At a bare minimum you need a complex database structure to support products, stocks, orders plus the pages for browsing, searching, shopping, ordering, tracking, then you need user accounts, integrations with payments and shipping, a transactional email service etc.
Well, sure. You’ll also need a filesystem to run it all on, cache memory with LRU replacement, a router, power and air conditioning, and lots of other stuff. The question was, what’s an easy way to do all that that’s ready to run. I’ve set up a couple different e-commerce sites on Wordpress and it’s easy and flexible; everything you listed does need to happen, but it’s behind the scenes of the plugin installation. I genuinely don’t know of a turnkey solution that’s easier, although I’m happy to hear about them.
I mean, Wordpress started as a blog. Linux started as a terminal emulator. The question is how well does its current state fit the current task at hand.
There are WordPress plugins that attempt it
Why do you say “attempt”?
it’s usually more for people who use it mainly as a blog/CMS and want to sell a couple of things on the side
So, I run a dedicated site that sells a few thousand items based on Wordpress+Woocommerce; it’s basically a hobby, but if I wanted to be serious about driving sales one of the most important things would be the ability to customize landing pages, test out different layouts, make changes, etc… basically, the ability for the software to function as a CMS would be key to what I would want. Being “primarily” a CMS product with selling products as secondary, for me, works better than the other way around (primarily a product-listing-and-selling software with editing pages and layouts as secondary).
I wouldn’t use them for a large shop.
Depends what you mean by “large.” Performance is probably the biggest issue that would make me hesitate to go for Wordpress+Woocommerce beyond a certain scale, but as I say I’m running a moderate-scale e-commerce site on Wordpress right now and I’ve generally been very happy with its tradeoff of “ease of setup” vs “customizability and extensibility for fancy stuff” vs cost.
Wordpress is the most beginner-friendly solution I know of in terms of fitting together nicely and smoothly. If you’re doing it on your own server, you will have to do the Wordpress install yes, but that’s true of any solution you pursue, and once the base is in it’s very easy to add e-commerce functionality. There are a ton of Youtube tutorials that show the process in varying levels of detail, but this one shows a streamlined way to actually install and set up the Woocommerce plugin. You will have to enter products and etc, but actually installing the plugin is literally about a 30-second process.
I generally like to talk it up just because Wordpress is generally my go-to for easy setup of a new web site, whether or not it involves e-commerce; it’s easy and well-supported and dedicated Wordpress hosting is probably some of the cheapest types of hosting you’ll be able to find on the internet. That tutorial I linked about likes Bluehost; personally I prefer Tigertech but the point is there are easy and cheap options.
I’m happy to answer questions or help; I’ve set up a few different little amateur-mode e-commerce sites on Wordpress and I don’t know of any easier solution.
Yeah. The “Fire on the Velvet Horizon” stuff is really too powerful to be used as-is in my experience; generally I’ll insert them in much reduced form. “Hostage Frog” becomes a big frog monster that tries to swallow and digest the adventurers. “Ice Age Eye” becomes a particular frozen part of the map that’s unusual and strange in a certain way. That is why I love it though; any one of those entries easily contains enough powerful content that it could take over and consume the entire campaign structure, so there’s plenty of creative strength to use for adding flavor to the adventure even if it’s not safe to use undiluted.
I for-real forgot that new reddit existed. I’ve stopped posting there but still read “all” periodically, and “old.reddit.com” is so ingrained that I was a little confused when they started talking about a new look, since I haven’t noticed anything…
Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV
Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.
Next you’re gonna tell me Speer’s book where he explained that he had no idea about all that holocaust stuff, and just liked building fancy buildings and getting hang out with this bunch of snappy dressers, was a little bit self serving.
Bro I’m from the US. If I stopped supporting people just because they were war criminals, I’d never be able to vote or talk politics ever again.
(Also, Speer actually talks about this in his book – he said at his trial in Nuremberg, his lawyer wanted to bring up that he tried to kill Hitler as a factor in his defense. He said, no, by that point in Germany you could just walk up to any random person on the street and say “I’m working on a plan to kill Hitler” and if they had courage, they’d say “Thank God how can I help.” Basically, he was happy laying out some good things he did late in the war, but said yeah maybe I am a war criminal, I don’t want to weasel out of any of my earlier conduct. But, also, according to his Wikipedia page which I just read, he took pains to present himself as more blameless than he actually was, made specific revisions to how things were presented in his English-language autobiography as compared with the German one, and was in general definitely a POS of the highest order.)
Speer was the one who actually vetoed the Ratte supertank. Also, check out this entertaining bit from the discussion of the Maus supertank, of which a couple prototypes actually did get built:
“It had the same design flaw that made the Elefant unsuitable for close combat. In the end, the tank will inevitably have to wage a close combat since it operates in cooperation with the infantry. An intense debate started, and except for me, all of the present found the ‘Maus’ magnificent.” -Heinz Guderian
I liked Guderian and Speer both. They seemed sensible.
I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.
If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.
If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.
The smaller edition which weighed 188 tons and which they did actually build a couple prototypes of, had a for-real problem that it was difficult to find a motor powerful enough to drive the thing but small enough to fit inside it. It wound up going 8 mph.