New year, new store
My holiday project has been deploying store.roobasoft.com. It’s Andy Kim’s open source Ruby on Rails store, Potion Store. I’ve known about Potion Store since Andy first opened it to the public. Since my current PayPal standard solution was working, and sales weren’t great, I didn’t see any need to change things. However, the PayPal standard store always seemed kind of sub-par to me and I always said when I started selling a second app I would do a proper store.
A couple weeks ago I downloaded Potion Store for fun and started playing with the admin interface in a development environment. It was way better than anything I had and I wanted it. The only downside was that I would have to sign up for PayPal pro and would lose $30 each month. I justified that as motivation to do more frequent updates and release new apps. Hope it helps.
It took me 7 days of very part time work to finish deploying the store. The biggest pain was adding support for state taxes. I’m a resident of Idaho and am required to collect sales tax from anyone buying rooSwitch that also lives in Idaho. PayPal’s express checkout is not setup to handle this very well. If you’re interested in the details, I started a thread at pdncommunity. I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t talking about this issue. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. (Feel free to educate me in the comments if you know what I’m doing wrong 
)
Apart from that little sales tax glitch, I’m happy with the results.
Happy 2008!
rooSwitch
rooVid
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January 1st, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Congratulations on the new store! It looks great.
I was curious about your sales tax issue. It doesn’t affect me, because I present users with the same checkout UI regardless of whether they chose to pay with PayPal or Credit Card. In other words, they’re encouraged to supply their address, even if they’re using PayPal.
I can see the argument that this defeats the anonymity of PayPal, but it doesn’t seem to have been an issue for me. I’ve not once had a customer complain about being asked to enter an address after selecting PayPal.
I like the idea that PayPal is “just a payment choice” and doesn’t affect the scope of the information I ask the customer for. The payment experience is largely identical regardless of whether the customer is using a PayPal account or a credit card.
January 1st, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Congrats on the store –I switched to the potion store about a month ago and I’ve been very happy with it. For me the switch was also a money saver as it is a less expensive payment option than esellerate.
I noticed you aren’t offering google checkout — Any reason? (It’s got even better rates than Paypal and is free until feb)
January 1st, 2008 at 7:09 pm
John, I tried setting up google checkout and it was causing me trouble. I spent less than 5 minutes debugging it before deciding to not offer it yet. I wanted to focus on other things so google checkout got bounced. I’ll likely get around to it at some point, I just didn’t want it to be a requirement for my initial deployment.