Build an online store with cryptocurrency payment support — build my online store
If you are a beginner with no coding experience at all but still interested in getting involved with cryptocurrency trends and setting up your own website, blog, or online store, then you have landed at the right place. This is the fourth section of a series.
What you’ll need
- No programming experience needed
- Some time, each session is about 20–30 mins
- No fee for building a test toy store locally
What you’ll learn
- API usage and other programming jargon
- Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency terminologies
- Website hosting and cloud deployment concepts
What you’ll build
- An online store with cryptocurrency, credit card, and PayPal payment support enabled
Build my online store
- What are the popular tech stacks for web applications?
There are hundreds of programming languages used for different purposes. What we are interested in are web applications.
A web application is an application we open in a browser. A large scale online business is like YouTube or Netflix, offering a user different ways to open it, via browsers, or via its Android or iOS apps, and providing plenty of services or features.
The browsers or the apps installed on your phone or tablet are called clients. The client side is coded in languages understood by the client. For browser, the de facto language is JavaScript, HTML, CSS; for android apps, it is Java; for iOS, it is Swift.
For a full web application, it is also has a server side to do the computing, preparing data in the right format to feed to your browser and your phone apps. There are multiple choices for the server side languages depending on what services you provide, Java, Python, C#, PHP… And you may have heard a bunch of buzz words for different frameworks in different languages from both client and server side before, like Bootstrap, ReactJS, Vue, Spring framework, Flask, LAMP…
Luckily, for small scale online store business, we don’t need to spend years of hard work to learn programming or spend millions to have a team of developers in house to build a skyscraper type application. By using some Lego bricks existing on the market, we can have a decent website with a built-in online store to broadcast our business to the whole world and start making money!
With the integration of forgingblock payment, it is even better. The online store can accept cryptocurrencies!
WordPress stack + forgingblock payment plugin, this is the stack we will use. No programming needed, and they will give you a nice on-line store made by yourself in a few hours.
Steps to set up WordPress website locally
- Download Bitnami WordPress Stack (https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress/installer)
The Bitnami website offers excellent get started tutorial for building a personal blog, please refer here or details
https://docs.bitnami.com/installer/get-started/
2. Start and stop the WordPress Stack
Please refer to this tutorial https://docs.bitnami.com/installer/faq/linux-faq/administration/control-services-linux/
Confirm the servers are running in green status, then open http://localhost:8080/ in your browser
Click ‘Access WordPress’ link or enter http://localhost:8080/wordpress/wp-login.php in the browser directly
Login using the user and password created during installation.
3. Download plugins
Go to Plugin> click Add New> search WooCommerce > click Install Now>Click Activate
If you’d like to know more details about WooCommerce, click More details link to pop up the feature page. It is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress out there.
At this stage, you’ll see WooCommerce’s on-screen launch/setup wizard. Fill out the questions in the setup wizard to get your site up and running with traditional credit card payment methods integrated in a few mins.
The first step in the WooCommerce wizard is about creating essential online store pages for you:
- “Shop” — this is where your products are going to be displayed.
- “Cart” — this is the shopping cart where your customers can adjust their order before proceeding to checkout.
- “Checkout” — this is where the customers choose the shipping/delivery method and pay for whatever they’ve bought.
- “My Account” — a kind of a profile page for registered customers (they will be able to view their past orders and manage other details).
The store locale parameters define your business origin, currency, and preferred units.Shipping & tax is about shipping and tax information for your store.
Payments page allows you to integrate with PayPal and add credit card payments.
4. Add products to your store and more
To start working with the product inventory, go to your dashboard, then Products / Add Product, play here to add your product information.
A bunch of tutorials can be found on line for making the store look nicer by choosing a theme.By default, WooCommerce works with any WordPress theme.
Adding and changing things until you are satisfied with your local store.
Steps to link forgingblock payment with WordPress locally
Now you have a local store running, it is time to add the cryptocurrency payment integration using forgingblock WordPress plugin.
- Install prerequisite plugin WooCommerce if you didn’t or skipped the previous online-store tutorial, this is needed for setting up forgingblock plugin.
- Next step is to download forgingblock wordpress plugin, it can be found here, click the Download plugin link
https://api.forgingblock.io/docs/#integrations-woocommerce
Save the zip file locally. Then upload it to the WordPress stack by clicking upload Plugin button at the top of the Plugins page > click Install Now
After Installation you could find plugin in Plugins -> Installed Plugins -> Fbuni for Woocommerce> click Activate
Click the settings to go to the settings page for forgingblock plugin
Scroll down to the API token section, select https://api-demo.forgingblock.io as the pairing network
3. Pair the forgingblock store id with the WordPress store
Click the link https://api.forgingblock.io/docs/#integrations-woocommerce,
enter your registered email and password along with the store id from previous step, check testNet, click Create Pairing.
A pair code will be returned. Copy this.
Paste in the WordPress plugin settings page, click pair
Once it is successful, the page will show forging block logo.
Now you have a store integrated with both traditional and cryptocurrency payments!
4. Test and receive payment for your WordPress store products
Create another customer wallet and get some test coins. This is used for purchasing products from your store.
Add products and continue to Proceed to checkout. On the checkout page, see ForgingBlock payment as a checkout method > click Proceed with cryptocurrency payment button
A payment form will open and you have 15 mins to complete the transaction. If you are using a wallet running supported by this form, clicking ‘Open in wallet’ , it will open.
The electrum wallet used in the tutorial is not supported, please click the
Copy tab to get the address and amount in BTC. Please make sure you have enough test bitcoins to make the payments.
Once the payment is received, it will show you this form “ the invoice has been paid”. Click the green button, it will bring you back to the store page with the order information.
The customer just purchased products from your online store using test bitcoins!
Now check your store wallet, the transaction is processing on the blockchain. You just need to wait until it gets confirmed!
- How to add more fancy features through plugins?
There are marketplaces you can shop for plugins. These are features built by other developers you can use directly. Some of them are free and others with advanced features are paid versions. If your business starts to take off, or you want to bring in more customers, this is the place to look around. Later on, you may want to hire a team of developers to build an in-house solution for you to support the increasing large volume of customers and provide users other customized services and features!
The next sessions are advanced topics about putting your online store on the internet and certain services are paid only, so please prepare a few bucks for them. Without buying a few more cups of coffee every month, you get to play the most fun and exciting part and deep dive more into the programmer’s world.
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