New Rails App: RightCart.com
Posted by josh June 02, 2006 @ 08:43 PM
Back in January I took the Pragmatic Rails Studio along with some guys named Dylan Stamat and Jonathan Siegel. Earlier this week they announced a brand new internet application: RightCart.com. By the way, the two of them wrote it in Ruby on Rails in just six weeks!
RightCart is "Shopping 2.0". It lets you embed a shopping cart on any web page with just three lines of HTML and JavaScript. The RightCart service manages your customer's shopping cart contents for you, so integrating shopping capabilities into your website is trivial. They take care of everything from your catalog to payment processing. You can sell your own stuff and pay them a small percentage. You can also sell stuff from a shared catalog (with over a million items already) and get a 1% commission on the sale.
And like all good Web 2.0 companies, RightCart has a blog (State of the Cart) to share news about their business and services.
Congratulations to Dylan and Jonathan on their product launch!
Looks pretty neat. It would be nice if there were a bit of a demo showing how it worked and all. Though it seems like a good concept.
Thanks Adam !
We should have a screen cast up shortly, and will be posting a lot of use cases on our blog. By the way, it did take only six weeks… but they were loooooong weeks :)
(that said, all of us at RightCart thank our families and significant others for putting up with the schedule !)
‘Patent Pending’ – Excellent! Another patent for ‘embedding a shopping cart on a web page’!
Maybe the RightCartGuys can explain what they are patenting and how it affects the rest of the world?
Mr Coffee (Patent on drinking Lattes)
How is this different from “Shopify” ? just curious..
Mr Coffee—Great question. We allow checkout within RightCart. This is a huge distinction between existing solutions.
Verisign, PayPal & Amazon—all have commerce solutions that can reside within a site, but at checkout the user is drawn to a separate checkout page. These solutions are great and obviously they do great business, but we wanted to offer an alternative.
Our approach allows blogs, content publishers, small businesses to “own their eyeballs”—that is, they can keep their visitors within their site and content while providing ecommerce functionality all the way through checkout.
VASU—I haven’t had the chance to demo Shopify, but it looks like they have a really stellar product (and a great design).
I am familiar with Yahoo Stores and can contrast RightCart with Yahoo’s offering. Yahoo Stores is a very flexible store builder. You get an out-of-the-box working template store and can customize it like crazy with some basic programming knowhow. The goal being that you rent a storefront from Yahoo and then start “migrating your content to the store.”
With RightCart, we are targetting users that already have their content figured out. This could be with an existing blog, CMS or even HTML files. When they decide to start selling products—they can drop a RightCart into their site with 3 lines of code and start generating sales. We think of this as “bringing the store to the content” and is a core motivator for our product roadmap.
We’ve just posted a screencast using RightCart to turn a blog into a store in a couple minutes. What we do in the video was just not possible a week ago. It is really cool to see—and I think it will make it easier to differentiate our offer.
http://RightCart.com/screencast
It seems like a nice idea. However if I am selling other peoples stuff direct from my website and the sale goes sour, ie goods don’t turn up when payment have been made, the customer is likely to be hunting me down for explanations rather than RightCart.
Regards
Brad
Looks like a very good idea …
Apart from the unsavory, very un-web-2.0-ish PATENT PENDING banner !
Do these people intend to anger visitors for the fun of it or do they genuinely believe thet the (cart)wheel is yet to be patented ?!
Hope it is an april’s fool despite our being in june.
People who do not understand the patent process should not criticise those that do.
If RightCart believe they are doing something new it should be patented. If they chosoe not to patent it, someone else inevitably will. That third party could prevent others from using the same techniques.
At least if RightCart are granted the patent, they can prevent anyone stopping you from using their techniques.
The thing you should be asking is if RightCart intend to enforce the Patent or if they are persuing it to prevent others from doing so.
I don’t undersand patents, so do most software developper.
If your idea is new AND you implement it in a way that outshines your follower, you will lead the pack and you will win in the end.
If your implementation sucks your patent gives you a right to be a dog in the manger by preventing other people from doing it right.
In the end, the only people who are better off with a granted software patent are layers and patent trolls.
What is certain is that the first thing one sees on RightCart’s website is a banner that looks like an insult to at least half the open-source developpers and turns them away. A questionable PR policy…
Hrmm…
I have to agree that the patent sash is a bit over-the-top.
It’s questionable whether you should be seeking any patents … but there should be no question about the ‘Patents Pending’ sash you have as the first thing people see when they kick onto the site. It’s not smart.
The product/service looks great … just suggest moving that ‘patent pending’ tag down to the fine-print.
-c
Well, I just got this notise from Rails’ feed, and still no time for making research in the technique level details, and discussing with you guys. But I believe that beyone the implementation, a well successful ror case study beside 37signals will make more sense.
‘Patent Pending’? That’s great PR.
Brad… This is an excellent point and one we’ve looked to the community for guidance. Companies that have addressed this and flourished include eBay, Amazon (their marketplace), and even DealTime (for lessor known online vendors).
We have located a great partner to help bring this value to our product and are busily preparing the functionality for our next release. Look for an update this month !
