Hi,
I purchased rapid weaver for the purpose of helping my wife escape the hold of wix.
We were hoping to rapidly build a few small websites.
I’m wondering if someone could tell me what plugins, stacks themes etc would need to be purchased to achieve the desired effect necessary to accomplish the feat of creating a small ecommerce site. I have watched the tutorials and each specific tutorial for varying plugins. I have seen what seems like hours of Joe Workman and am still unable to determine what will need to be purchased and in what order things go together…
Lets use this site as an example: [www.paxvapor.com/pax ]
Say we want to create a site with similar components and even the layout.
My wife liked the layout and thought of some newer effects and styles such as parallax that could ad to the style and get the job done for her. What in all is needed to mimic / improve on such a simple single commodity site?
I’ve compiled a list of what I thought would solve the problem based on all of the videos, tutorials and talk. Does this list equate to a site such as the one listed above as an example?
Rapid Weaver6
Stacks 2 (for adding all these components?)
Foundation (is this necessary with stacks? This is where I get confused)
Rapid cart pro (e-commerce plugin, could not determine all options for merchant service??)
Rapid maps 3 (for “where are we located” section with locations listed by pins and database)
Accordian (for FAQ section)
Postoffice (email subscription database)
Animagic (will add to newer style)
Reflection (to use for main top image)
Parallax (For neat overlay fade effect)
Mobilize (does this ensure the page displays on all devices?)
Sharable (have to have social media connectivity!)
unlock (more social media promotion)
Doorkeeper (18+ verify)
Final word (why not)
This seems to cover the bases component wise for this type of design from what I can determine. Please advise!
Am I mistaken or thinking along the wrong lines?
Is it possible for someone who understands this better than I to in quick list form tell me how to connect these things into one conducive site. I can play for hours with this and get nearly no where… Not sure where to put the first foot down.
I used to build with html in dreamweaver and microsoft front page 10 years ago and this is completely different…
For example:
1.open foundation theme?
2. Open stacks page?
3. etc.
my mind is clouded with all of this information and I am trying to make quick sense of things. We are both very technically inclined. This is all new to us though! Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Let me start by clearing the first thing that you say confused you up.
Foundation is a theme / theme builder. It’s a set of stacks and a blank theme that allows those that do not wish to be constrained by a theme that has been developed to look a certain way.
While this is great and offers quite a bit more besides, it may be a step to far for your first steps.
I’d suggest starting with either a built in theme like Telsa, or a third party theme of your liking. At least that takes a massive load off your shoulders to get you started, you can always switch themes or build your own foundation based theme later.
Stacks 2
Rapid Cart
Rapid maps
These are all what we call plugins. Similar to the page types you would have seen already built into Rapidweaver, plugins extend rapidweavers functionality by adding these new page types. For all intents and purposes a page type is self contained within a single page of your website. There are ways and means to get that content into other pages of the site, but I won’t go down that road now.
Stacks 2 is kind of an extra special plugin / page type.
It allows you while creating your “stacks” page to use third party stacks as the building blocks of that page as well as the stacks that already ship with the stacks plugin. It’s all drag and drop. It has a small learning curve, but an hour clicking around inside a stacks page in edit mode and you’ll soon twig what this thing can do.
Stacks like : Animagic, Doorkeeper, Final word, etc etc…
These are all building block components for you to use inside a Stacks 2 page / page type.
They will all become available for drag and drop into your stacks page once installed. Stacks has a library where all your stacks are kept, both built in stacks and third party alike.
I could go on and on, but I hope that puts a few basic basics across.
There are great video tutorials over at Rapidweaver classroom if you really want to dig into everything Rapidweaver related : http://www.rapidweaverclassroom.com
What would you say is the most professional pay gateway a step above paypal… Any suggestions for ease and speed of transaction. I wound not have the first idea which would be the smoothest for customers. just trying to make things work smooth.
Personally I think Paypal is fine. I’m always happy to use it to pay for stuff. Here’s a nice simple Paypal-enabled stack - https://www.yuzoolthemes.com/themes/cart/.
Lets say the commodity is considered as related to the tobacco industry, paypal does not support this nor does square space or stripe unfortunately. Are there any rapid weaver friendly merchant setups that will work with the therapeutic vapor industry (not e-cig) Initial search resulted in these two options from what I can tell. Authorize.net and bigcommerce.com Will either of these work with rapid weaver stacks?
Hi Rob,
Thank you so much for the advice and link.
I was hoping to go with stripe but they are incompatible.
From your experience, what is the next closest match to stripe with the short pay method etc that is industry friendly?
I came up with a few and am not sure how to integrate.
Here are a few examples I came across with a couple of searches and some picking:
One warning: if you are intending to sell within the European Union, even if you are based outside it, the EU authorities demand that you collect VAT from those domiciled in an EU country and you have to do so at the rate pertaining in that country. This currently only applies to electronic products but, the last I heard, they are intending to include physical products from January 2016. Whereas companies and individuals are not required to register for VAT below a certain limit (which varies from country to country), there is no lower limit for this electronic transaction tax. This ridiculous piece of legislation is probably unenforceable for those based outside the EU even though the IRS are apparently intending to force US suppliers to conform. Even within the EU, there is massive confusion, not to say chaos and I doubt if many national tax authorities, including the UK’s HMRC are in a position to police it properly. That said, I am law-abiding and am staying clear of selling products from my site until they scrap the regulations.
FastSpring may be suitable for you and they also handle any EU VAT issues. I know Realmac uses them and I am about to start selling a product through them.
@Rob, what you mean, I think, is that RapidCart Pro can handle such transactions. The vendor must still register for VAT (if he/she is not already registered) and account to the tax authorities. This is a very unwelcome additional burden for many of us.
I’m very impressed with what RapidCart Pro offers but my main business is printed books which are VAT zero-rated in the UK and so I don’t need to be registered for VAT unless I want to sell electronic products directly from my website. In any case the UK VAT threshold is £82,000 p.a., way above my turnover. For me and, I suspect, many others, the extra paperwork is something we could do without.
@ashleykaryl yes FastSpring do seem to handle all that – at a rather hefty price.
it is a limited template and monthly membership service that you must pay for to even maintain access to your site and it’s also made in their code. You have to pay to have the site code output to put into your possession as well. I can keep going with downsides to online pay per month editors particularly that one
Yes, having done some research since I posted, I’m less enamoured with the idea of Wix aswell, mainly because I don’t want to be tied into the subscription thing and also because it doesn’t seem to have the versatility of RW. Thanks for confirming.
We have just released RapidCart Pro 4 with support to stock management, coupon codes, new stacks to build custom product pages and much more.
If you are an existing RapidCart Pro user you don’t need to buy a new license.
Your license has been automatically migrated to the new RapidCart Pro 4 Advanced license.