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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Why Piggybak exists

    Brian Dillon

    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.

    ecommerce piggybak rails


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