So I have been thinking a lot lately about e-commerce and related shopping cart products. While working with products like bigcartel.com, Spree, Cubecart and others I have realized there is need to be filled. I see lots of people coming to my website and I have received emails of people looking for help with Spree, bigcartel, analytics and more.

I have several ideas for products that I know would sell upwards of $100 but I have decided I would rather support my readers with a free giveaway.

Here's what I need from you

If you found this blog because of your interest in e-commerce solutions or trouble working with an existing product and you need further help I would appreciate if you would take just 3 minutes to fill out a quick survey.

Just provide me some of your thoughts and answers to questions as simple as, What *free* product would you like for me to create for you?

If you are able to take the time to fill out this quick survey, and provide me with your email address, I will make sure that when product is ready you will get a copy without having to pull out your credit card.

Thank you so much for reading my blog.

Survey Link

--Matt

The tools for your muse

Tim mentions many great tools to get your muse up and running. At Tonka Park we use many of this such as wordpress, wufoo, skype, google adwords and analytics and more that he doesn't mention. I feel that we have a good handle on these tools and have made them work for different projects.

So that brings us to a new service from Tonka Park. Test, Rollout and Automation.

Test, Rollout and Automation

4 hour work week introduces many of the concepts but not all readers are going to be familiar or even comfortable with these tools. Perhaps you have already outsourced your life and you have another muse but you don't want to go through the test, rollout and automation process by yourself. This is where Tonka Park will step in.

Outsource your muse

If you have a great business product idea and don't have the time or desire to work on websites, contact forms, pay-per-click advertising or online shopping carts, then you need to contact us today, hello@tonkapark.com or fill out the form on on our homepage.

Find out more about our plans to help you test, rollout and automate your muse.

Etsy - is handmade

If you are making something by hand or selling products used for other crafts or handmade custom goods start with Etsy. The community there is a great starting point for almost all amateur and professional crafters.

The pros of Etsy are the community, especially the handpicked item feature and the search built in that helps shoppers find items regardless of the store. For me the cons are the small fees, they can add up, the lack of flexibility in branding your shop and integrating with your existing site.

Big Cartel

If you aren't selling handmade items then Etsy is not the place for you. They won't even let you in the door. That is where Big Cartel comes in to the conversation. Featured as the 'Simple Store for DIY Rockstars', Big Cartel offers an inexpensive solution to getting a store up and running with little to no technical knowledge needed.

The pricing plans are easy to follow and include a free account. The store and product setup is dead simple, just try it out with the free account. The low cost, even for paid plans, is great for a small business, band or creative artist selling a limited number of items. Finally you can use your own domain name and custom pages with Big Cartel to make your site unique and to match your brand or style.

Big Cartel runs into problems for those businesses selling more than 100 unique products or needing special handling or setup for different product types. For t-shirts the setup works great, but if you have a highly customizable product you might find yourself struggling to setup the options. If you find these to be a problem you will need to move up a level product.

Shopify

Several years back this was the first shopping cart solution I looked into. It was when the Ruby on Rails community was booming. Shopify was built on ruby on rails and the team continues to be actively contributing to some open source projects based on the code from their service.

The pricing plans start where Big Cartel leaves off. Shopify has grown into a great resource for those bigger stores or higher ticket items.  The store allows for everything Big Cartel does plus much more. Integration with shipping and analytics, and a great theme engine. They have even recently released the appstore for Shopify that allows developers to sell their custom plugins that integrate 3rd party apps with the store for shipping, accounting or even affiliate marketing. There is a lot to be seen with Shopify if you are a growing store and don't want to worry about the technical side of hosting a shopping cart.

Spree

If you are finding that the monthly fees or the limits of using a hosted shopping cart are keeping your online store from succeeding there are options such as Spree, an open source e-commerce platform. Spree is a great tool built using some of the payment gateway code from Shopify.

Spree is a flexible tool that can be hosted on your own servers and branded any way you like. There is an active development team and community to offer support. I have contributed some open source extensions to spree community (Wordsmith and heroku).

You can see a Spree Demo here and checkout the showcase of popular spree based sites.

Final Thoughts

Each of the solutions above have strong points but they all depend on your product and business model. Take some time to review the pricing plans and the features offered by each of the big names in online shopping carts before you make a decision about setting up an online shop.

Getting the shop setup is only step one. Step two involves great internet marketing and word of mouth to get those shoppers to your store.  Tonka Park can help you with both steps if you are in need. We can help find the right online shopping cart solution as well as begin your next internet marketing campaign to attract customers to buy your product. Send hello@tonkapark.com an email today.

You can blog, create static pages, manage comments with the popular comment service from Disqus. Each page or post can have a unique permalink, meta keywords and descriptions and posts can have tags. Post and page formating is accomplished using RedCloth and the textile formatting syntax.

Disqus was chosen as the commenting solution to basically outsource the effort in dealing with moderation and spam control of comments. Also with the move towards more social sites this provides an option to take advantage of existing systems.

Check out the github repository for more information on this blogging and cms solution for Spree.

The Pages functionality is a spin-off of an existing extension by Peter Berkenbosch. The implementation is different in database design and administration but the display method is the same. If you don't need blogging or comments I suggest his extension.

What the future holds

Wordsmith is not perfectly polished and is still an infant. While we are at version 2.0 that is not an indication of the maturity of the project. With the change to Disqus and the addition of pages I simple jumped to version 2.0 to signify the big additions.

The next set of features is likely to contain link or blogroll functionality and perhaps a way to provide custom templates for different pages.

In general I am using WordPress as a guide to make sure that the most basic blog features are covered for a basic blogger while giving the developers freedom to customize their Spree implementation and include these widely used features without having to integrate multiple applications.

Feel free to fork the project and contribute your ideas on github.

Other helpful projects and links

Ruby Disqus Gem - http://github.com/norman/disqus/

Static-Content extension - http://peterberkenbosch.github.com/spree-static-content/

Disqus Comments - http://disqus.com/

Spree e-commerce - http://spreecommerce.com

Disqus allows you to off load the coding and maintenance of comments and spam. Users can login with their social network accounts, such as twitter or facebook. The comments then can be integrated into the social network of those leaving comments. It seems to be working for many sites out there, I am just not sure it is for this project.

The project includes a user registration for purchases. I was hoping to eventually integrate the comment functionality from the blog posts to the reviews and utilize the existing user authentication system. Now perhaps I will rethink that and allow reviews or comments on the products via the disqus comment system.

For an example of Disqus in action head over to the Brand5 blog.

If you are using ruby on rails I did come across a gem on github to make disqus integration simple.

Any thoughts about using Disqus in an application that has a user system integrated?