Building the Store

A week or so ago I did a presentation for the local Philly on Rails group about how I implemented my store which sells licenses for Billable. I’ve taken the presentation and reworked it into a quick and dirty(1) screencast.

Building the Store

Topics include:

  • Reasons why and why not to build your own
  • Choosing a payment gateway
  • A review of some existing interfaces to PayPal via Ruby
  • Why I used SOAP and an overview of how to set it up
  • A walkthrough of the user experience paying with a credit card and then with a PayPal account
  • Code snippets
  • Other resources

It’s available as a QuickTime video (26MB) and since the content can work fairly well by itself a MP3 (14MB) is also available. The total length is about 40 minutes.

Relevant links:

(1): Quick and dirty, as in this isn’t based on a script like I normally do. It’s recorded as-is and does contain more “uhs” and “ums” than I’d like

Posted on: March 11, 2007 – 5:35 pm

8 Comments

  1. Chris Ryland wrote:

    Thanks, Mike! Nice job.

    One thing: I think Google Payments’ daily cap is just some theoretical limit. People have used it say that it doesn’t kick in for them.

    But I certainly agree that not having phone support is poor.

  2. JL! wrote:

    Totally sweet! Seriously, this is great. I’m going to find this all very useful pretty soon.

    Aside from that, the whole video was totally worth it if only to hear you say, “I had not used soap before, so this was a big learning curve for me.” Taken out of context, that’s comedy gold! ;-)

  3. Mike Zornek wrote:

    @Chris: Yeah, if that is the case it’s good to hear. The Google Checkout FAQ has more info. My impressions are based on an earlier version of this answer (which wasn’t as open):

    http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=25399&topic=8676

    @JL!: I’m curious as to what you’ll use this info for. And yeah … down with soap!

  4. Joe wrote:

    How about using the PayPal alternative https://www.swreg.org ? Just curious.

  5. Mike Zornek wrote:

    @Joe: I don’t have any experience with them. Sorry.

  6. Jan wrote:

    Very cool feature, thanks for putting it up!

  7. Ecologist wrote:

    Nice video and conclusions. Really awesome, thanks!

  8. Dmitry Chestnykh wrote:

    Downloading your video.

    Found out that your shopping card has an out-of-date list of countries. PayPal recently enabled some other countries, for example, Russia ;)

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