Open Bitcoin Store: Free bitcoin online stores

[aantonop]

I'm sure many people have products and services they'd like to sell, but do not know how to set up a store. Easy solutions like Shopify are difficult to use with bitcoin. To solve this problem, I am launching:

Open Bitcoin Store

The idea is simple:

Person has an idea to sell a product to make bitcoin, but no store or technical experience.  They visit OpenBitcoinStore, pick a name for a store and... boom. They get a free, pre-configured store, ready to accept bitcoin payments and sell products.


The prototype technology is ready and tested for one of my own projects. For the techies, the setup is:

Wordpress with plugins, with a buildpack for Heroku hosting, ecwid hosted commerce cart, bitpay merchant account.

The rest is mostly glue. I want to build a front-end to heroku-drop new stores into production.


License: Everything in this project will be open. Code, process, scripts, website, documentation.
Goal: Enable a brand new bitcoin user to open a store and sell in bitcoin, within a day, following simple web based instructions.

Seeking: Feedback, help, design, ideas, code, beta testers (wanna sell something, no cost to try?)
Specific Skills I need help with: Wordpress, WP themes.

Note: I'm out of bounties for this one, sorry. Wish I could afford more. I'm putting in most of the infrastructure work, if someone want to donate a bounty towards others' work, not mine.

UPDATE: License detail - Code BSD 2-clause. Web/text/graphics - CC-BY-SA.

UPDATE: Repository: https://github.com/openbitcoinstore/openbitcoinstore

UPDATE3: Repo moved to its own "openbitcoinstore" organization, from my private account

UPDATE4: Beta testing has opened and 4 stores are in progress... More news soon.

[1713284339]

1713284339

[1713284339]

1713284339

[1713284339]

1713284339

[emorydunn]

A new (better?) Bitcoin shopping cart is always welcome. My current one is kind of a nightmare to manage. If/ when you get something ready I'd love to help test. I'd also be more than happy to help out with the planning to make sure it's both easy and feature rich for merchants and customers.

[aantonop]

A new (better?) Bitcoin shopping cart is always welcome. My current one is kind of a nightmare to manage. If/ when you get something ready I'd love to help test. I'd also be more than happy to help out with the planning to make sure it's both easy and feature rich for merchants and customers.

What is your current cart?

[Xenland]

I did build a WYSIWG you editor for the CheaperInBitcoins/Bitcoinmall store but the merchant seeking department in charge couldn't find any "merchants". The editor was similar to the MySpace editor (now) and allowed for something that I called "dynamic bbcode" you could type things like [product_listing category=5] and your css would be applied to the products that were dynamically queried from that category, it would even "paginate" on its own intelligently it took about 6 months of daily work (still have the code) but nobody cared with out any merchants list. Use this knowledge to help your store idea

[aantonop]

Have any of you checked out ECWID? (Fork from old X-Cart devs)

It's completely free, very fast Javascript cart with a ton of features. It does categories, products, shipping calcs, tax, customers, orders, bitpay, API and SEO. Customizable via CSS easily, but pretty slick out of the box.

http://www.ecwid.com/

The basic build I've got going is a git repo which contains a buildpack for Wordpress on Heroku (free hosting), plugins and themes for ecwid, a plugin and custom code for bitpay merchant integration on ecwid, etc.

The process for a new OpenBitcoinStore owner would be somewhat like this:

- Sign up for a free cart on ecwid
- Sign up for a free hosting account on Heroku
- Sign up for a merchant account with bitpay
- Buy a domain (optional, or use a free subdomain of openbitcoinstore - I'll offer that)
- Select a store name
- Enter all the info from above into a form - Click build store (this part is currently "edit a bunch of files, git commit, git push heroku")
- Log on to ecwid and add products, pictures, categories, prices, shipping etc.
- Log on to your new store and add content via Wordpress (optional, FAQ, contact form etc.)
- Hit "Open" on ecwid and your store is ready to sell.
- Tell the world and watch the BTC roll in (or not, and all you've risked is one hour of your life and no money).

[emorydunn]

A new (better?) Bitcoin shopping cart is always welcome. My current one is kind of a nightmare to manage. If/ when you get something ready I'd love to help test. I'd also be more than happy to help out with the planning to make sure it's both easy and feature rich for merchants and customers.

What is your current cart?

Currently I use OpenCart and the BitPay plugin. It's just a little bit too "much", if you know what I mean. There are too many options and things that I really don't need and tend to just gum up the works.

[aantonop]

Can you please take a look at the demo here: http://www.ecwid.com/demo-frontend.html

You can see both customer and store-owner views.