What about people not wanting to umm…. fill in their credit card numbers in random forms on random websites over the internet?
The whole idea of Amazon / eBay / PayPal processing your payment was that customers don’t have to really trust you to buy from you since there’s this big, well-proven, serious party that bills them and refunds them when appropriate.
Asking people such important data on tiny little forms inside vulnerable iframes opens the road to a myriad of horrible fraud schemes. I understand the cc processing is done by RightCart but we’re still in the years when internet browsers suck huge cocks. One can put itself in the middle of the customer and RightCart to steal valuable information (even though this shouldn’t be possible, theoretically).
RightCart really seems to address a virgin niche but I think they’re doing it a bit Wrong.
I too have the trust issue. How do I know that I am really submitting my personal and credit card information to RightCart?
It is a nasty problem. The more pupular they get the more fraud-fragile the service becomes; if RightCart establishes a brand then people will simply assume that it is them when they see the embedded form/cart on a web site. But there really is NO way to validate this because everything is happening ‘under water’ web 2.0 scam style.
Mr Coffee
I love the concept!
However, I share the same security and trust concerns as some of the above posters. In particular, the lack of SSL encryption in the checkout process, is a big issue with me.
But I reckon the RightCart guys can deal with that! Good luck :-)
If what you are patenting is essentially a complete shopping cart inside a frame/iframe, you might want to do a search for “shopping cart in frame tag”.
I found a slew of what would be known as “prior art” in the patent world.
The technique of using frames to mask the brand, location or technical details of a shopping cart have been around a long long time.
This doesn’t mean you won’t get a patent on it. Heaven knows that the patent office may feel that the use of an iframe, of a certain size, in a specific region of a web page, is reason enough to issue one.
I still think you guys have an excellent product, but sometimes developers can get too close to a project and can’t see the forest for the trees.
Having dealt with numerous web 1.0 shopping carts, your cart seem like a good start on replacing the dinosaurs of the past.
Good luck!
One other point. The concerns regarding security, while valid, probably aren’t that big a deal.
As I posted in my previous comment, shopping carts within frames has been done before. Consumers have used them.
Ryan here from RightCart.
Lachy-
we tried to post a response like this to the Kennedia.com blog regarding SSL, but couldn’t seem to get our comments to show. We think you did a great job of reviewing our product, and wanted to clarify how SSL is used in our system. See our blog post at State of the Cart-our checkout pages our fully SSL secured and we discuss why Lachy might have missed this in his article.Whoever decided to go for the patent, well done you have put me off. I came accross the link, thought oh cool nice rails app to look at, possibly use this on client sites. However as soon as I saw the patent banner I decided to leave. Nice app, but really guys we dont need more web patents. Talk about bad marketing.
What happens if the user has javascript disabled?
Ryan/Dylan,
I like many of the others here would really like to know if you plan on using your potential patents in an offensive licensing type manner, or do you plan to obtain the patent and then open it to the public so that no one else may patent it? I think many here are hoping it’s the latter.
Get off the patent thing you Marxists. So they think they invented something of worth they want to protect. That’s a crime? Go form a socialist state if you’re so up in arms about businesses protecting their ideas and investments.
Quit crying about shit that doesn’t even matter and evaluate the software on its own merits…
Communists ?
Yes of course ! Aven’t you yet realized that the the only kind of communism that ever worked on earth is the open-source.
Can’t you see either that you have built your own software on top of a first rate communist web framewok ?
Yes, you got Rails free of charge, with no strings attached. And it DOES contain quite a few genuinely patentable stokes of genius.
However good your idea, however brilliant your implemention your agressive patent stance has already sunk you PR-wise.
You might be able mend some of your self-inflicted damage by visiting there : http://www.patent-commons.org/
Jonathan and Dylan congrats on your launch, while I agree the consumer experience with return policies and shopping cart trust are potential issues, they are solvable. What I love is the disruptive nature of your product and the potential it brings to online shopping.
haha. go patent the iframe. good night, and good luck.
While I agree that the “patent pending” on the entry page is a bit annoying, I think your idea and execution of that idea is outstanding.
EXTREMELY well done, guys! I may use your service in the future (might save me from having to create the shopping cart functionality for a site I have in mind).
The screencast is extremely persuasive, too.
heh, I’m glad I got the patent on that whole internet shopping idea. Good one Dave, very forward thinking my man.
Uh, can you like cease and desist, or somethin like that.
No, Really, Stop it.
heh, I’m glad I got the patent on that whole internet shopping idea. Good one Dave, very forward thinking my man.
Uh, can you like cease and desist, or somethin like that.
No, Really, Stop it.
heh, I’m glad I got the patent on that whole internet shopping idea. Good one Dave, very forward thinking my man.
Uh, can you like cease and desist, or somethin like that.
No, Really, Stop it.
nice, triple post. I got the patent on that too. :)
Yea, patents are evil…the Internet should be free, it was created by THE PEOPLE…
Oh yea, it was actually created by the US Military, my bad.
It’s a big Internet world out there – stop bitching about someone who beat you to a good idea and go out and think up a few clever inventions of your own.