[patrickheeneyMember]

That looks like a great shopping cart site.

Another option I was considering was bridging a wordpress module to an ecommerce site although I think that detracts from what I am trying to do with keeping everything within wordpress.

And yet another option I think might be to hack a current wordpress eCommerce module to retrieve data from pods versus posts/pages OR try to create a plugin to integrate something like Mals e-commerce into the wordpress admin and tie it in with PODS.

Thanks john for your feedback. Does anyone have any other ideas on another approach? Also what kind of integration would everyone like to see?

[sc0ttkclarkKeymaster Post count: 782]

I’ve built a semi-ecommerce Pods site before, it just requires a good structure to start with. Everything else comes into play as you layout how you want your site to work out. Checkout can work through Pod Pages, and processing can work through Pod Helpers to keep things modular.

Definitely requires a strong php background, what are you leaning more towards now?

[sc0ttkclarkKeymaster Post count: 782]

Another thing to keep in mind is the Pods has importable/exportable packages. On our new site (coming in the next two months) will have a Package Repository where people can share their creations! I’ve already got an unruly amount of packages ready to be unleashed Having an eCommerce package would be great!

[patrickheeneyMember]

I have a good php background so Im basically up for anything. Due to the amount of time I spent trying to make other CMS solutions work, I wasted alot of this projects timeframe. However once I found pods it only took me a day to get integrated. However this project is in a very strict timeframe now ( < week ).

So im leaning toward the fastest solution. Bridging another ecommerce solution into using pods would probably be the most feature rich but also would still remain bloated software for this projects needs.

I would like to try and build it all in pods as I am sure that would probably be the fastest option and keeps tied together.

Can you help me with kind of a work flow for how the checkout would work? As mentioned in the first post I would use pods to create the products, the product categories, etc. So displaying them is the easy part. So you mentioned checkout could be run from pod pages. Am I correct in my first post that storing the information in a session for the checkout pod page to read is the best way to go about it?

During the checkout process I imagine I would use public forms(?) to display the billing address, payment information, etc. Would these forms be another pod? I just found POD pages yesterday so Im not to familiar with Pod Helpers yet. Would these come into play after they completed the information and submitted the order for processing?

Im definitely open for a POD only solution but Im not sure yet how to accomplish it. I appreciate your response.

[patrickheeneyMember]

John,

I took a closer look at Mals e-commerce. It looks like it is a hosted solution so I dont believe that it would work for this project unless they allow access to all of the source files.

[sc0ttkclarkKeymaster Post count: 782]

For checkout, I would actually suggest using our API and using normal forms (with the user’s information pre-populated if they are logged in) along with Session storage across the different steps. At the end, add a new record for your "order" pod with all the relevant information so it’s always there (and won’t change when the user updates their account, good to have everything as it was for your records). Also, after confirmation of information being correct, you can run a Pod Helper and effectively bill them using your payment processor. Interacting with your processor’s api, you can display an error message or continue on to adding the record to the "order" Pod and show them their Order Number.

[patrickheeneyMember]

Nice, that definitely helps put me in the right direction. I see that there is a page in the codex with the API so that should help.

Do you happen to have a package intended for the repository that contains a little more in depth Pod Helper? Or is it as simple as manipulating the $value variable?

In either case how do you prevent the POD from being submitted if for example it errors out (payment declined, fields left blank)?

Thanks again!

[sc0ttkclarkKeymaster Post count: 782]

That’s where using the API comes in, the Pods Public Forms use AJAX and probably aren’t a good idea if you want to do something this complex. Use the Pod Helper to submit payment and return the approved / declined message. If Pod Helper returns approved, continue through process of adding the Order to the database.

[patrickheeneyMember]

@beyonddesign

I had built a working checkout with Pods but I switched to WP-Ecommerce in the last minute due to time constraints. Ideally I would have had a few days more to make the ecommerce pods integration like I wanted it.

To my knowledge the the form has expired error message has to do with sessions. I would guess the problem is a conflict of how shopp and pods handle the sessions. I would check to make sure the session names do not conflict and how shopp declares its sessions to find the problem.

I hope this helps a bit!

[davidangelParticipant]

@patrickheeney I would love to either know how you integrated pods with wp-ecommerce or if you’ve perfected the 100% pods method. I’ve got an ecommerce project coming up and would LOVE to use pods for it.