How does that compare? More or less complex that OpenCart?

[emorydunn]

Can you please take a look at the demo here: http://www.ecwid.com/demo-frontend.html

You can see both customer and store-owner views.

How does that compare? More or less complex that OpenCart?

It does look a little bit less complex than OpenCart. I'd have to actually set up a store with their system to really know for sure, but at least from the screen shots of the admin pages it looks better.

[aantonop]

Ok, then

Would you like to be a beta tester in setting up a new store with ECWID+WP+Bitpay+Heroku?

It will be about two weeks before I'm ready to launch a beta site.

[emorydunn]

Ok, then

Would you like to be a beta tester in setting up a new store with ECWID+WP+Bitpay+Heroku?

It will be about two weeks before I'm ready to launch a beta site.

I'd be more than happy to. Let me know what I need to do.

[aantonop]

Well, the first thing you can do is to build a little test version of your shop inside ecwid:

I'll document these steps more thoroughly, as part of the new shop owner manual, but in the meantime, you can try them and let me know if any parts are difficult or need more documentation.

The best part of this, is that when you do a beta, you link it to *this* store on ecwid. So any work you do, will be available as your store when we create a hosted instance. Basically, all your work will show up, so you can actually put in the real information and it won't be wasted work.

a) Setup a free account with ecwid.com  (it's not a demo, it's a working shop for up to 10 products.

Probably the easiest is to use an existing account ID, such as a Google, Paypal, etc. It will not re-use or "learn" your password for these services, it will simply ask them to identify you.

Go here: https://my.ecwid.com/cp/

 
b) Create a few categories, by visiting the Catalog/Categories section. Your store comes with sample categories, you can delete those.

c) Create some products, by visiting the Catalog/Products section.

d) Check out your demo site at, by clicking on the "Visit Store Front" on the side.

[emorydunn]

Well, the first thing you can do is to build a little test version of your shop inside ecwid:

I'll document these steps more thoroughly, as part of the new shop owner manual, but in the meantime, you can try them and let me know if any parts are difficult or need more documentation.

The best part of this, is that when you do a beta, you link it to *this* store on ecwid. So any work you do, will be available as your store when we create a hosted instance. Basically, all your work will show up, so you can actually put in the real information and it won't be wasted work.

a) Setup a free account with ecwid.com  (it's not a demo, it's a working shop for up to 10 products.

Probably the easiest is to use an existing account ID, such as a Google, Paypal, etc. It will not re-use or "learn" your password for these services, it will simply ask them to identify you.

Go here: https://my.ecwid.com/cp/

 
b) Create a few categories, by visiting the Catalog/Categories section. Your store comes with sample categories, you can delete those.

c) Create some products, by visiting the Catalog/Products section.

d) Check out your demo site at, by clicking on the "Visit Store Front" on the side.

Easy enough. I'll work on it tomorrow.

EDIT: I've got a very pared down version of my store set up.

[aantonop]

Easy enough. I'll work on it tomorrow.

EDIT: I've got a very pared down version of my store set up.

I have tested three store products now and they all work, with varying levels of success:

a) Wordpress + Wordpress E-Commerce + Bitpay (fiat prices or bitcoin prices, bitcoin payment)
b) Wordpress + Woocommerce + Bitpay (fiat prices or bitcoin prices, bitcoin payment)
c) Wordpress + ECWID + Bitpay  (fiat prices, bitcoin payment).

I have deployed a test store for emorydunn (link in private message). Anyone else want to try one of the above stores, send me a PM and I will deploy it for you. They take about 1 minute to deploy.

[bitchef]

I can help with Wordpress if you need something.

I don't care about Heroku at all, would rather have a deployment system that works with better clouds or a plain-old VPS.

[aantonop]

I will definitely need some WordPress help.

Heroku is free, so alternative would have to also be free. The whole package (WP+store+bitpay modules) will be open, so if people want to host on VPS or AWS or elsewhere, that's easy to do.

[aantonop]

READY FOR MORE BETA TESTERS!

Things are going well and we have two stores in pre-launch testing.

Who wants a FREE STORE?

The tests indicate that Woo Commerce is the favorite. I have FIVE stores ready to go for beta testers.

[Operatr]

I would kill for a good Bitcoin Wordpress shopping solution.

[aantonop]

I would kill for a good Bitcoin Wordpress shopping solution.

No need to kill. There's one available and it's entirely FREE.

Would you like a Woocommerce and bitpay enabled site turned on for you to play with?

I'll PM you a URL right away...

[marcus_of_augustus]

Interesting project.

[Aswan]

Can you store virtual goods on the Server to have them delivered automatically once payment completes?