RightCart
Posted by David Harris Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:30:00 GMT
Today, a break from the Fictiverse series so I can blog about possibly my favorite Rails application to date. You may notice the addition on my sidebar of a little goodie called RightCart. This little gadget is a whole hosted shopping cart made in Ruby on Rails.
Let me preface this by saying eCommerce is the bane of my existence. I have attempted the creation of several sites for “individual” sellers who had little computer experience. These were not businesses who had a certain inventory and kept great control over the entire selling process, they were just people who wanted to sell something they made or bought wholesale. Trying to find a solution for them was impossible, at best. I wound up using Comersus or similar open source carts, hardly the best solution.
Then came Shopify, possibly the easiest to use commerce software of all time, ever, also built in Ruby on Rails. And it was loved by all. Finally, a storefront that was not difficult and even dummies could operate it. Yet, it was still overkill for the person wanting to sell only ten items or so, but by far the easiest to use. Judging from the technological progression of shopping carts, I figured it’d be a decade before anything truly perfect came out.
Then came RightCart. I’m not about to claim it’s perfect at all, but it’s leaps and bounds forward for the personal merchant who does not want to bother with merchant accounts or integrating Paypal or any of that nonsense, but wants to make some quick cash for some merchandise. Perfect for the people I’ve made individual stores for in the past. Perfect for even the small business! Probably not perfect for a Wal-Mart or Target. :)
The concept is simple. You create an account at RightCart using just an email. It then gives you a 3-liner code to put on your website. The next step shows you a summary page, where you can create items to sell, or find existing items to sell from their catalog of existing items. Visitors to your site use the cart as if it were integrated into your own page, though behind the scenes some very simple but powerful and secure AJAX is being used to add items to the cart. Checkout happens on the cart itself, so the user never needs to leave your site.
It’s actually brilliant. It’s a storefront hosted elsewhere, but you do not have to create dirty templates to match your site, the user doesn’t know he’s left your page, and you don’t have to add any code but the three lines! They simply take a 1% cut off any money you make, and they give you 1% of any items you sell that are not your own (i.e. from the catalog). A 1% cut is amazing for something hosted elsewhere, even better than having your own merchant account with Visa. Even better, your item can gain exposure from other places outside your site if people wish to include it.
While it’s great, it’s not perfect. It is oh so close, though. The amount of screen real estate is horrible. They include two paragraphs of text to explain the cart, which results in almost an entire google skyscraper ad being taken. In fact, it pushes my own ad bar even farther down because the cart needs to be up above where people can interact easily, which will probably cut my ad revenue quite a bit. They could have easily opted for a small ”?” link at the bottom (perhaps after the “Shopping 2.0” text) that a user could click on and it would scroll the current text down for them to see. This would result in a much improved space footprint and still allow them some advertising to get people involved in their product. Don’t get me wrong, I fully support their need to initially get the product attention, but I’m afraid the ton of text will turn a lot of designers off the product, because it really does detract from the whole site (everything you add takes something away from the site as a whole).
Speaking for the text, whatever font is being used bleeds like crazy at least on my monitor. It appears like an old JPG that has been through several enlargements of smaller text. I really wish they would use a cleaner small font for that too, if they aren’t going to hide the text.
In the empty state, the cart is much too large. It says both “this cart is empty” and has a big picture of a Zero for items. One needs to go for an empty cart. I’d also get rid of the “title bar” at the top saying “RightCart Store”. My users are not going to know what that means. In fact, the word RightCart appears no less than 7 times on a single empty cart! That’s a little over the top. I would opt for a much plainer cart (no title bar, no text at the bottom), with a simple footer bar with a “powered by (RightCart logo)”, with the little ”?” link that expands the cart to display the help text. This would create a slick cart with a much better branding scheme than the current layout.
I’ve also encountered a few Internal Server 500 errors, and a few Rails errors due to a nil object. I’d be a hypocrite if I complained about those, however, because my apps have 500s and nil errors popping up everywhere usually. :) However, the nil errors can be solved by checking for it and handling, and the 500 errors can normally be solved with a nice stable hosting solution, but both are unfortunately a downside of Rails still. Can’t fault them too much for those.
However, those are all nitpicks from a design POV. And it’s almost a shame, because the control panel design is so brilliant. Adding an item makes you think it shouldn’t be that easy. The fact it keeps your cart over multiple webpages is awesome. The fact it’s so easy that a web novice could use it is awesome. As someone who has bore the brunt of many novices trying to get an online store up and running, I do appreciate this product.
I’m not sure yet how I will use it, but if you wish to purchase my eternal love and admiration (and see how this baby works), you may click here:
... well, actually I cannot get the “item code” link to work, so I can’t offer you my eternal love and appreciation yet. Check back later. I guess there’s another bad error. :)
EDIT 06/06/06: I emailed the RightCart support team, and they are great about responding quickly too! They quickly fixed the problem with the code generation (I love the speed RoR allows), and explained I only saw the Rails error page because my IP was in the same block as one of their devs. Ha, small world. :) Anyway, for those who wish to purchase my eternal love and devotion AND test out RightCart simultaneously, 
