[ANN]: buy handmade facemasks, pouches, scarf's with bitcoin

[mocacinno]

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

[examplens]

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



note: I am cut out this image, although it is posted publicly. Direct link to his tweet is posted

[slaman29]

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?

[mocacinno]

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:

• About the rough setup: yeah... It's basic. We opted for a default theme, no customisation and as little plugins as humanly possible. We opted for this because we wanted to have as little attack vectors as possible (hence keeping with custom themes and only a few plugins) and because the owner doesn't want to spend to much money in this phase of the project. I'll be tweaking everything a little bit more, and go over all settings with the owner later this week, but it'll probably stay a bit rough untill the onwer sees some revenue rolling in. (i know, you have to spend some money to make money, but this isn't my budget)
• About covid + bitcoin: I do like the idear of having custom bitcoin (or bitcointalk) masks. I had a talk with the owner, and there's an option to do this. However, custom printed fabric is quite expensive, and the owner is afraid of ordering custom fabric, putting in time to make these masks, then not selling a single one due to bitcoin not being "mainstream". However, i was allowed to organise a group buy, if i manage to get 10 pre-orders, the owner will buy the custom fabric and produce such masks... I'll probably be testing the waters later this week/next week
• About setting up similar stores: this has little to do with this particular store... I can certainly do this, but the pricerange may vary depending on what needs to be done. In this particular case i had to hold the owner's hand the whole way (and i had to do a lot of stuff by myself aswell). This includes helping with adding A, MX and TXT dns records, setting up a clean VPS, installing a LAMP stack, getting certbot to work, installing wordpress, installing woocommerce, getting everything to work together, getting postfix running, getting a paypal professional account, getting the payment methods setup, helping with social media accounts, helping with google and bing adwords. I didn't record my time, but it probably took me > 15 hours to set everything up. I usually ask $25/hr, so in this case this would have been a >$300 job... But like i said: it all depends on what's been asked from me. I recon i can get the job done in a couple of hours if somebody had a shared hosting account with a domain, ssl certificate and mail all setup, and already had a paypal account and no need for social media and adwords help...

EDIT: Almost forgot, the owner gave me a coupon code  

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!

[buwaytress]

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.

[mocacinno]

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

[buwaytress]

@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.

[mocacinno]

update(s)

• After buwaytress's feedback I changed the way the coupon codes work, the coupon "bitcointalk2020" should work fine now (it's the best coupon currently available)
• I messed around with the google translate plugin, updated it a bit, tweaked it a bit, but there are still cases in which i can simulate buwaytress's "bug-report". I guess i'll have to install a manual translation plugin, but the owner asked me to postpone this for a couple more weeks untill there's more time (manual translations are time-consuming)
• After buwaytress's feedback I changed the wording on the crypto payment options to a (hopefully) less confusing phrasing

[pugman]

Okay I love this website, its pretty cute.

The google plugin works, at least for me. Proof:

Before:


After:

Also, what if you make the default language English instead of dutch, in the small dropdown list option?


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!

[mocacinno]

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 

[xenon131]

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.

[tbterryboy]

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 

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?

[mocacinno]

--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--
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?

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).


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).