Title: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on July 30, 2020, 02:05:32 PM A friend of mine setup a small home-business selling handmade facemasks, pouches to store facemasks during the day, devices to keep wasps out of your beer, baby clothes, scarfs,... and is currently in the process of making all legal arrangements.
I was asked to help setup a webshop... Just wordpress and woocommerce with some plugins. I know this person from the crypto community, so offcourse bitcoin payments are accepted... Sadly, the world isn't ready for a crypto-only shop, so next to crypto, also paypal, wire transfer and CC's via paypal are accepted (the owner is in the process of getting accepted with more payment providers). Bitcoin payments happen trough my btcpay server, either on-chain or via the lightning network! (on-chain addresses get derived from an xpub given by the owner, offchain payments go to me, and i'll foreward an equal amount of BTC to the owner). Since my btcpay server is a tad bit slow, i also used the "Nomiddleman Crypto Payments" plugin, which derives legacy addresses from an xpub and shows the QR code... This is basically a failover when the connection to my server times out. Like i said, it's a pre-release... It's in dutch, but the automatic google translate menu can be found in the right bottom corner. I'm not the owner, but the real owner does not visit bitcointalk anymore and has no intention of coming back in the near future, so you can look at me as this store's representative. If you have problems with this store: send them to me and i'll foreward them to the owner (usually within 1 or 2 days...). I'll ask the owner for some bitcointalk-only discount codes and post them (if I get my hands on them) Here it is: https://www.merel.mobi Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: examplens on August 07, 2020, 09:25:37 PM this shop is just roughly set up, there you have a lot of work. but it is a good initiative.
I have one suggestion to you and your friend based on COVID mask + bitcoin business. I like a mask from this guy, and I would probably buy it: https://twitter.com/alexmatanovic/status/1291345648978141185?s=20 https://i.ibb.co/fCj3RjF/image.png (https://ibb.co/gDk01k9) note: I am cut out this image, although it is posted publicly. Direct link to his tweet is posted Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: slaman29 on August 08, 2020, 07:02:47 PM Maybe this can be the start of a list of selfmade stores that will use bitcoin as method of payment. I know many people wish they had it but most are either manual payment confirm or using some other centralized one to settle in fiat so I laud all these good efforts! How much would you charge for setting up a similar store or at least maybe do a tutorial that works for dummies?:)
Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on August 10, 2020, 01:40:02 PM I had a talk with the owner today, and also added the feedback i got from examplens and slaman29. I'll try to answer all topics:
EDIT: Almost forgot, the owner gave me a coupon code ;D bitcointalk2020 redeemable on https://www.merel.mobi 12% discount if you spend more than 10€, valid untill december 2020, not cumumlative with other coupon codes... But the owner gives 5% off if you pay with crypto and there's an introduction code for 10% off, so this code is better than the other ones. One sidenote tough: this code should only be used when you pay with crypto... Don't use it if you're going to pay with paypal! Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: buwaytress on August 13, 2020, 06:09:00 AM Hey OP. Went to buy a couple of items from the store, think I just got something sold out;)
Some feedback, in chronology: 1. Some of country dropdown options don't work even if I changed language to English. Had to type the country name in Dutch to find my location. Also to note in Chrome, if Google auto translates the page, some of the form options won't function as normal. 2. Wasn't clear for me about the Bitcoin options. Perhaps it should list just the primary Bitcoin option, and a secondary option that informs this will be a manual payment. I tried the one that says "Bitcoin or Litecoin" as I assumed the first option was Bitcoin on LN, which I'm not super confident about trying just yet =) 3. 1 problem trying to pay, when clicking Place an Order button, the website seems to try to load something at the bottom in an endless loop, and then I realised the error was from the coupon you supplied (error message was "discount code already used"). So I just deleted the code and it gave me just the 5% off (from using BTC I guess). 4. Order confirmed page: just shows me the BTC address, so I did a manual payment. Apart from above feedback, overall experience was good, I actually prefer shopping sites that are stripped clean so they're fast. Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on August 13, 2020, 07:50:56 AM Hey OP. Went to buy a couple of items from the store, think I just got something sold out;) Some feedback, in chronology: 1. Some of country dropdown options don't work even if I changed language to English. Had to type the country name in Dutch to find my location. Also to note in Chrome, if Google auto translates the page, some of the form options won't function as normal. 2. Wasn't clear for me about the Bitcoin options. Perhaps it should list just the primary Bitcoin option, and a secondary option that informs this will be a manual payment. I tried the one that says "Bitcoin or Litecoin" as I assumed the first option was Bitcoin on LN, which I'm not super confident about trying just yet =) 3. 1 problem trying to pay, when clicking Place an Order button, the website seems to try to load something at the bottom in an endless loop, and then I realised the error was from the coupon you supplied (error message was "discount code already used"). So I just deleted the code and it gave me just the 5% off (from using BTC I guess). 4. Order confirmed page: just shows me the BTC address, so I did a manual payment. Apart from above feedback, overall experience was good, I actually prefer shopping sites that are stripped clean so they're fast. @buwaytress: i'm not the owner of the shop, but i was allowed to keep an admin account, so i looked it up, and it seems the owner has already started processing your order :) As for the feedback: thank you, all feedback is defenately appreciated. It's the first time i help setup a webshop, so there'll defenately be some things i overlooked. In this specific case: 1) languages are difficult :-[. I started out with a plugin that allowed you to translate wordpress manually. But the owner lives in Belgium, so the text should have been translated from Dutch (the owner's language) to French and German (the other 2 languages in Belgium) and to English... And even then most of the world would be "forgotten". So we opted to use google's official translation plugin. I'm sad to hear it doesn't work 100%, so i'll be trying to see if i can tweak this plugin, or if there's a better one available next week. 2) I might have worded things a bit wrong. The first option (Bitcoin & LN) is basically using my btcpayserver as a backend. It allows on-chain (normal) bitcoin payments aswell as offchain (lightning) payments. The on-chain payments go to addresses derived from an xpub delivered to me by the owner, the off-chain payments actually go to me, and i foreward the money to the owner afterwards. But, btcpayserver is written in .net, and it's sloooooow... That's why i opted for a second option, which is a manual payment gateway. I do see the order was marked as being payed, so everything is ok :) 3) Sorry. I'll talk to the owner and see if there was a mistake... Maybe the discount code was single use or something... I'll talk to the owner and see if we can do a small refund for 10% of the total value, or if you're interested in the future group-buy give you a hefty discount to make up for your troubles. 4) Yup, that's because this was basically the "fallback" method. It's my fault tough, i should have worded things a bit better so it was clearer from the start. But the payment got trough perfectly fine :) Title: Re: pre-[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: buwaytress on August 13, 2020, 09:21:47 AM @moca thanks for your reply and no worries! I knew everything went well in the end, I only posted feedback to help you improve the experience for others, which otherwise might prevent them from completing the purchase!
