shopping-cart

From IndieWeb

A shopping cart is a mechanism for allowing people to buy specific goods and services, often with invoicing and shipping.

Standalone shopping pages

These silos provide a full website with product categorization and often a larger marketplace for product discovery. They usually charge a per-item commission and/or listing fee, with different monthly fees allowing for additional services (e.g. more control over variations, using your own domain name, etc.).

Embeddable widgets

These providers allow you to embed a cart interface onto a page under your control.

Product-level embeds

This mechanism gives more control over the layout and allows providing your own markup, including h-product.

Full-shop embeds

This mechanism embeds the shop itself onto your page, which generally limits the customization and the markup that you can generate. It's also generally bad for SEO as search engines are unable to parse your product information.

  • Ecwid: embeds a full store interface into a DOM element on your site

Self-hostable options

These allow you to host your own cart service on your own server; payments are still naturally outsourced to a third-party payments provider. Generally these are for building entire web presences for a large enterprise and are the IndieWeb equivalent of using an erupting volcano to roast a turkey.

  • OpenCart: open source
  • PrestaShop: open source, but the payments modules are mostly proprietary and expensive

Rolling your own

Many of the payments providers provide APIs that simplify the order management/tracking/payments aspect; for example:

IndieWeb examples

See also