16 Jun 2018, 06:29
Hi Andrea, thanks for asking. As you may know, we are looking to implement a "lightbox" (choose images) and simple e-commerce solution into X3. E-commerce is multi-level (cart, checkout, payment and product service), and therefore my answer is multi-level also:
Cart & Checkout :thumbsup:
We will be releasing a cart/checkout (lightbox) plugin, allowing visitors to pick/select images, and then "checkout". The checkout will allow the visitor to "place order", which means an email will go to owner with a list of the images.
The above is essentially a very basic, but flexible self-serve e-commerce solution.
Payments
Here is where it starts getting tricky. We could implement the cart with Paypal, so that the visitor would have to make a payment through Paypal on checkout. This requires that the owner has a Paypal account of course. X3 can instruct Paypal to let X3 know when a purchase is successful, but there is not really much X3 can do with this information. If it is a print product, the owner will have to deal with this manually anyway.
Product Service / Digital Download
Although we can implement a cart and even a payment system (as above), the entire follow-up process for an order will have to be done manually by the owner. At least for any tangible product (like print). As for "Digital Download", we could perhaps figure out some automated solution, although I don't yet have a full plan as to how this could work. Original size images would have to be stored in a password-protected folder(s), and then an email would go to visitor with a secret link that somehow linked to an auto-generated ZIP file with all the purchased images.
Therefore, for now, YES there will be a cart and checkout feature coming very soon. Payments also. As for providing the product to customer based on the order/purchase, this is more complicated. I would be very interested to consider some solution, but this would not be available immediately at first.
I estimate a basic lightbox/cart system in a release after the summer. X3.25.0 is only a few weeks away.