Noodlings

In my recent quest to deal with some long needed “home improvement,” I’ve just rolled out my own store based on PotionStore. For those that don’t know, PotionStore is an open-source store implementation done by Andy Kim. It’s used by PotionFactory, of course, as well as a few other shops.

Until now, I’ve been using Kagi for all my payment processing. Kagi is great for someone starting out as they provide the store, deal with taxes and can even provide a license number generator. I think when you are doing your first release, outsourcing the commerce side to someone else can save a good deal of time.

So why am I switching off Kagi? Mainly much lower commissions on each transaction and more control over the store itself. I was finding that the commissions were adding up to significant money as my volume rose and there were certain features I wanted to add that I couldn’t. On top of that, there was a bit of confusion regarding having customers dealing with a 3rd party.

Unfortunately, now with my own store, I am going to have to charge sales tax to New York residents. One of the downsides to living in the same state as me. Trust me, I’m not looking forward to doing the tedious sales tax filings.

Using PotionStore has been great. The integration took a bit longer as I had to learn Ruby on Rails at the same time (more on this possibly in a future post). I also had to change the code a bit for certain requirements I had (sales tax, license files, family packs, etc.). My thanks to Andy for sharing his code. I hope to see other devs pick it up and maybe even contribute to it. Oh, and a thanks to Gus Mueller for letting me crib some Javascript from his store.

The result of all this is a store which I hope looks nicer and has a more streamlined flow. I’ve added the ability to download your licenses immediately as well. You’ll still get them emailed to you but this way, you’ll get instant satisfaction coupled with some level of redundancy.

So, give it a spin. Maybe even buy something :). If anything goes wrong, or even if everything goes right, I’d love to hear about it.