Donation Store (Self Hosted Webstore Helpdesk)

[Mark Barrett]

Register | Features | Discord | Blog | Twitter​

What is Donation Store?
So if you haven't seen before, Donation Store is the worlds first self hosted webstore and helpdesk for Minecraft Servers. Like other Market leaders, Donation Store offers the same (and more) features that they all offer however Donation Store is self hosted meaning that customisation is infinite. Not only is customisation a huge factor of Donation Store, but so is the fact that you choose where it is hosted and manage it yourself, you also do not have to pay monthly fees, just a once off fee that has been constructed and priced based on market research from multiple competitors.

Why make another platform for this?
Originally Donation Store was a small, minimal featured PHP script that I created a couple of years ago that is for sale on CodeCanyon. I thought I would leave it there but I was swamped with a huge amount of emails from people from the community asking me to add certain features that they needed (more gateways, customer chooses price etc etc), however I got fed up using Vanilla PHP as I was not seeing satisfactory returns for the amount of effort I put in. Because of this I decided that it would make more sense to create a new piece of software from scratch using different technologies, so I did!

Why are you telling us this?
Well Donation Store has actually been in development for nearly a year. The first commit was the 1st of June 2017, and development continues. Recently I have been contacted asking when it is going to be released and normally I have pushed it off saying "soon", however I can now give a confirmed date as to when Donation Store will be released.

Donation Store will be available for immediate download on 22nd June 2018.​

So what comes with this?
You can see a full list of features at https://donationstore.net/features. However alongside the release of Donation Store we will be releasing a few other things too.

The Donation Store Addon Developer Program allows people just like you to develop (for now) themes and templates for Donation Store and sell them on the Donation Store addon store. These can then be applied to anybodies store when they purchase them. Right now we are unsure as to how this will work but it will either be a rolling subscription or a cut taken from each sale and in return you will receive the Donation Store SDK and all HTML and CSS files that come with Donation Store for customisation. Applications for this will be rolled out a couple of weeks after Donation Store releases.

With this we have also planned a number of addons that we feel will work really well with Donation Store. One of them being a Vote Manager for your webstore which will allow you to add a voting module (like the old Vote4Diamonds module), onto your site. It will also come with a Votifier listener that will do things that you schedule it to do on the web app like reward players with packages, give them coupons, give them virtual currencies etc. It will also come with a notification system that will notify visiters to vote for rewards. It will finally give statistics on votes.

As of now there is one final idea which involves the social aspect of Minecraft. It is not in development currently but we are playing with ideas. Some ideas are acheivements and social profiles which will be integrated with the core Donation Store plugin.

All these addons will be coming after the release of Donation Store. But once Donation Store has been released development will not stop. We will be ironing out any bugs that people bring to our attention, but also we will be implementing new requested features that may have been left out upon release.

How do I keep updated?
The best way to keep updated is to join our Discord server, the link to which can be found at the top of this post. By registering on the Donation Store site you are also ensured to get less frequent but more important updates as they come out.

Also, there will be a demo of the current version of Donation Store released in the next couple of days!

If you have any questions please drop them below or you can contact us at https://donationstore.net/support. All non technical questions can go to sales.

More in depth information about features etc can be found at our blog post: https://donationstore.net/blog/6

 

[Mark Barrett]

so we should skip paying 20 bucks for buycraft and pay some random store host hundreds of dollars? not to be rude or trashing but those prices are crazy

Not at all! If you find the prices too high then we would not expect you to move from a platform like Buycraft. We encourage all small server networks to pay for what they can afford.

I am fine with people skipping our prices and using something like Buycraft, but what I am a bit confused by (nearly every time people mention it), is when people say our prices are high. Okay I will admit it, from the get go our prices are a lot more expensive initially then other options. However let me ask you this, how long do you expect your Minecraft server to be running? If its anymore than 5 months then Buycraft is the more expensive option, Enjin too! For example, both Enjin and Buycraft equate to around €25 per month. After 5 months you are paying the same as Donation Store and after the 6th your paying even more. Donation Store's payments are once off, they do not require you to pay again (unless you require support outside of the amount you are provided in your plan).

I'm not trying to be rude either but our plan is to aim our product towards servers that have a long future. A future that allows them to pay for this software once, and never have to pay for it ever again. Initially we do not aim to market towards servers with 10-15 players as yes it comes across as being really expensive. But a big network that turns over tens of thousands of dollars a month, it's not a big deal.

Oh and I almost forgot, the main reason why Donation Store is priced the way it is, is because you get complete access of the source code. It is all open for you to tweak, edit and add features to. If we could protect the source code but still provide it to people we could but that is physically not possible.

Just to note, there has been talks about trying to push a cheaper hosted version for smaller servers but at this time it won't happen for quite a while as that is not our main focus.

 

[Mark Barrett]

Alright, so 125$ plus the cost of buying web hosting // dedicated server.

I'd like to hear you ideas around pricing. Would you rather I charge $20 once off and give you all of the source code that you can do what you like with?

 

[Mark Barrett]

Obviously not. Silly. Just stating that.

