A presentation at PHPSW eCommerce in in Bristol, UK by Drew McLellan
Building Ecommerce Projects with Moltin
Hello!
I’m Drew McLellan.
Lead dev on Perch CMS.
Publisher of 24ways.org
@drewm
github.com/drewm
Ecommerce sucks. Open Source and crappy! Hosted and restrictive! Enterprisey and useless! Bespoke and full of sadness :(
Time spent on wrangling ecommerce is time stolen from fi nessing the UX.
Payment gateways are all di ff erent. (AND MOST ARE TERRIBLE)
Compromise all the way down To gain: O ff -the-shelf functionality Ease of hosted SaaS Choice of gateway Web, app, PoS integration You lose: UX fl exibility Seamless integration Your hair Entire contents of your bank account
What could the answer possibly be?
Moltin is an ecommerce web service API.
Moltin is an ecommerce web service API. Products Inventory Carts Checkout Customers Promotions Shipping Orders & Receipts Currencies Taxes
It works like this
Sign up at moltin.com
Create a store
Get an API key & secret
Install PHP SDK with Composer
Start building your store
Install the SDK composer require moltin/php-sdk:dev-version1
Instantiate all the things use
Moltin\SDK\Request\CURL
as
Request ; use
Moltin\SDK\Storage\Session
as
new
\Moltin\SDK\SDK ( new
Storage (), new
Request ());
\Moltin :: Authenticate( 'ClientCredentials' , [
'client_id'
=>
'<YOUR CLIENT ID>' ,
'client_secret'
=>
'<YOUR CLIENT SECRET>' , ]);
Get stu ff done // Create a product
\Product :: Create([…]) ; // Update a product
\Product :: Update( '<ID>' , [ 'title'
=>
'Updated!' )] ; // Get a product
Product :: Get( '<ID>' ); // Delete a product
Product :: Delete( '<ID>' );
Forge Dashboard
Checkout
50+ Payment Providers authorize.Net
DataCash GoCardless Mollie NetBanx PayPal SagePay SecPay / PayPoint.net
Stripe WorldPay
Checkout Calculates shipping, taxes, discounts. Adjusts stock levels. Generates orders and invoices. Handles gateway API interactions*
Gateways You don’t get total isolation from gateway weirdness. You can’t just swap one gateway for another. Still needs planning for payment fl ows to call the right Moltin API methods at the right times.
Moltin bills on API requests.
Billed on API requests Free up to 30,000 per month. 300,000 reqs is $49 600,000 reqs is $99 … 5,000,000 reqs $499
So.
Advantages You get almost complete control over the UX. You don’t need to build all the boring stu ff . Multiple apps (website, mobile, PoS, etc) can all use the same backend with no extra work. Swap out your front end easily. Start adding inventory via Forge before site is built.
Disadvantages Creates a very large dependancy compared to something self-hosted. That comes with risk of downtime or service discontinuation. Introduces network latency into many operations. Not as fl exible as something completely bespoke.
Questions?
Moltin is an ecommerce API for building online stores without needing to implement carts, inventory management and payment gateway integrations yourself. In this talk, find out how to use the Moltin PHP SDK on your next ecommerce project, where its strengths and weaknesses lie, and why you might consider building on top of an API rather than building something custom.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
For technical reasons, Perch Shop doesn't use Moltin anymore.
Here’s what was said about this presentation on social media.
