How to Build a Product Catalog on Steemit
Selling something? You can sell directly from your Steemit pages.
Please excuse the self-promotion here as I'm demonstrating this using my own company (FoxyCart). You can do the same thing with PayPal buttons or Pay with Amazon buttons. The idea is to use Steemit blog posts as your product pages. You can even create category pages linking all your various product pages together. The example below demonstrates how you can list all your products on one page.
Here's a simple example:
| Image | Product | Price | Add To Cart |
|---|---|---|---|
 | A Simple Product | $10 |  |
 | Bundled Product: Camera | $100 | |
 | Bundled Product: Camera Bag | $10 |  |
| Monthly Subscription to your amazing service! | $25 |  |
Go ahead, click the add to cart links (hold down CTRL or Command to open in a new window). If you want to complete a checkout, use 4111 1111 1111 1111 as a test card number.
If you have beautiful works of art, photos, or anything else you'd like to display and sell, why not host them on the blockchain? Even if people don't purchase from your Steemit pages, they might upvote your work while they are window shopping.
Featuring your products should be as simple as learning a bit of Markdown to display your images and building add to cart links for FoxyCart or a similar cart/checkout service. PayPal and Amazon have tutorials for their pay buttons and FoxyCart has some examples on our home page here:
Eventually Steemit will morph into a blockchain marketplace where things can be bought and sold directly for Steem Dollars (that's going to be amazing!). In the meantime, you can start setting up a product catalog now. For those outside of Steemit who find your product pages organically and aren't yet ready to figure out BTC or SMD to buy from you, they can still purchase through traditional payment methods like credit cards, PayPal, or Amazon.
If you want to try this out, FoxyCart is free to use until you want to turn on a live payment gateway (we support over 90 of them). After that, we charge a monthly fee.
What do you think?
We could create a whole retail section on Steemit to drive even more traffic to the site.
I really like this. Let me know if you make more progress.
Thanks @pairmike. There's not really much more that needs to be done as all of this can be accomplished right now. It's really just a matter of adding links to your pages and styling things up based on your needs.
Love this! I totally forgot about using <a> tags to create cart items on foxycart! Goes to show you some of the flexibility foxycart has to offer!
Thanks Ben :)
I'm sad three of the images on this post don't work anymore. They died at one point and now I can't edit this post to fix them. :-(
That's a bummer. I'd like to see that ability exist. I'd say the platform could do a diff on revisions and if a x% (or, some fancy little math equation) detects too much of a change, perhaps it alerts all of the readers with a big yellow alert at the top of the page, or perhaps, it just doesn't allow you to post. In addition, I'd also like to be able to see revisions of changed posts and comments.
Wow this is cool! A lot of possibilities on Steemit. Keep us updated on your progress :D
Quality information from end to end.
This is a great idea. I see this was written a year ago, do these methods still work here?
They sure do! :) Keep in mind, this isn't pure Steemit functionality, it's an integration with my company, FoxyCart.
I should revisit this post and do an updated version. I've wanted to fix the images in this one, but it's archived.
Awesome! thanks for the feedback.