[volomikeMember]

I don’t know if Pods is the right solution for this without a lot of work. I mean, remember now — there are other things to product catalogs and shopping carts on sites that customers often expect, such as:

• bundle suggestions
• color choices
• size choices
• shipping choices
• order tracking

And then there are things the merchant will often want like:

• discount prices in a product category
• increase prices by a dollar or percentage in a product category
• upsells, promotions
• automatic seasonal price changes

So, in such cases, you might want to investigate something outside of the WP realm, like Magento.

However, keeping it in the WP realm, if the client needs are minimal, at a minimum and beyond the product catalog and shopping cart features, you’ll probably want some kind of order tracking so that the customer can get a tracking code and can go to a form on your site, put in his email address and this tracking code, and see the status of the order. On the backend, you’ll want to have an admin component where you update the status as the payment is paid, shipped, returned, etc.

[davidangelParticipant]

I’m wanting to do something unique. I’ve got a client that is wanting to sell handmade crafts online. As such, she wants to take a picture of each individual item, sell it, and have it leave the store automatically once sold. It would be easy enough to do with ‘buy it now’ paypal buttons, but I would love to have some sort of shopping cart to encourage customers to buy several items.

What would a workflow for something like this look like?

[patrickheeneyMember]

Hello Everyone,

I just discovered Pods this morning and have already integrated it in several areas of a project im working on. Im very excited about the future of this project.

Im in desperate need for a good ecommerce solution. Out of the 4-6 main wordpress ecommerce products available right now, none of them meet my requirements. They are all bloated, based on posts or pages (which is just to confusing for clients), and they have a million different settings and options (none of which interest me).

So Im thinking that its probably possible to create this with everyones favorite plugin. The easy parts would be the product creation, product classifications, and product list by using pods of course.

However what I cannot figure out is the shopping cart and checkout parts. Heres how I envision it. When someone is on the detail page they add the product to cart which is then redirected to a add to cart page which uses _GET or the function to grab the last param and saves it in a session then redirected. The shopping cart would then read the session and display the results. Once the checkout button is pressed it must somehow be presented the forms (billing address, payment information, etc).

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could make this process work? I have a kind of short time frame and Im basically looking for a very basic shopping cart and would love to come up with something using pods.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[logikal16Member]

@davidangel – It would be entirely possibly to build an e-commerce system using Pods. The problem is that it hasn’t been done before. And as @volomike mentioned, it could take considerable investment.

If there aren’t any budget limitations, then it’d be a great learning experience with Pods. However, solutions already exist that do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Someone above mentioned the Shopp plugin for WordPress.

Plugins like Shopp take care of most of the eCommerce heavy lifting, and cover aspects that you may or may not have already considered:

1. Seamlessly sending transaction information to/from secure payment servers (while keeping the user on your site).
2. Handling product conflicts (e.g. If an item is already in one person’s shopping cart when it’s sold to someone else)
3. Transaction "paper trail"

---

Now that the disclaimer is done, here is how it can be done:

name (txt) *
photo (file) *
description (desc) *
price (num) *
sold (bool)
lock_expires (date)

• The available items will be the ones where "sold = 0" and "lock_expires < NOW()".

• If a user adds an item to the cart, that item gets stored into a SESSION variable. Multiple items in the cart would mean a comma-separated list of IDs into that SESSION variable (e.g. "25,16,3")

• Each time the user refreshes the page, a query will be run to make sure that each item is available (and isn’t locked). There could be cases where shopping cart items could be purchased by someone else.

• When the user goes to the checkout screen, a temporary lock is set (to ~5 minutes in the future).

• In the checkout screen, the total cost is the SUM() of all the "price" values from the shopping cart. When the user submits the payment form, it gets sent to a processing gateway (e.g. Payflow Pro), and a status message is returned back.

• If the payment was a success, then "sold = 1". The payment details (user’s address, products purchased) are stored into another Pod, and a shipping notice is emailed to the store owner.

---

This is an extremely simple example and I probably left out a lot of stuff.

[acenikMember]

hey guys, has anyone made progress on this, i was thinkin of using a wordpress plugin called Dukapress, it handles the e-commerce part pretty well, code is very simple easy to modify, already integrated with loads of payment options

Website: http://dukapress.org/
Demo: http://dukapress.org/demo/

other than using this i was thinkin of extending the functionality with PODS for any other custom queryin against a user for their transactions, of favorite products, or testimonials, all these things can be pods related, some more extra features which the e-commerce part or wordpress cant handle im sure pods is gr8 for it

anyone have a better solution please let me know, thanks!

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