eCommerce on concrete5 5.7 with Snipcart
We've recently launched to the concrete5 marketplace an add-on that allows you to easily add Snipcart eCommerce functionality to your concrete5 5.7 site. See our video for how it all fits together.
What is Snipcart?
Snipcart is a third-party service that integrates with an existing website to provide a (fully responsive) shopping cart, checkout process and payment facilities. To configure Snipcart options and manage orders, you log into a Snipcart dashboard, a seperate system from your site.
Snipcart takes care of all of the complexities of ordering, such as payment processing, invoice emailing, discount code management and shipping calculations.
What does the add-on do?
Our add-on makes it easy to add Snipcart's required scripts to your site, to add product details and buttons and to place a cart/checkout link. Additionally, our add-on provides simple ways to access more advanced configuration options, such as product and cart custom fields.
If you are using the default theme for concrete5 5.7 (Elemental), the appearance of the blocks should immediately match the theme. If you are using another theme or developing your own, our add-on provides some convenient ways to select styling for your add-to-cart buttons. On a more technical level, the block templates are straight-forward for developers to override, giving you full control over their appearance.
As demonstrated in the video, it takes less than 10 minutes to progress from the initial setup to a complete working ecommerce solution.
Features at a glance.
- A product block with a range of display options, including image resizing and a lightbox option.
- A cart block with options, with the ability to hide the cart if it is empty.
- Basic stock level management, with automatic reduction of stock levels through orders being placed.
- Stock levels for multiple products can be updated at once via a page in the Dashboard.
- Easy ways to add both product options (colours, sizes, etc) and well as order custom options (such as delivery instruction fields, free gift selection, etc.).
- Products can be placed on pages protected by permissions (for members, etc). (This can't be done by directly adding buttons via HTML.)
- A convenient way to add extra CSS to style the Snipcart dialog itself.
A low cost, low risk solution
One great aspect of Snipcart is that there are no setup or subscription costs: fees are only charged when transactions are made. This means that you do not have any expensive initial costs to set up a complete online shop or have to worry about making a certain number of sales to break-even. As the add-on is designed to make integration with an existing site and theme as easy as possible, initial development costs are very low too.
Your on-going costs are only the normal hosting of your site and the cost of an SSL certificate per year. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands to develop a custom ecommerce site, you can get something up and running at a very low entry cost.
Is this a complete eCommerce solution?
In short, yes. Our add-on, with Snipcart provides a way to add products to your concrete5 site, for customers to add them to a cart, checkout and make payments. That being said, this setup is more intended to be used for shops with fewer products and/or those without overly complex technical requirements.
We envisage that this setup would be great:
- For those that are wanting to sell a smaller number of products on their site. Some people only want to sell one product!
- Where sites present their products in several different formats/layouts.
- Where development budgets are low or the number of sales are hard to predict.
- Where the setup of a shop is more of a 'market test', to see if it's worth investing in a more complex shopping platform.
- Where the focus of your site isn't on online sales, but you still wish to provide the ability for visitors to place orders.
- Where you're wanting to add an ad-hoc way for visitors to make a credit card payment. It could be used by a club or organisation to take membership payments or to make donations.
Where can I get the add-on?
Our add-on can be purchased from the concrete5 marketplace. Please note on the marketplace page the accompanying documentation pages.
You'll also need to visit Snipcart and sign up there.
What about support and customisations?
Naturally we will support the add-on where users have issues setting up it. Beyond this, if you are a developer you should find it straightforward to style and further customise.
If however, you are needing such services, please feel free to contact us.