Ox Shop game plan

Ox shop is a (mostly headless) backend designed for the metrum/sonnet webshop.

Features

• Order flow
  • Create/modify shopping cart (client-side, w/ server-side validation)
  • Add (available) products to shopping cart
  • Checkout {mollie} (email req.)
    • Partially validate shipping address(?)
  • Order status page
• Fulfillment flow
  • List pending orders with status
  • When paid send email to customer & internal fulfillment address
  • (Future: generate sendcloud things)
  • (Future: add/sync order with erpnext)
  • [Employee] Update order status (with email on trigger)
• (Future: Product creation flow)
  • Employee login
  • Create new product (image, variants, price, etc)
  • Update properties
  • Template pages with properties (or api)
  • Query products (for lists and slideshows, etc)
  • Sync/set stock level & availability

Development guidelines

• Database compatibility
  • We want to minimize migrations, and to do that we should use append-only structs with something like musli-wire
• Security
  • Store the minimum amount of information, and require authentication for all non-public information

Project Structure (v0)

• Frontend framework
• Config toml; compiled into the binary?
  • Mollie config stored inside the config toml file
  • Email config stored inside a config toml file
• Product list (pricing) is stored inside a toml file; these are used to validate & populate cart/product information
• Orders stored in feox-db as a semi-flat struct
• Order status page using only 'uuid' of order
• Sessioned endpoints (ephemeral)
  • Cart checkout
  • Cart validate
  • Order/Cart status
• Authenticated endpoints (static token)
  • Order update endpoint
  • List order endpoint
  • Update order status

Migration Status

• Optimization
  • Image-sets with backend-transcoding
• Product Pages
  • Attachments
  • Multi-image preview
  • Add missing accessories
  • Add (restructured) tech faq
  • Cart interaction
  • (Check mollie) add currency/locale option
• Blogs
  • Add missing newsletters
  • Add RSS feed
• Reviews page
• Contact page
• Add support pages/info
• Add terms and conditions
• Add social media links (footer)
• Add content to landing page
• (Optional) add quick search

Product navigation/layout

Coming from https://oat.ink/ and https://www.schiit.com/products I'm inclined to go with the sidebar navigation. Compared with https://gradolabs.com which has more traditional ecommerce layout, it's significantly less clear and slower to navigate.

Thus it provides significantly quicker navigation. Two downsides I've noticed from shiit:

1. Mobile/small-screen navigation sucks
2. Parameteric search non-existent/upsell is very passive (i.e. a customer will only see price difference not the benefit)

Not everyone will use parametric search, so upsell-by-comparison is likely a better option, but requires per-product eval.

One other downside of quicker navigation is lower time-wise retention, this would best be solved by adding depth to the products (e.g. measurement plots, calculators, etc)