RightCart II and an apology
Posted by David Harris Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:44:40 GMT
Ok, so first of all I’m sorry I dropped the ball on the Fictiverse series. It was probably a bad idea to start those at the same time as my job was picking up AND I was working on my own Rails apps. Hopefully I can get back into those in the next month.
Currently, I’m knee-deep in Rails junk, and realizing that the shiny goodness of Rails goes away when you get farther into application development. However, that’s where the clever right-brained Ruby language picks up and leaves you able to program without getting burned out. However, having a 40-hr/week job using C# plus trying to develop in Rails at home gets a little tiring, and it’s taking me a lot of effort to complete my first app.
However, much of my pain may be alleviated thanks to the guys at RightCart. I recently received an email asking for feedback on the cart. Now, as cool as the app was, I didn’t have much use for it. I have no products to sell or ship, and even with the latest improvement to allow digital content purchasing (like ebooks or mp3s) I had little use. I don’t sell things off my blogs, except if you want to buy my eternal love and gratitude, linked on the previous post. :)
But, while doing my own apps and some for a friend, I ran into a real problem… how do I actually accept money for this? Now, I know the basics, having set up shopping cart systems for people using open source stuff like Comersus or such. I know about merchant accounts, etc., but my real problem is that I didn’t want to spend time to find the perfect payment gateway that was easy to use but also allowed recurring payments (for monthly subscription models), etc.
How nice would it be just to drop in two lines of code, and have a cart that automatically handled your subscriptions? I’ll tell you: it’d be awesome. I was looking to use Google Payment (because let’s face it, if they wanted to buy me out I’d flip it in a heartbeat, and they’d have an easier time with it). In fact, I was set on making a whole Rails plugin just to handle this, so other people could have less pain. Programming a cart is not really fun, and I’d rather be focusing my efforts on my application, not how I get the few bucks I gain from it.
So when RightCart requested feedback, I probably annoyed them with two incredibly-long emails. After all, subscriptions are just products I can set up in my right cart, and now they even allow recurring payments! However, there is no pingback to me when an order is made, thus I cannot update my database to allow the user a subscription. So I emailed them my suggestions, as newbie as they might seem, basically requesting that I provide a server address they can ping with an order number, such as http://application.net/orders/10200394. I then take that number, check the RightCart xml feed, and update the order as appropriate. And with the new ability to include “special information”, I can capture the “add to cart” click, record the user’s information, create a hash in the DB, and then check the order information against those hashes. Basically, everything I need with one simple mod, and plus it allows for power users to ping their own website so they can use a custom order/inventory system.
Now, I’m not saying it will always work for me. If an application grows to gargantuan sizes, I might consider writing a custom cart/checkout and get a real merchant account. But at 1% cost with RightCart, you can’t beat that. In fact I don’t know how they do it for that cheap. It’s absolutely perfect for small starter sites. How many out there have spent about half the total development time handling how to get money? How much time would RightCart save us by handling that for us? Plus, it abstracts that part from my application, and frees me from the worry I’ve implemented something that could potentially screw with my users? Or worse, with my income?
I’d like to thank Ryan Garver, CTO of RightCart for taking the time to listen and respond to my needs, and I fully support the company, and can’t wait to use them for all my applications! They have an incredibly responsive team, and I wish them the best. I hope the mods I suggested can propel them even further. After all, they are about to make my life incredibly easier, so why would I not promote them to my best? And for you developers out there, check the app out, it will save you much time and heartache. :)
