How to trade/sell on my website?

[hikatamika]

Tried searching for this one from a few angles ("sell", "shop", "PayPal")…

Anyone know how I can sell things or facilitate mail trades on my own website? Maybe with iFrames and PayPal? I think I've seen King Melon do something similar on his site.

Why?
I used to have a Ko-Fi shop, but I'd like to use it for specifically, like, supporter downloads or whatever.

I'd like to offer up original art for sale on my website in the future cause it's like, a cozy safe-space for me, and it feels more personable to have small things for sale on there than on a separated shop site.
Additionally I'd like to try and code stuff into my website "myself"(*) instead of paying monthly for Shopify or BigCartel or something. Paying such subs also makes me more hustley and grindy about marketing and selling. Having it be a slow-going thing on my site would allow me to be more relaxed and less stressed about it

Ideas that IDK how to Realize
1. Letting people choose multiple things from me to purchase (at once)… and then getting notified about it.

• Some sort of PayPal iFrame/API magic would be cool.
• Or instead, even serving up the visitor a mailTo determined by HTML form options they pick, or something, would work too. I could check inventory and manually have PayPal email a payable invoice back to the customer.

2. Taking intake for physical trade offers on my website.
It'd also be cool to solicit offers for trading things like original art cards on my site.

• I imagine this kind of thing would really benefit from starting off as some sort of mailTo, again with the prefilled content determined by what HTML form options they pick. That way I can discuss the trade offer with whoever wants to trade with me.

Passing the Mic
Anyone have any experience/insight on…

• PayPal iFrames & API
• HTML Forms that can shape/interact with mailTo links

…that could help me in these endeavors?

[Marziponder]

Hi my friend,

Let me just start this post by saying that sadly I don't think I can be much help. But I want to give back to this awesome Melonland community and am trying to find posts with no replies that I can contribute to. Now let me elaborate on that by saying, I have done web development for many years, and I think the reason why you're not getting any responses on this post is because you're asking about something that is fiendishly hard and kind of scary to implement. As soon as you're taking money for products you are kind of opening a Pandora's Box of legal and security concerns. Even if you're using a plugin or frame for payment, vulnerabilities on your page can still expose credit card info to hackers. That's why it's very uncommon to see anyone but big companies having a storefront directly on their site - and honestly nowadays even a lot of big companies don't bother. Even if you do see a storefront directly on someone's site, it's often just a third-party storefront that they paid to rebrand and route to from a subdomain of their site or something like that.

Looking at the scale of your Kofi, and assuming people actually are buying these things regularly and subscribing, I hate to say it but I don't think you really can move that into your own site. It would be a job for a paid developer at the very least, and even then I'm not sure it would be worth it since most people are vastly more comfortable making payments on established familiar platforms. Especially stuff like subscriptions.

I will say maybe there's some more customizable payment platform out there to do what you want, but I researched this myself for my internet radio site awhile ago and didn't find one. In the end I ended up just using a Square payment link to take donations.

I think that if you REALLY wanted to move more of it to your site, my honest recommendation would maybe be to just have a page that lists what you have for sale, along with prices, and that links to your payment platform for the actual heavy lifting. In other words, just keeping the Kofi and adding your own sort of "mirror image" page of it in your own style on your site.

Sorry to be a naysayer, but this is just one of those things that is not too feasible for an indie website to do perhaps a developer with more experience in the payment space can correct me, I would love to learn otherwise.

[Dan Q]

My experience is mostly with much bigger eCommerce systems and payment gateways, but something like what you're talking about is certainly feasible, so long as you're willing to rein in your more-ambitious thoughts.

PayPal's probably the way forwards. Back in about 2005 I added some "buy with PayPal" links to a (PHP-powered) website, using PayPal's own tools. All it did was take money from them and then redirect them back to my site with a token that I could then use to check that they'd actually paid (and not just been given the link). Nowadays that's probably possible with JavaScript, although it's more-important to get the security right (and sending emails wouldn't be possible, outside of those provided by PayPal).

Try this PayPal guide as a starting point, perhaps?