It’s a popular question on the forums: How can I do e-commerce with ExpressionEngine?
The only built-in way to do e-commerce is using the Simple Commerce Module (SCM), a first-party module from EllisLab. This method is, of course, limited to using PayPal as a payment gateway and some clients are hesitant to do that because they (incorrectly) perceive PayPal to be an amateur solution and not secure. Also, SCM has limited functionality; it’s called Simple Commerce Module for a reason.
This is pre-CartThrob, pre-Store, pre-Brilliant Retails, and even pre-Stripe.
DevDemon recently released their Subscription add-on for ExpressionEngine, which makes it easy to sell subscriptions through your ExpressionEngine-powered website.
I’ve been using this in beta over the Summer for some testing on a project of mine. It’s very flexible and, out of the box, it should do everything you’d need from a subscription add-on, including customizing through actions.
Subscriptions also delivers a very powerful Trigger and Action system. Utilizing almost 20 different triggers you can customize actions through an easy to use control panel. These triggers allow your administrator to modify and create new subscriptions without modifying template tags.
The full set of cookies for matching domains is transmitted by the browser with each page request to that domain, even if the original cookies were set using HTTPS/SSL and the current page is HTTP.
One way around this is by setting the “secure” flag on cookies you set. Any cookies set with the “secure” flag will only get transmitted by browsers when connecting to HTTPS pages.
I can wholeheartedly recommend it and give it my two thumbs up. It has been powering e-commerce for me since 2012 and has handled thousands of transactions without an issue. And look at that beautiful site.
SquareBit publicly released a new add-on last week that makes one-off payments with Stripe a possibility on your EE-powered websites. It’s called Charge.
Charge is great for single product sites. There’s no need for any complicated cart setup. Just let your users pay. It’s a simple as that. There’s an advanced action model to let you attach payment information and perform updates after a user has paid too.
Charge only costs $45 (free for non-profits; email them for information) and does require that you have a Stripe account set up to process the payments. The download also includes some sample templates so you can get started quickly.
Last week an update to CartThrob was released and it includes support for EE 2.6. The big update fixes several issues (see the changelog for details and added a few things, too.
Justin turn the quantity field into the price field and then cleverly sets the product price to $1. The end result is the ability to set the price you want to donate.
Earlier this week I relaunched the Mijingo store using the Store e-e-commerce module. I do want to talk about that some more soon but right now I want to point out an article that covers some of what to think about when setting up an e-commerce site.
In the most recent release of Store, Exp:resso added support for Zoo Visitor and some other features like additional custom order fields.
If you haven’t tried Zoo Visitor yet, you definitely should. It makes using members in ExpressionEngine easier and can even store members accounts into entries.
The combination of Store and Zoo Visitor makes total sense to me and now I’m really excited about an upcoming project.
The apps covered in the chart are: their own Exp:resso Store, Cartthrob, and BrilliantRetail. It is a comprehensive chart and even includes Buy Now links at the bottom for each add-on.
Over the weekend, CartThrob 2 was deemed “production ready” in an announcement on the CartThrob website.
CartThrob2 is now production ready and available for purchase here at CartThrob.com. Though it’s been fun building a Google-style perpetual beta, CartThrob2 has really grown and is ready for release. Over the last few years we’ve refined every feature and interface, added tons of features, updated docs, templates, and everything in between.
The sweetheart of a e-commerce system for ExpressionEngine was first released for ExpressionEngine 1 and has been revamped for EE2. If you haven’t used CartThrob before, check out the video walk-thru(.mov file) for a general overview.
If you were one of the customers that particpated in the paid CarthThrob 2 beta, then your license is automatically upgraded to the production ready version.
In the last couple of years we’ve seen a lot of movement in the e-commerce space for ExpressionEngine. It used to be that you had to use a solution that wasn’t exactly a good fit…but it worked. We now have Cartthrob, BrilliantRetail and others.
We’ve been working with David and Tony from Brilliant2 to relaunch the ExpressionEngine Store on BrilliantRetail, their excellent ecommerce add-on for ExpressionEngine. They’ve been a joy to work with and we’ve given them permission to release all the custom work we commissioned into future versions of BrilliantRetail. We can’t be more specific about this until the store launches. Honestly we’re not sure if this will happen before or after EECI, but we’re doing our best to make it before.
I know what you’re thinking…why not Cartthrob? Me too.
Yesterday, add-on developer Exp-resso released Store, another offering for doing e-commerce on ExpressionEngine.
Two years ago we had very few options for e-commerce. Other than the Simple Commerce Module we didn’t even have a solution that worked with and inside of ExpressionEngine. In the last year and a half we’ve seen a mini explosion of options, like Cartthrob (released last April) and BrillianRetail, which was released earlier this year .
So, while they felt it necessary to explain why you might need another e-commerce app for ExpressionEngine, I don’t think there’s any explaining to do. There’s room for more, and the more options we have, the better. We now have three robust e-commerce options. That’s hardly too many.
One of the marketing points of Store is ease of use. From their write-up:
We also felt that the template tags should be easy to learn and remember. For this reason, we have only 7 tags to learn, and most sites will only need to use 3-4 of these. We have also included a full set of example templates with the install, which you can use as a basis for your checkout process.
Just like with, for example, Cartthrob, Store is fully integrated into ExpressionEngine and uses Channel Entries to store your products. It also includes support for inventory management (pretty cool).
This release is a paid beta ($20) but they consider is stable and production-ready.
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