Why Piggybak exists
By Brian Dillon
June 13, 2012
There are some clients debating between using Spree, an e-commerce platform, and a homegrown Rails solution for an e-commerce application.
E-commerce platforms are monolithic—they try to solve a lot of different problems at once. Also, many of these e-commerce platforms frequently make premature decisions before getting active users on it. One way of making the features of a platform match up better to a user’s requirements is to get a minimal viable product out quick and grow features incrementally.
Piggybak was created by first trying to identify the most stable and consistent features of a shopping cart. Here are the various pieces of a cart to consider.
- Shipping
- Tax
- CMS Features
- Product Search
- Cart / Checkout
- Product Features
- Product Taxonomy
- Discount Sales
- Rights and Roles
What doesn’t vary? Cart & Checkout.
Shipping, tax, product catalog design, sales promotions, and rights and roles all vary across different e-commerce sites. The only strict commonality is the cart and the checkout.
Piggybak is just the cart and checkout.
You mount Piggybak as a gem into any Rails app, and can assign any object as a purchasable product using a the tag “acts_as_variant” and you’re good to go. To learn more, and to see it in action ‘checkout’ Piggybak on GitHub.
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