Ecommerce store

News & General Discussion
1

This is my first post and I’m a Unity noob.

I was going to create an ecommerce app for a physical product that I am launching, but decided that Unity would be better for the following reasons:

  • load times - I don’t mind a 5-10 second load time as we are creating a cooperative type of commerce, i.e. users own the cooperative and therefore shouldn’t mind a few seconds to get into the experience

  • battery life - I know a game engine is constantly running as opposed to an event-driven app engine, but our users will not be spending so much time inside our experience that this should matter too much

The upside of using Unity will be a uniquely gamified commerce experience (leaderboards, level up, missions, etc.) . So this post is not too long, I won’t go further into that now.

My main questions are:

  • Shopify has just launched something called the Unity Buy SDK. It allows developers to sell physical products inside a Unity game. I do not think the Shopify solution will be robust enough as I need an ability for users to sort and filter search results. More significantly, I want users to have their own storefront (think marketplaces like Ebay, Etsy, Amazon). Is there a way for me to setup an ecommerce platform with robust features like this and importantly – users will not need to leave the experience/environment I’m creating?

  • My product is a “platform product”. In other words, it is a product that users can customize with their own designs. Though my product is not a t-shirt, we can use that for an example. I would like to create an interface where users can create or upload their own designs to a personal storefront in our marketplace. If it sells, we manufacture/ship the product and the creator gets paid. This will require the user to create a “sellers” account, which I’m thinking could be the same account that a regular store shopper sets up to make a purchase, but also have a bank account attached to receive funds from any product sales and monthly reports on how their store is doing. Is it possible to create something like this with Unity?

2

It certainly is possible though probably a lot of work. Is this a mobile only product or do you also want it to be browser and pc based?

3

Thanks for your reply Dustin. It needs to be mobile product. Browser and PC are not necessary. May I ask why you believe it to be a lot of work?

4

I’m not saying it won’t be worth it. Sounds like a cool product, just saying there’s not a simple drag and drop solution to do what you need. Not much more work if any than developing the same thing in JS or native.

I asked about mobile vs browser just in case search engines were a consideration but they’re not with it being strictly a mobile product.

5

Thanks Dustin. We will be launching our product through schools as fundraising tool. As a cooperative, teachers love it. They keep all the profits, which are desperately needed in an underfunded system. Kids go crazy for the product and parents love that kids can earn money (not only for classrooms – anyone can create and sell our product). By gamifying this, you could say it’s the perfect storm…a happy storm tho lol.

Just need a robust system to handle a ton of user-generated content as there is zero risk to upload a design. A buyer will require strong sort and filter options to wade through it all.

6

hi ,

it’s possible with RestApi , communication with your store Api like prestashop or magento or any …Ebay … with post delet update etc… json format…in webgl
and in mobile platform is to call a inside the app “add to cart” the Url inside a webview.

it’s done already , i made it successfully.

7

Necro post - but using a GE for an ecommerce app is not a smart idea due to the unnecessary overheads.