Lando store

[pirog]

Currently it is difficult to stay up to date with new sponsors who have a swag benefit. We could get around this by

1. Having a very basic store with our merch eg tee-shirts, mugs, stickers etc, all of which send out on demand eg no warehousing etc
2. Sending out a coupon code on eligible sponsors anniversary date for them to get a free item from the store.

Benefits of this are fairly obvious:

1. Not a ton of overhead on our part once its set up, eg automatically send coupon codes
2. People can also one-off purchsed merch without sponsoring, the proceeds of which can help fund lando
3. More merch out there = more marketing

[reynoldsalec]

I've setup our t-shirt "product" on Printify: https://printify.com/ Doing fulfillment on a few orders for our Patreon sponsors now, so we'll see how it works out.

Printify has integrations with 7 different common ecommerce platforms for a store; I connected ours to a new Shopify account that we can use for an ecommerce front if we want. For $9/month we could just put buy links on the lando.dev site, their full store plans start at $29. Buy links may be enough if we are just doing t-shirts and a couple other things. I'll take a look and see what the experience looks like for both options.

The cool part about Printify is that they integrate with hundreds of printers, so you can choose between different printing vendors to find the best one for the specific product you want to sell...they have options for most product types you can think of (shirts/mugs/pillows/art/bags/etc)

[reynoldsalec]

Did a bit more research here on setting up a store for Lando with Shopify.

Fulfilling Sponsor Benefits w/Shopify

Unfortunately Shopify doesn't let you issue a discount code that gives free shipping and free item value, nor does it let you combine two discount codes. We can, however, give each sponsor a unique Gift Card code with $20 on it.

1. New sponsor is registered by Lando API.
2. Generate Gift Card code. At first this would be a manual process (they're one-time use codes, so one per customer), but in the future this could be automated (need to look at Shopify API).
3. We send the new Herald an email with the Shopify Gift Card code and a link to the store.
4. Herald visits the store, selects their item, enters all their fulfillment info etc. and enters the Gift Card.

Fulfilling Sponsor Benefits w/Printify

Alternative would be fulfilling directly via Printify. I've done this for a couple people now; the process is very quick, but it would require use to still collect shipping info directly from sponsors.

1. Herald signs up.
2. Herald receives Mailchimp email, fills out Hubspot details.
3. Create a "manual" order in Printify (in the future we could automate this via the API).
4. Herald receives an email when their t-shirt ships.

With either approach, I think the real conversation is around whether a store will cannibalize potential sponsors. A $4/month sponsor is worth more to us than a one-time t-shirt buyer, since we make very little off of the t-shirt. However, people who buy a t-shirt and aren't sponsors would be good sponsorship campaign targets...it's possible the store is an initial step in the sponsorship funnel.

[pirog]

@reynoldsalec very solid. Thinking more broadly about our other Lando Alliance/Sponsor initiatives we could probably do this in two phases.

Phase 1

1. Launch a standalone store at store.lando.dev powered by shopify/printify/etc, get some tees, hoodies and mugs rolling there
2. Test out the options ^ to make sure the quality and experience all checks out
3. Fulfill existing sponsors with manual gift cards or manual entry
4. Fulfill future sponsors by manually sending out gift cards to the store

This would definitely help us fulfill the swag benefit more frequently and in less overall time

Phase 2

1. Set the primary sponsorship mechanism to be via stripe Implement our own Lando sponsorship mechanism #167
2. Rework sponsorships so benefitted tiers are only possible via stripe, github/patreon/open collective are available but purely for donations eg no benefits
3. Automate the stripe integration so it can automatically dispense gift cards to the store
4. Cut out hubspot and replace with basically stripe/mailchimp

@reynoldsalec am i missing anything obvious above? interested in feedback