u/michaelnovati replied · · edited
Hi. You have to be really careful because if you have any bugs or problems, people will find them and exploit them (i.e. steal your money or your products).
So you have two reasonable approaches if you want to do this for real and launch it publicly.
1. Make a shopify or similar page and customize the look and feel so it appears more custom.
2. Use commerce APIs like Stripe or BigCommerce, or even just PayPal, and build your own website from scratch using their APIs to actually store and handle financial transactions. Stripe’s API is pretty easy to use and you can use their demo mode to build something quickly without any real data. It’s a bit confusing at first because they support so many different use cases, so you want to make sure you keep it simple.
2 sounds like what you want. Just be careful with storing your api keys and your customers tokens properly so that they don’t leak out, or you will have the problems mentioned above.
I actually personally find this stuff really cool - how to securely tokenize credit cards, now to securely create payments and transactions connecting between Stripe and your own data model, it’s a great project to show off too. Password managers is another area that makes for a great project. Like look at 1Password’s white paper and try to build some of the pieces of that.