I have a request to look at building a shopping site. Before I jump into Wordpress (woo commerce) or Shopify I was wondering if this is something this lovely app does?.
It would be amazing if it did as it gives ownership to me rather than being held to ransom with the big companies. The shop is for clothing and custom personalised products so it would need to manage things like quantity and invoicing, payments etc.
I know its a far fetch but thought I would ask before I try something else.
Duncan if you see this and it’s not something this app currently does, is this on the plan for future upgrades. A shop in a box approach would be amazing!.
It would be @Chrisb, but for now Sitely hasn’t the ability…
Ecwid fits into Sitely nicely with its widget integration, but it is still a third part ecommerce platform.
It is a lot of work but you could manually create a pseudo shop with PayPal buttons or the like, but there would be a lot of manual work to keep track of stock.
There has also been suggested on this forum a few times to download an ecommerce framework (a small one-off purchase) onto the host of the Sitely website and then connect Sitely to that, but I have never done so to tell you more about it.
The recommendation suggested by @FlaminFig to incorporate an e-commerce script does work very well with Sitely. Essentially, the e-commerce application is installed onto your web server and acts like a self contained app with its own home page. The app itself has its own backend admin area where you can set up products, pricing, payment gateway etc. Access to the admin area is done via a separate URL and a login, so the client can manage the e-commerce store without your intervention. When it comes to Sitely, you only have to provide a link from the Sitely website to the e-commerce system home page. Alternatively, you can embed a piece of code into one of your Sitely pages that will display the e-commerce home page right within your website. You can search for shopping cart scripts on any of the popular freelance platforms, or on sites such as phpjabbers.com . It’s best to choose a script from a developer who offers installation support, particularly if you are unfamiliar with setting up php scripts. The small price of such a script is often less than a couple of months subscription to a third party e-commerce platform.
I’ve already set up several e-commerce projects using Sitely for the front end and WooCommerce as the back end, mainly because there’s no subscription required and the client keeps full control. Naturally, I leave WooCommerce handling only the checkout on a subdomain (checkout.example.com), grab the add-to-cart link for each product, and integrate it into the button on the product page in Sitely.
However, this approach has a few downsides: I can’t display stock levels, the product appears available until the user clicks through to checkout (where the cart page then shows whether it’s actually in stock or not), and I can’t add multiple different products to the cart in a smooth, organic way.
With Shopify, you can achieve this same flow. They have the “Buy Button” purchase method, which even includes an embedded cart in the script, but then you’d need a Shopify subscription.
Either way, this would integrate with your client ERP or even if he does not have one, they can control their stocks, legal details, invoices etc with the Woo or Shopify backend, and the front would be Sitely (also, the subdomain route is nice because if either your WP site/woo goes down or the Shopify service goes offline for some reason, the client would still have their website on and only the store not working)
Thanks for the workarounds I’ll look into it, It sounds like the only way to do it at the moment. I do think that the dev team are missing a trick here especially when you can get PHP scripts to manage this, I’d even pay a separate subscription for this to be included in the app as a shop in the box.
