Need Volunteers: New Rails Shopping Cart

Greetings,

I'm a long time Java programmer and I'm considering switching my consulting business to Rails. The only shopping cart solution out there I could find is Substruct. Substruct is ok but it differs significantly from my own personal goal of creating a shopping cart that can be easily integrated into a custom website.

The goal is to create a shopping cart that could be used by experienced Rails programmers. It wouldn't do 100% of what you need but I've never seen a shopping cart that didn't need to be tweaked. So this would be something that would contain all of the basics: inventory management and organization, shopping cart and checkout process, gateway integration and reporting. It would be technically possible to run it as a standalone website but it would be pretty generic looking. The idea is that the end user would customize some of the views and styling.

I will have a very rough cut of the code in a week or so but I could obviously use some help. If we get the right people involved this will be a very useful product. Please contact me if you're interested. Please only respond if you have a serious amount of time to dedicate to this. You don't have to be a Rails guru (I'm definitely not) but significant web app experience would be helpful.

Regards,

Sean

Hi I am also creating a shoppingcart system for a client of mine with a lot of functions in it. I have just finished up the admin interface for products and all tables connected to products in one way or another.

/Andreas

Is that an offer to help?

Lets create a google doc and compare functions to see if we are heading the same path, okey?

schof wrote:

Greetings,

I'm a long time Java programmer and I'm considering switching my consulting business to Rails. The only shopping cart solution out there I could find is Substruct. Substruct is ok but it differs significantly from my own personal goal of creating a shopping cart that can be easily integrated into a custom website.

Have you checked out Shopify?

Yes a while ago. A lot of my thinking and ideas come from vpasp platform which I have used for 8 years but now it is time that tagclouds,ajax,rails and more become a part of ecommerce systems as well as social networking sites.

Thanks for the tip. I went ahead and ordered the book (and the one for Java developers while I was at it.) The gateway stuff is not a problem since I plan on using ActiveMerchant. So far, that works very well with Authorize.net (haven't tested other gateways.)

Shopify is great but last I checked only the ActiveMerchant piece was open source. They did a very nice job with it for sure. I'm looking to replicate some of that functionality but as an open source project.

Hey Schof -

Shopify is great but last I checked only the ActiveMerchant piece was open source. They did a very nice job with it for sure. I'm looking to replicate some of that functionality but as an open source project.

schof wrote:

Greetings,

I'm a long time Java programmer and I'm considering switching my consulting business to Rails. The only shopping cart solution out there I could find is Substruct. Substruct is ok but it differs significantly from my own personal goal of creating a shopping cart that can be easily integrated into a custom website.

Have you checked out Shopify?

-- Cheers, - Jacob Atzen - not related to Shopify in any way

the-soup.net is a small but growing group of railers (plus artists, biz types) that are looking to work on interesting projects like yours.

I can't guaranteee anything, but you'll reach a audience of like minded people.

disclaimer: I am most definitely associated with the-soup. mmm.

cheers, Jodi

I'd be interested in this. I actually started on building an ecommerce system a while back and just never found the time to finish it up, it's a lot of work. I spent the last 12 years working at payment gateways as a developer and product manager.

What I really want to do is create an ecommerce system with a built in payment gateway. I actually have quite a bit of code done on that part already, with working connectors to Vital and Efsnet (Firstdata). Just need to do the certifications, which I've done before several times. Right now I've been working on a recurring billing system that has a natural language interface for defining recurring billing periods.

My suggestion would be to concentrate on the basics first. Social features are great but not nearly as important as having the key features most business owners want.

Anyone up for creating a mailing list for this?

Chris

The group has just been set up (http://groups.google.com/group/ railscart). There is also a very basic wiki and some starter source code hosted by Google (Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.). So far its just me and one other developer doing some private emails about ideas but its time to take this public so we can take advantage of everyone's input.

Hope to see you there!