What I'm working on - eCommerce within Ghost

For anyone wondering about all the questions and what I’m up to:

I’m working on an eCommerce integration using Stripe. You can read more about it here: A shopping experience for Ghost

Or see a preview video here:

Is it beefy like some paid services? Nope. Could you sell a handful of products with it, without paying for anything extra (assuming you already have Ghost hosted somewhere)? Yup.

Definitely still in WIP land, but thought folks might be interested. Feedback welcome!

5 Likes

Hi

It’s really great.

I’ve been looking for a simple e-com solution for Ghost for a while.

Wanted to ask:

Can it be integrated with a current theme? E.g. I’d like to keep using the current theme but still implement some features of the cart.

Can the add to cart button be added to the product details page?

Thanks.

I have the add to cart added to the product pages at this point. (That wasn’t true yesterday morning, but i was busy yesterday. Layout still needs work.) Latest screens are on my website.

You could certainly merge these theme additions into a different theme. I think it’s going to take some minor editing theme of files (because the javascript is replacing certain divs that aren’t in the original theme), but there’s no specific reason I chose Ruby other than I thought it was a good starting point. When I’ve gotten it nicely polished, I’ll add some documentation about what code to copy over into an existing theme, too.

1 Like

Great news. I’ll wait for it then

A demo is available at https://ruby-sales.sarisky.link.

2 Likes

Okay, I checked out the demo site. Some interesting features there, for sure.

Question: What do you mean by “the rest comes from Stripe on the fly”? Are you storing products and prices and such in Stripe? Does Stripe have its own cart as well? If so, that would be very helpful, to not have yet another cost/system to deal with.

You can define products in Stripe. Each product in Stripe has a name, at least one price, and can have one image and a description. So yes, I’m storing products and prices in Stripe. Stripe doesn’t exactly implement a ‘cart’, but it takes orders as lists of products to be paid for, which is rather like a shopping cart. I’m managing the cart with client-side JavaScript, storing it in Local Storage so it’ll persist between visits.

On this page: Rapid storefront , everything comes from Stripe. (I’m fetching products and prices from Stripe. Nothing is stored on Ghost.)

On this page: Better store front. , you additionally create a post for each product, allowing you to include more photos, details, etc, in addition to the Stripe product entries. That allows more detailed product listings. Prices are pulled live from Stripe (so you only have to update them in one place), but everything else is in Ghost.

Yeah, I went with Stripe because I figured anyone who had Ghost subscriptions set up would appreciate not having to use a different vendor.

Purchase info gets stored in Stripe. You can retrieve it there through your dashboard, or you can set Stripe up to email you about them.

resurrecting this old thread to ask the status of creating a small ecommerce page on my Ghost blog? right now I have an etsy store but wondering if I can make my ghost site one stop shopping?

1 Like

the whole cart piece would be nice. right now i am just using the stripe embedded pricing tables links for a separate page in ghost. would be nice to see if cathy ended up completing this, i was considering attempting writing my own.

The code is on Github - please help your self if you’d like to develop it further. I went from having lots of time to play around with it last August to being really busy with client work by October… and I’ve been meaning to get back to it ever since but haven’t!

And disclaimer: I worked on it last while just starting to learn Ghost, so it might not meet my present standards! :slight_smile:

1 Like

Stripe has a suite of robust checkout tools - is it possible to use those within Ghost (for subscriptions not e-commerce)

yes, the subscriptions part gets set up automatically in stripe when you have stripe connected and have different subscriptions in ghost

Totally get that. I’m wondering if rather than using Ghosts portal (which is limited and cannot be highly customized) it’s possible to use Stripes payment portal and suite of tools. This allows the collection of a lot more user data (stored on stripe). and is much more customizable.

I assume I could have the signup happen on stripe and then use the API to add the member to Ghost or some such thing?

see what i typed the other day with pricing tables in stripe. you make the pricing table in stripe and it gives you the code you paste into ghost to display the pricing table. thats separate than the subscription signup thats in ghost.

I’m thinking of handling the entire signup flow OFF ghost.

Sounds like you would benefit from reading the stripe documentation on pricing tables. There is no sign up needed in ghost.