Adding my thoughts to build upon what Seddon has already said:
The store is not the most mission critical work that we do, but it is working well. It is good to have people wearing Wikipedia t-shirts out there and to meet the need of the people who want to purchase Wikimedia merch. It is also a very nice thing to be able to thank an editor https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Merchandise_giveaways with a Wikipedia coffee mug from time to time. The store is a lean operation and is self sufficient. And the profits from the store fund the give away program, so the more we sell the more we give away.
The team who works on this has done a very good job of keeping the costs low, producing products people want, and executing the operational side (they get people the products they ordered on time). We don't have large quantities of merch ringing up high warehouse costs. The merch is stored in Springfield, Missouri (not San Francisco) where the rent is low. Between sales and the giveaway program, the inventory moves pretty quickly.
If we had to build out our own sales platform in order to do this, it probably would not be worth it. As it is, the shop is meeting a expressed need, turning a profit, and allowing us to give merch away. I think the team has done a very good job with the shop this year.
On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Vi to vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Above all hosting a shop means: *production on demand: no "risks" but products become more expensive and slow to deliver *warehousing: means immobilizing a certain amount of money at the risk to accumulate unsold items. IMHO an internal shop would be justified by turnover at least 10 times greater than Joseph's estimate in following email.
Vito
2016-03-21 20:43 GMT+01:00 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Have you considered the cost? It is not free to run a shop. When another organisation can do it for you for less, it would be not good to have an own shop on principles only. Thanks, GerardM
On 21 March 2016 at 20:39, Steinsplitter Wiki <
steinsplitter-wiki@live.com
wrote:
Why do we need such a Shop?
(I must admit that i tested the job a year ago, the product was fine,
the
shipment fast. A bit expensive for my taste.)
I agree with other users that the shop schould be hosted on wikimedia servers.
--Steinsplitter
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 17:41:46 +0100 From: rupert.thurner@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Who runs the Wikimedia Shop ?
How many orders are handled by this shop?
Rupert On Mar 21, 2016 17:32, "Joseph Seddon" jseddon@wikimedia.org
wrote:
In an ideal world then I would definitely be pushing for a fully
wikimedia
hosted online shop. I completely agree with the principles you've
raised.
But moving in-house would require resources for building and
maintaining an
ecommerce workflow that I don't think we collectively can justify.
The
setup and maintenance of any solution would require a degree of
people
power that I personally think could be spent better elsewhere in
the
movement as I am sure you would agree.
Throwing together an e-commerce site can be easy. But doing it
well,
ensuring you are PCI compliant, ensuring its stable, secure etc.
etc.
and
making it user friendly both front and back end. That takes time
and
money.
Even if we did all that we would still in end up using a third
party
payment gateway. To ensure the shop is viable and not a drain we
need
to
keep it as efficient as possible.
As Marc said Shopify may not be completely FLOSS but many of the
frameworks
that Shopify use in their hosted service are on available on Github
[1] and
I would encourage you to take a look.
With regards to the URL, I as a customer would find a top 10
website
sending me to a third party URL for their shop highly suspicious
and
I
certainly could treat it with suspicion. Making it clear that it is
hosted
by shopify I think would at least improve the situation.
Regards
Seddon
On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 7:34 PM, Ricordisamoa ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org wrote:
Il 21/03/2016 13:14, Marc A. Pelletier ha scritto: > > On 2016-03-21 8:03 AM, Ricordisamoa wrote: >> >> As in [1] I'd like to know whether the use of Shopify is
acceptable for
a
>> FOSS-friendly organization. Thanks in advance. > > > While Shopify isn't FLOSS-only, they're a fairly okay place that
does
> contribute to FLOSS themselves (mostly in the Ruby and Go
worlds,
that
> intersect very little with our own tech). > > I don't think it's reasonable to expect that every external
supplier is
> all-FLOSS. For one, the movement would be pretty much stuck
without
> hardware, networking gear, and power at the very least. Not
every
> service/provider even *have* pure-FLOSS alternative - let alone
good or
even
> adequate ones. > > -- Coren / Marc >
My concern was about the (likely proprietary) JavaScript that is
run
on
the
customers' devices, but it turns out that it isn't actually
required
to
browse and purchase?
I very quickly looked, and it appears to be mostly open libraries
and
Shopify specific code for making purchases. However any amount of tracking could be hidden somewhere in their JavaScript, and an audit today doesnt mean it is safe to use
tomorrow,
as the source code is not publicly reviewed before being deployed.
And yes, it'd be nice if the server side was under WMF's control
too!
IMO it is more important that any service on the "wikimedia.org" domain (and others owned by WMF) is free software.
Outsourcing the service provision is fine, provided the software is free software and the delegated service provider abides by our
terms
of use and privacy policy.
If we need to run non-free services, that isnt free software or
can't
comply with our terms of use and privacy policy, it should be
hosted
on a different domain, preferrably the domain of the service
provider
so that it is abundantly clear who the transaction is really with.
-- John Vandenberg
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