Despite the lack of updates I have been working on the site. Lately I’ve been struggling with the database design for the products. We eventually plan to sell items other than shirts that will also have different attributes than shirts. I’m trying to decide how flexible the database needs to be right now. I can make it possible to add anything we want, but that makes the database and programming more complicated and we will probably be sticking within the clothing-item realm. I’m thinking about making it more t-shirt oriented and just tweaking it as needed later since I can’t really foresee everything we would need anyway.

We’ve also been going over payment processors. We’re going to use the rails Active Merchant plugin, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to switch between processors if necessary. We’ve narrowed it down to the two that we think will work out best for us. Paypal and Braintree.

We plan keep the checkout/payment process on our site, but Paypal is good because we can allow people who want to to pay with paypal. My main concern with Paypal is that I’ve heard quite a bit of fuss about their service and down time.

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Braintree, and so far I’ve found their customer service to be excellent. Their monthly fee is only $20 compared to Paypal’s $30. We plan on having people re-enter their credit card numbers for each purchase so that we don’t have to concern ourselves with storing them. Ever checked out at The Pragmatic Bookshelf? They do it that way and it’s really not bad at all! But if we did decide to save credit card numbers, Braintree has a great feature where they store the numbers for you and you just save a token for the user. That saves a lot of trouble.

Have you had any good/bad experiences with these payment processors? Are there some good ones that we’ve overlooked? You’re help would be appreciated. ;)

We hope to open the store on the 1st of July with a small stock of shirts. If there is interest we could design and print a ‘30 day sprint’ shirt of some kind. Let us know if that is something you’d like and we’ll try to post a potential design sometime this week.

This may be pushing it a little for us, but we think it is possible. The main problem would be the payment processing. Since this would be more of a ’soft’ opening (no marketing beyond this blog, and probably only open for a few days), we could just set up payments though paypal standard and go with that as we get that area worked out. I think it’ll be very motivating to actually have a functioning site up, even if people have to go off-site to pay for the short-term.