I am trying to create a donation centre of sorts in Rails for a non-profit, using PayPal, and am wondering if I should start from scratch or use an existing eCommerce gem/platform.
I want to:
- list various "products", or donation types that a user can select, customize and pay for
- be able to send/serve downloadable files to a donor, depending on their donation type
- keep track of donors, donations and various custom bits of data the user enters
- add hooks to add donors to mailing lists, push donation notifications to social media, etc.
Basically, I want something that looks like a store and supports digital products, but processes donations instead of sales through PayPal.
Does anyone have experience using Spree (or something similar) to accept donations? I can't seem to find evidence that this works without a lot of hacking.
Thanks!
There are several ways of doing this, but each will require you to roll up your sleeves and get into the code. I would recommend, especially if you are learning rails, using Daniel Kehoe's "railsapp - Ruby on Rails Membership Site"
http://railsapps.github.com/rails-stripe-membership-saas/
It is a great tutorial and building block for what you are wanting to accomplish. Don't just copy/clone it and use it out the box, I would run through the tutorial to get a better understanding of what is going on and how you can customize it to meet your needs. It uses Stripe, for payment processing.
Related
I am developing an E-Commerce application.
I want to integrate Sirikit with the app.
Sample Instructions i want to give is in the following format
Buy |Something| from |App Name|
I did everything but i am confused which Domain or Intent to choose. Would be great if someone could guide me.
The only domain that seems suitable for your needs is the Payment domain.
As its documentation states, the Payment domain can be used for bill payment to any vendors, so it seems like a good candidate for an eCommerce application. Specifically, you should be using the INPayBillIntent as this is the intent that should be used to facilitate a financial transaction between an individual (your user) and an entity (the seller of your eCommerce product).
Even this intent won't exactly match your use case, so most probably you won't be able to use the phrase "Buy |Something| from |App Name|", but this is as close as you can get with the currently available intent domains.
I am have been using rails for about a week now and have created a website/app which for simplicity's sake we can call a job board. Users can create listings which other users can then apply for. Everything is working as desired. The next thing that I want to set up is the ability to charge users to create the listings.
After extensive searching, I can't find any tutorials that explain this process, just the typical cart and checkout for selling physical products.
I have been pondering solutions but I wanted to consult here for pro advice.
For the payment process (at least for now) I will most likely use active merchant and Paypal as I am based in Europe.
My current doubts are with setting up the modeling.
Would it be better to create a new model eg. 'credits', have users purchase 'credits', then run a variable when trying to create a 'job', eg. if_user_has_credits post the job else link to buy_credits_path, or is there a more direct way of achieving this through the already functional user and jobs models?
Any advice on setting up this functionality would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
I would try to create a credit system, so users just have to purchase credits and you can just drive the user to purchase credits in case they do not have enough for create a listing:
Simple one: Store the user' credit as balance field in the database, and all actions ("add", "deduct") are logged but not used to compute the latest balance. The balance-based way gives you fast access to the current amount
History based: Don't store the balance in database. The balance is computed by looking at the history of transactions, e.g. ("add", "deduct"). The history-based way gives you auditing. The history table should store the transaction, a timestamp, the balance before the transaction happened, and ideally a way to track the funds' source/destination.
You can use both. See the Ruby toolbox for bookeeping and Plutus
I recommend also using logging, and ideally read about secure log verification and provable timestamp chaining.
For logging details see techniques for ensuring verifiability of event log files
So, we have a currently setup web service which is essentially a Email-as-a-service which runs for free (beta). But, we are looking to move up and we want to be able to charge as Pay As You Go like MailChimp and so on.
So, the two of us still don't know whats the best way to tackle this.
Should we create like a digital wallet where the user adds in money (via stripe) and then we remove a little portion of that for every email they send.
So, we would love some guidance on what to do and how you recommend we achieve it!
There are some gems out there to instantly have a simple messaging system for users which I have looked at but they don't really fit the bill in terms of having a way to easy customize them.
Therefore I would like to ask some suggestions of gems that you consider be good for an instant messaging on a site, or discuss how one could implement this functionality.
I have built a simple system before that consisted of a messages table like this:
inbox
outbox
friend request
replies
id|message_id|sender_id|receiver_id|is_reply|is_friendreq|message
I'm thinking of storing everything in this one table and get all messages of a certain user where the user_id == receiver_id. This is very basic. I'm learning Rails and try to learn how to implement this on best Rails practice, so any tips/suggestions/ideas are more than welcome.
I have a site where members write specialized articles. I'd like to allow my members the option of putting up a PayPal button to charge their readers for these articles.
Basically, I'd like to set it up so that a member can choose to charge for content or not. If they choose to charge for an article, then their reader must pay via PayPal before they can view the article.
What is the best way to do this?
Most PayPal website tutorials are geared towards how to integrate PayPal to sell items on one site and don't really cover how to allow a site's members to charge others.
I'd just like for members to use Website Payments Standard. I'd like to make it very simple for them to take payments. Just enter their PayPal email address into our admin console and our site will take care of everything else.
Do I need to have the member setup IPN to get this to work? Or can just adding their PayPal email be enough.
Anyhow, any tips or tutorials you could point to would be great. Also, I'm using rails if that makes a difference.
Thanks.
You touched on what my suggestion would be - have them specify their IPN URL to a resource on your site that would process the transaction and allow access to the article if appropriate.
Another option would be to process those payments yourself, then at the end of the month, say, use the Mass Pay feature to send money to all the authors. I'm not sure what your tax liability would be in this situation however - IANAL.