Monthly Archives: October 2011

Fun With Localization

I implemented something pretty fun today. You know how I said a while back that the whole point of the experimental storefront was to push the envelope to ridiculous lengths? In that spirit, I added realtime currency conversion to the price widgets.

This is what you see in the United States, in a region outside of my sales tax responsibility:

This is what you would see if you were another unfortunate denizen of the Republic of Texas, where digital goods are somehow considered to be “tangible personal property”:

And now for the fun of it, some other currencies (GBP, CAD, and EUR):

Okay, here’s how it works. It polls OpenExchangeRates.org for the latest exchange rates, then saves them to the database. Every hour and 30 seconds afterwards, it polls OpenExchangeRates.org for a fresh set of rates. So, the storefront updates the rates every hour, shortly after OpenExchangeRates updates their values, and in between, the buttons and catalog price strings pull the rates stored in the database and apply them to the default USD pricing.

The actual PayPal transaction will probably still display in USD–I don’t have any foreign currency to test it with, and this is something I guess we’ll need to find out after the public beta starts, but I’m pretty sure it’ll still be transacted in USD as that’s the default currency in my account. However, the storefront rates will still give you a good ballpark figure in your own currency, plus or minus a few percentage points, and that’ll save you the bother of hitting up Google for a conversion for every item on the page.

About those few percentage points of difference…well, there are actually a few different currency exchange rates. The interbank rates are what large blocks of currency are traded at by banks and financial institutions, then there are the retail rates, which are generally higher and assessed against smaller amounts of currency. Most currency converters and the newspapers generally display the interbank rates, while the retail rates are what you get zapped with when you exchange cash in another country or make an international transaction. To address that, I’m planning to add both a “quoted rates are approximate at best” disclaimer and add an extra 3.5% to the displayed total to account for PayPal’s conversion fee, which should bring the displayed total pretty close to what you’d actually end up paying in a non-USD currency.

Work on the experimental storefront will be somewhat spotty over the next few days, since there are a few things I have to do over at WorldWorks. Nothing sexy, mostly just time-critical administrative stuff, so I wanted to post this update to tide you guys over in the meantime. 🙂

Ouch II: The Brainhurtening

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I’m surfacing for air briefly so you guys know what I’m up to. 2 biggies:

First, the USSC gunboat has actually been more or less finished for the past few days. 15mm and 28mm sizes both. Second, there was a good reason for that post a while back about online shopping being unnecessarily sucky. 🙂

I’ve spent the last several days up to my elbows in some pretty cutting-edge stuff. HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, PayPal’s brain-hurting APIs for Express Checkout and Digital Goods, and more. I wanted to see, as an experiment, what I could do with that kind of power at my fingertips. So, it’s not really a production environment, it’s more of an experimental testbed that pushes the envelope.

I don’t want to bore you people with another textwall of dry technical details, so let’s just go to a couple of screen captures and go over the high points. Below, you can see a snapshot of the partially completed front page, with placeholder graphics. Just to give you a sense of where things will be visually.

Nothing too special there, just some news posts on the left side and what will eventually be a list of the last X new releases ordered from newest to oldest.

Okay, here’s the part that really made me work for it. This is the product page–ignore the placeholder graphics. I basically just grabbed the first promo on my hard drive and used it as a placeholder all over the place. This is where the fun stuff starts.

Below the header, on the right side of the nav strip, is a location widget. Instead of filling in crap at checkout, you just set your location on the nav strip. The first thing you’ll see is a dropdown selector for countries, then if you happen to select a country that has states or provinces associated with it, a second dropdown selector will magically appear next to it. That’s all it needs from you, a country and sometimes a state or province.

Below that, on the right side, you’ll see a price and a PayPal button. This deceptively simple looking arrangement required a staggeringly disproportionate amount of work to set up. Here’s why:

When you click it, the next thing you’ll see is a PayPal dialog right there on the same page.

When you click the Log In button, it pops up a secure mini-browser:

Then once you’ve logged in, it takes you right to the confirmation step:

Clicking on “Pay Now” returns you to the store, immediately displaying a summary dialog with a download link:

Note that I did NOT leave out any intermediate steps. What you just saw is literally what a PayPal account holder will see, step by step. I’m not kidding. That’s all there is to it. No forms to fill, just a simple PayPal login and a couple of simple button clicks. In fact, if you let it remember you, you can collapse the purchasing process into two clicks. Well, three, if you count closing that last confirmation dialog.

Okay, here’s another surprise. There is zero user account management. You don’t register or log in or anything like that. This part makes use of some pretty fun HTML5 functionality. Your download links, when you buy something, are saved to local storage on your own machine. It starts right after you buy something (note how the buy button has been replaced by a direct download link):

It’ll stay exactly like that, and the links don’t disappear unless you happen to delete your cookies and flush your browser cache. You don’t log in at all, you just visit the page and it’s all there for you. Now, if you deleted your cookies and flushed your cache, or you’re just accessing your stuff from a different computer, this is what you would see:

Uh-oh, no downloads found. However, here’s the other fun bit: syncing your downloads. All you have to do in order to sync your downloads is enter your PayPal email address and any invoice ID from any previous order:

Bam, just like that, your download shows up in your collection again:

Anyway, this is all a work in progress, and it’s very much an experiment. I don’t know how much of it is going to be practical in a production environment, and I’m pretty sure it won’t play nice with older browsers and what have you. But if you’re using a current version of a modern browser, it’s a fun peek into the future.

Some of the stuff under the hood, mostly to do with the PayPal API backend, will likely make it into the next version of the WorldWorks storefront, and having a separate experimental storefront lets me play around with some ideas and prototypes that we wouldn’t normally dare implement on a production storefront. 😀

Thoughts on online shopping

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Introductory Waffle

I’ve been thinking for the past few days about the differences between now and back in 2003, when I first got started. Specifically, in the area of online shopping.

It’s amazing to me, that after all this time, the user experience during online shopping still sucks. It’s not so bad the first time, but when you find other stores you want to shop at, you’re likely to run into differences in the user experience. I don’t really like this. For me, the optimal user experience should be similar to walking into a real store. You pull out some cash or you swipe a debit/credit card, and you leave with a bagful of goodies. Short, sweet, easy. No passwords to remember, no worrying about the safety of your personal information, just pay the cashier and leave with your purchases.

Of course, this isn’t literally possible online–if only to prevent fraud and maintain some sort of accountability, there needs to be some step to establish that you’re really who you say you are. So, online businesses have to ask for your name, address, card number, and all that, and they pass it along to their payment gateway, which will verify or decline the transaction. That’s unavoidable, but it can be made relatively painless. Not completely painless, but relatively painless. I’m gonna share some purely hypothetical thoughts on that subject over the next few pages of this post.
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Chez Ebbles has a new home…

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Some of the stuff I wanted to do in the future requires a real webhosting package, and Blogger doesn’t really cut it in that respect. So, I set up a new subdomain on ebblesminiatures.com and pointed a shiny new domain name to it.

I’ve imported all of the old Blogger/Blogspot posts, but the formatting is wonky on several of them, especially the older posts. I cleaned up a lot of the more recent posts, but I still have to work my way through the rest of the old stuff. I’ll be doing that in batches of 10 or so posts at a time, just so you know it’ll all be sorted out eventually.

Don’t forget to update your bookmarks and let me know if you run into any issues. 🙂