Initial development of the e-commerce feature was done under a small sponsorship from BrainBeacon in early 2007. Unfortunately BrainBeacon went out of business before ever using the e-commerce feature and development slowed to a halt due to lack of funding to complete it.
In May of 2008 I decided to change my business model and try to sell some premium features for mojoPortal rather than focusing mainly on consulting. Since then renewed effort has gone into the WebStore ecommerce feature to get it ready to sell my own download products. Currently the WebStore is feature complete enough to sell a few download products but still lacks a lot of needed features for general ecommerce use. The Store is open on this site using MySql. You may also try and use the WebStore yourself but please consider it experimental. It is still in its early stages of development and it does not yet have a proven track record in production use. I am beginning to sell a few products and a few people have bought me a beer in the store on this site, so it is getting some production use. I hope that by using it myself on this site it will mature and evolve into a great general purpose ecommerce solution as I will be working on improvements to meet my needs.
Current Functionality
You can can Buy Me A Beer or purchase add on products for your mojoPortal site in our store, or try out the current functionality at http://storedemo.mojoportal.com using a fake credit card and processing through a test server.
Currently only selling download products is supported. We do not yet have shipping cost calculation or fulfillment tracking for shipped products.
Only MS SQL and MySql are currently supported, other data layers will be implemented once the schema is stabilized.
Currently for the customer facing side there is just a simple Product List and an optional "Current Specials" list with links to add products to the cart. There is a product details page where more information about products can be shown.
The current functionality that is already built includes the ability to configure products, offers, tax calculation, and fulfillment of downloadable products and several discount scenarios are supported.
It can process payments through the Authorize.NET, PlugNPay, PayPal, and Google Checkout payment gateways and customers can download immediately after purchase according to configurable download terms, i.e. how many downloads allowed, date range, etc.
Multiple stores within a site are supported but the payment gateways settings are at the site level so all stores would use the same commerce credentials in a given site.
Users can login and see their purchase history and download products for which the download ticket has not expired or been invalidated.
To Do
Shipping calculations and support for shippable product fulfillment tracking.
Product Categories and browse by category feature
Product Search - completed version 2.2.8.1
Reports - initial sales report included as of version 2.2.8.1
What else?
How To Use WebStore
You add a WebStore to a page the same as any other feature. It then exposes its administration links according to edit roles of the page or feature instance.
You have to configure ecommerce settings before you can actually process orders.
Note that the store administration allows configuring of products and offers. Products are not sold directly but through offers. Offers can contain 1 or more products. This allows bundling of products but makes configuration a little cumbersome. Ultimately I'd like to make a wizard for creating new products that will make it easy to create the product and the offer in one go for the most common scenario which is one product in the offer. Currently, in order to sell a Product you must first create the product and then create an Offer to sell it in.
A Video - Musicians Can Use mojoPortal to Sell Their mp3 Files
Last Updated 2008-12-23