Don't worry about the refund or code, I think it's fair price for handmade items. Just wanted to pass on the error. I really enjoy being able to spend bitcoin (and BTCPayServer too, although I chose the wrong option!), and if I'd seen this site before lockdown and all), I'd have bought a few more, but these now are just spares. Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on August 21, 2020, 03:07:50 PM update(s)
Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: pugman on August 21, 2020, 04:50:32 PM Okay I love this website, its pretty cute.
The google plugin works, at least for me. Proof: Before: https://i.imgur.com/LPRExND.png After: https://i.imgur.com/uHy2Qon.png Also, what if you make the default language English instead of dutch, in the small dropdown list option? https://i.imgur.com/A7BQdeM.png I just realized, the google plugin only works in one page, it goes back to dutch again. Also, make the cart auto update, when people change the quantity. Alsooo, when people choose to add a product to cart, keep an option for quantity, it helps user experience. The products are very very cute though. I really like it. If this site is too much of a work, try selling in some famous merch stores, you guys will get better sales and a bigger audience. Goodluck! Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on September 14, 2020, 11:05:21 AM update:
Thanks to the feedback i received on bitcointalk, i did convince the own to do a manual translation using a completely different plugin... As for now, most of the site is translated by me or the owner (neither of us is a native speaker tough, if you find spelling errors, don't hesitate to give a shout-out). I'm still figuring out some of the other feedback i got... The site uses wordpress+woocommerce, and some of the features are a bit "harder" to do (for example, showing a quantity selection outside of the cart). It's a work in progress ;D Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: xenon131 on October 31, 2020, 10:10:37 AM I wear similar homemade mask bought from different people. A few of them have exhaled valve and I must say such kind of masks is more comfortable to me as they barely get wet inside and they can be worn much longer. Probably you could advice your friend to think him about embedding such valves into his masks. Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: tbterryboy on November 02, 2020, 04:35:43 PM update: Looks like the translation is not finished and added to the website as, because when I clicked English from the language menu, it gave a 500 Internal Server Error. So, I managed to translate it using google translation. Thanks to the feedback i received on bitcointalk, i did convince the own to do a manual translation using a completely different plugin... As for now, most of the site is translated by me or the owner (neither of us is a native speaker tough, if you find spelling errors, don't hesitate to give a shout-out). I'm still figuring out some of the other feedback i got... The site uses wordpress+woocommerce, and some of the features are a bit "harder" to do (for example, showing a quantity selection outside of the cart). It's a work in progress ;D The website looks like a simple blog instead of an e-commerce shop. You might consider using shopify. Shopify gives better themes and features than woocommerce. and is shipping available for worldwide? Title: Re: [ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin Post by: mocacinno on November 03, 2020, 07:44:33 AM --snip-- I wear similar homemade mask bought from different people. A few of them have exhaled valve and I must say such kind of masks is more comfortable to me as they barely get wet inside and they can be worn much longer. Probably you could advice your friend to think him about embedding such valves into his masks. thanks for the tip, i'll bring it to the owner's attention :) --snip-- Thank you VERY much for bringing this to my attention!!! An upgrade of the theme broke the translatepress setup and resulted in a 500-error. Since i only checked the dutch pages after upgrading i completely missed this issue. I hope i fixed it now... That being said: the translation is always a work in progress i'm afraid. The owner sees dutch-speaking countries as the primary target audience, so the translations get forgotten quite often. It's usually up to me to clean up the mess afterwards (in other words: quickly translate afterwards).Looks like the translation is not finished and added to the website as, because when I clicked English from the language menu, it gave a 500 Internal Server Error. So, I managed to translate it using google translation. The website looks like a simple blog instead of an e-commerce shop. You might consider using shopify. Shopify gives better themes and features than woocommerce. and is shipping available for worldwide? About the look of the website: it's true that it's based on wordpress, but this was chosen this way because the owner had a little bit of wordpress experience AND because the owner also makes blogposts using the same platform. Using 2 platforms wasn't a good choice in this specific situation. As for the shipping: yes, it should be available worldwide, but i don't think a lot of sales were made outside the benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) yet... I'd have to inquire with the owner to verify, but i do have access to previous sales, and most of them were "local" (dutch-speaking regions). |