Perch and e-commerce

  • Hi all,


    "I see you've redecorated..."


    We're part-way through building a new website for a client, using Runway. They have now sprung the surprise on us, that they need an e-commerce element. I am "aware" of the Shop App plugin, but we are not coders by nature and having a brief look at the documentation for Shop App, it all sounds rather manual in setting up.


    Currently, the only reason they want e-commerce is so that new "members" can pay their sign-up fee. We're not talking hundreds of products (although there are 4 or 5 levels of membership) no shipping of anything at all etc. and I'm wondering if the level of effort involved in getting (and keeping) Runway up-to-date and secure that e-commerce needs, is just excessive for the actual number of transactions we're realistically looking at.


    So... Who has experience of the Shop App and its upkeep? And might there be a much simpler solution, where the actual whole membership sign-up is done outside of Perch on an official 3rd Party platform?


    Cheers,

    m.

  • drewm

    Approved the thread.
  • I've used Shop, and once you get your head around it, it's a super simple platform. There's a lot of ways it can actually be implemented but the demo provided by Perch gives you a great way to get started.


    You could use Member Tags that are applied on purchase of a product to handle membership, where you can do conditional checks, pretty powerful!

  • I'd agree that the shop setup is fairly straight forward - and upkeep is easy. However, it might be simplest to use something like Stripe Checkout, with a select input for the type of membership required, then use the perch_member_add_tag(); function to assign that membership level to the user.


    Would that work for you? This way you'd only have to implement a payment system, rather than an entire ecommerce solution. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like any help setting this up.

  • Thanks for the replies guys (I've been away on leave since posting the question).


    It's good to hear that Shop doesn't sound overly complex... I guess my worry is that I'm coming to it from the POV of a Designer learning to code, as opposed to a Coder doing what comes naturally.


    Jack, I may well take up your offer.


    Regards,

    m.

  • Just a small note of caution. I've been a jack of all trades (and therefor master of none) in web design and development for a number of years and it did take me quite a bit longer to get my head around implementing Perch Shop than I anticipated.


    Having said that, on your first go around with it, keep your scope tight on what you need – it is very good, and eventually it will click together. Just be prepared to learn a little bit of PHP.