News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jHoldroyd

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @01:20PM (#9219545)
You can use our checkout and order system but simply drop out the payment processing. Stripe makes this very easy and while people may not want to do it, by charging them a percentage of each transaction we're almost incentivizing them to do it.

We do need gateway options, each country is different and we're always being asked by users for support of X. I can promise you if we'd been able to stick only Stripe in and use it for everyone, we'd of done it. Our lives would have been so much easier!

And no we wouldn't call it 5% but the store owner would quickly do the math and that's where we'd end up. It's a hard sell, we ran the model past a number of people and it was almost universally rejected.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @12:55PM (#9219320)
Exactly, we went through four revisions of our pricing and I'm not sure we'll ever be certain it's the "right" one. We just knew we had to simplify it and after user feedback this is the one that stuck.

And thanks for the kind comments, we've always loved your animations and the attention to detail you put into your site. I mean who doesn't want a buy bacon button in their header?

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @12:51PM (#9219277)
We also felt that it meant the people building the sites also had an incentive to be more careful about the way they did it - like sharing resources across a session and limiting the calls per page, or implementing caching. All of which actually improve the user experience due to slightly faster page loads, which in eCommerce is crucial.
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @12:49PM (#9219254)
That's the reason why we added the little bit of information about page-views to try and guide the user a little in case they had a store already.

We very quickly know when a store is under attack and we either (where possible) drop the malicious traffic, or we absorb it. We had a customer on our free tier (30k requests) that ended up processing over 3 million during a 2 day attack, his site stayed up and we still didn't charge him.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @11:08PM (#9216059)
We've had a few people doing that, and we'll be forking our JavaScript SDK to natively support Node in the next week or two.
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @11:06PM (#9216049)
Commercetools is a good platform and one of our closest competitors. The key differences are that our pricing scales a lot better, we don’t lock you into a single gateway or charge transaction fees. We also don’t arbitrarily limit the number of products you can store, or the bandwidth you can use.

We’re also more flexible, we have an EAV system (Flows) that allows you to modify and store custom data sets in a structured way. This allows you to use Moltin as a much bigger part of your product than just what we currently offer.

They do have a few more features right now but we’re pushing hard on the development front to reach feature parity with the major platforms.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @10:50PM (#9215994)
Yes we do, we support over 50 payment gateways with more on the way. You can see the complete list here - https://moltin.com/faq#gateways
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @09:40PM (#9215779)
Great, if you need anything or have any feedback we're always available on livechat or [email protected]
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @09:37PM (#9215767)
Again, on the list - but if someone were to do one we'd be happy promote it ;)
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @07:21PM (#9215185)
The beauty of an API approach is the features we don’t quite fully support can be easily created by you within your application, and then work alongside our product.

We don’t explicitly advertise support for digital products at the moment, however, we can support it to some degree. Reach out to us on livechat or email and we’ll be happy to help.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @07:18PM (#9215171)
We have support for modifiers (size, colour, etc.), singles (gift wrapping, etc), input (custom options or labels). We’re working hard to make sure our new docs platform has all of this in it, but you can find it in the API reference and use these via our dashboard (forge).

If you ever have any problems we’re always available on email or live chat :)

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @06:30PM (#9214904)
In short, Yes! But perhaps not soon.

We have a really strong community ethos at Moltin, and we’re trying hard to open up as much of our platform as possible, both in open source and community modules.

We know there is still work to be done and we have a pretty lengthy set of features and updates going forward.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @06:16PM (#9214832)
Because we’re quicker and easier to implement. That gives the developer much more freedom to be creative with their application, especially if they’re working within a budget or short timeframe.

Our API also allows you to pick and choose the components you want, you can build more than just a website, your data is accessible on mobile or at a physical retail store all from the same platform.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @06:05PM (#9214759)
We are yes, we started with what we knew and now are allowing the community to vote on what they want us to release next - https://moltin.com/getting-started#vote
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @06:00PM (#9214732)
Because we’re an API, you can retrieve, remove, destroy your data at will. When you incorporate us into your app or site, you have a very loose relationship with our system. That means its very easy for you to stop using our product without having to rebuild from scratch.

In the future we’ll be making it even easier to migrate to and from Moltin with tools to import and export data.

Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @05:46PM (#9214627)
Sorry about that, I'll take a look at the issue now.
Re:Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service on Monday March 16, 2015 @05:46PM (#9214623)
Hi there, co-founder here. A few of them do have an API offering, but there's a few issues with them -

Firstly they’re bolted on the side, and aren’t usually functional enough to actually power a full store - generally they’re designed for add-ons.

Secondly you’re locked into their whole platform just to get access to the API even if you’re not looking to build a website, or use all of their services.

We’re making a product that gives you the ability to pick and choose exactly which parts of e-commerce you need, in a way that doesn’t lock you into the product.

Re:Show HN: Moltin - eCommerce API on Friday March 13, 2015 @03:47PM (#9199536)
Hey co-founder here. Thanks, we're built on PHP, nginx, Postgres and redis running on AWS.
Re:Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @12:03PM (#8658513)
Fantastic library, we've tried a few like it before and none of them really worked quickly or reliably enough.

We did a quick mashup of our API and this to create a basic (but functional) mobile PoS using the phone camera as a scanner.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TWAKxIYAALMp7.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TYETSIAAErP8U.jpg