could set up a cron job that polls BigCommerce for new orders and then sends the email notification.

Test multiple-product purchase with sandbox PayPal

I have a webshop and im almost there, but I have a number of items for purchase which are downloadable content. I fixed so when a user has paid they are redirected to my pdt.php where they get a receipt, Now I written code for also displaying content if the item-id are == something. Now I wanna make a sandbox/test-purchase of all products that are downloadable ontent which are 28. I can create 28 buttons and have the id 1-28 but that seems stupid. How can I do this easier?
Check out the cart upload command method of sending transaction data to PayPal. It's similar to standard buttons except that you'll include all items in a single form.
Alternatively, if you're familiar with web service API's I'd recommend using the Express Checkout API. This gives you more freedom over your checkout and provides more advanced features as well.