Product video showcases in Go

What it does

Configuration

Nothing has to be set: the zero Config is what a store runs. All three fields are Go only, and there are no settings on the Plugins screen. Showcases themselves are made on the admin’s Content › Video showcases screen.

The module reads its Config struct, not the environment. The variable names are the ones the package’s own example or the reference binary uses; in your own main() you choose where each value comes from. Where a setting has a panel label, the admin’s settings drawer can hold it too, and a value typed there wins over Config.

Setting it up

1. Install the modulePass showcases.New to gocommerce.New, as below, or start the reference binary with -showcases. It adds five tables, and the Video showcases plugin starts switched on.
2. Paste the video’s linkOn Content › Video showcases, paste the video’s own link. For a YouTube video the editor asks YouTube for its title and says if it is private or cannot be played on another site.
3. Attach products and publishPick up to 50 products or a collection, choose where it appears (the home page, the pages of its products, its collection’s page) and publish. A showcase with no products cannot be published.
4. Show it on the storefrontGET /x/showcases?on=home, ?product=<id> or ?collection=<id> lists the cards; GET /x/showcases/{slug} gives the player and the products. Report views, clicks and adds with POST /x/showcases/{slug}/events.

import (
	"github.com/itswadesh/gocommerce/core"
	"github.com/itswadesh/gocommerce/ext/showcases"
)

app, err := gocommerce.New(cfg,
	// EventsPerMinute bounds views and clicks from one address; zero means 600.
	showcases.New(showcases.Config{}),
)

How it works

• The platform’s own player

  YouTube plays from youtube-nocookie.com/embed, its privacy-enhanced embed, with a still from i.ytimg.com; Facebook plays in its video plugin. A watch URL opens the video on the platform when the player cannot. The address the store pasted is left out of the public answer.

• Only links that name a video

  youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, /live/, /shorts/, /embed/ and /v/ for YouTube; /watch, video.php, /reel/ and a page’s /videos/ for Facebook. A channel or page is refused with what to paste instead. A fb.watch or /share/ short link is refused rather than followed from the server.

• A link check before publishing

  POST /api/admin/x/showcases/check asks YouTube’s oEmbed endpoint, within five seconds, for the video’s title and whether it may play elsewhere. A private video, or one whose owner turned off embedding, comes back with what to change in YouTube Studio. YouTube being slow is not a refusal. Facebook’s oEmbed needs an app token, so a Facebook link is checked by its preview alone.

• Counted without knowing the buyer

  Views, clicks and adds to the cart are counted per showcase per day, and nothing about the buyer is kept. An add that carries its cart token ties that basket to the showcase, the last one to add to it. When the basket becomes an order, order.created credits the order and its total to that showcase once.

• Rate-limited by address

  Views and clicks from one address for one showcase are capped per minute, 600 by default; past it the answer is 429 with Retry-After. An add with its basket is not capped but is counted once per basket, because behind a proxy every buyer shares one address. X-Forwarded-For is not read.

• A small route for broadcasts

  GET /x/showcases/{slug}/now answers only the label and the product being shown, cacheable for five seconds, for a storefront to ask every few seconds during a livestream.

• Its own rights

  showcases.read for managers and staff, showcases.write for managers. Turning a showcase’s picks into a collection of their own, with POST /api/admin/x/showcases/{id}/collection, needs collections.write as well.

What it does not do

Read these before an order depends on it. No store is known to run GoCommerce in production yet, so these come from the code, not from anyone’s experience.

• No video hostingNo upload, no transcoding and no stream. Only YouTube and Facebook links are accepted. A video removed or made private on the platform later stops playing, and the module is not told.
• Live is the store’s wordThe label never comes from the link. A livestream nobody marked live shows as a video. One marked live and never ended reads live for up to twelve hours, then as a replay.
• The check warns, it does not refuseA private or non-embeddable YouTube video can still be saved and published; the check only tells the merchant. Facebook videos are not checked with Facebook at all, and have no thumbnail.
• The store’s own priceA showcase shows the default variant’s price. Price lists apply in the cart, against an address the buyer has proven, so a customer’s own price appears only there.
• Fifty productsA hand-picked list holds at most 50 products. A collection can hold more, but a showcase reads at most 50 of it when shown.
• Counts per showcase onlyThe event route accepts a product id and does not keep it, so there are no per-product counts. The rate limit is held in each process’s memory, so several instances each count their own. The event route is public, so counts can be inflated up to that limit.
• Three places on the storefrontThe public list filters for the home page, a product’s page or a collection’s page, or lists every published showcase. A showcase is listed on a collection’s page only when its products come from that collection.

Related modules

Each is a directory under ext/, imported the same way. Where this one fits in the store: What modules add to a direct-to-consumer store.

• XML sitemaps for a Go store Publish a storefront sitemap from the live GoCommerce catalogue: products, collections and CMS pages, the storefront URL and paths, and the 50,000-URL limit.
• Ecommerce wishlist in Go Let GoCommerce shoppers save products to a list kept by a token, guests included, and see which wished-for products are out of stock. Settings and limits.
• Abandoned cart emails in Go Remind shoppers about baskets they left in a GoCommerce store: a sequence of emails per kind of basket, a counted link back, and the order each one brings back.
• Google Merchant Center and Meta feeds in Go Publish a GoCommerce catalogue as a Google Merchant Center RSS feed and a Meta catalogue CSV: one item per variant, built live from the catalogue.