But the funny thing is I myself have tried to do market research with this topic before and the result was that all small servers basically want the entire source code for one months subscription to Buycraft or free. The features we've tried to add to this can in some ways rival Buycraft Enterprise which is ~ €55 per month + 1% of earnings over 7k I believe? Not sure the exact figures.

The main reason why the pricing is the way it is, is because when I released V1 people flooded to me asking can they move to another platform because Enterprise was too expensive to them, and if you didn't have it, the support just wasn't great.

I believe there is a definitive line between this product and others. Buycraft etc work with using SaaS, which I believe is a great system, however the main USP for Donation Store is that it is self hosted and completely customisable. I've been told that self hosted is an advantage not a disadvantage. People who want to subscribe to monthly payments are free to do so and there are platforms that allow that, and upfront they are not as taxing as a once off payment. But there are people that do want to pay once off and they want to never have to worry about paying again. If there was no one with this need I wouldn't be developing this.

 

[Overlord]

Do you think Hypixel or other extremely large servers are unable to develop their own store? Many of them love having things built in-house, yet still retain the usage of Buycraft.

The reason is simple: fraud protection.

Minecraft is an area with lots of chargebacks. Kids using parents cards without authorisation, buyer regret, literal fraud in attempt to get something for free, buyer regret, etc...

Buycraft can easily keep a log of these things, matched against UUID, and offer the data across all stores, allowing servers to benefit from the data by tens of thousands of other servers over the course of many years. That data is invaluable in decreasing chargeback rates, and hence saving staff time and money.

Buycraft kills the market. Their pricing is very reasonable for the added protections you get by using their service. There's a reason there is no market for competing solutions, especially self-hosted ones.

I think your product looks cool and quite professional, your website is nice and you guys clearly aren't incompetent, but I'm not sure what luck you're gonna have here. It's a high price, smaller servers benefit from the reduced monthly (and hence spread out, reducing risk) pricing of Buycraft. Medium and large servers benefit from the fraud protection. I can't see this product being valuable for communities.

 

[Sam]

so we should skip paying 20 bucks for buycraft and pay some random store host hundreds of dollars? not to be rude or trashing but those prices are crazy

This is actually cheaper. $20/mo adds up overtime, this is a 1 time fee. Also you should have a website for you server, and you can put this on it.

Do you think Hypixel or other extremely large servers are unable to develop their own store? Many of them love having things built in-house, yet still retain the usage of Buycraft.

The reason is simple: fraud protection.

Minecraft is an area with lots of chargebacks. Kids using parents cards without authorisation, buyer regret, literal fraud in attempt to get something for free, buyer regret, etc...

Buycraft can easily keep a log of these things, matched against UUID, and offer the data across all stores, allowing servers to benefit from the data by tens of thousands of other servers over the course of many years. That data is invaluable in decreasing chargeback rates, and hence saving staff time and money.

Buycraft kills the market. Their pricing is very reasonable for the added protections you get by using their service. There's a reason there is no market for competing solutions, especially self-hosted ones.

I think your product looks cool and quite professional, your website is nice and you guys clearly aren't incompetent, but I'm not sure what luck you're gonna have here. It's a high price, smaller servers benefit from the reduced monthly (and hence spread out, reducing risk) pricing of Buycraft. Medium and large servers benefit from the fraud protection. I can't see this product being valuable for communities.

There's still a problem with chargebacks, even with BuyCraft. Just use a VPN and different info and boom! You've bypasses BuyCraft. The problem is paypal, not the store solution. Also this has multiple payment methods so you don't have to use PayPal. Also self-hosted can be better so you can reduce costs by hosting this on a website you already pay for and not having monthly fees for the shop. Also the customization is next-level.

 

[Mark Barrett]

Do you think Hypixel or other extremely large servers are unable to develop their own store? Many of them love having things built in-house, yet still retain the usage of Buycraft.

The reason is simple: fraud protection.

Minecraft is an area with lots of chargebacks. Kids using parents cards without authorisation, buyer regret, literal fraud in attempt to get something for free, buyer regret, etc...

Buycraft can easily keep a log of these things, matched against UUID, and offer the data across all stores, allowing servers to benefit from the data by tens of thousands of other servers over the course of many years. That data is invaluable in decreasing chargeback rates, and hence saving staff time and money.

Buycraft kills the market. Their pricing is very reasonable for the added protections you get by using their service. There's a reason there is no market for competing solutions, especially self-hosted ones.

I think your product looks cool and quite professional, your website is nice and you guys clearly aren't incompetent, but I'm not sure what luck you're gonna have here. It's a high price, smaller servers benefit from the reduced monthly (and hence spread out, reducing risk) pricing of Buycraft. Medium and large servers benefit from the fraud protection. I can't see this product being valuable for communities.

As Sam provided an excellent reply as to chargebacks and Buycraft I cannot add much to what he said. However what I can add is that like Buycraft, Donation Store too collects analytics. Unfortunately at the beginning there won't be a lot of data but the more Donation Store is used the more data it will receive. Right now (at the owners discretion, (see attached image)), they can turn on Donation Store Analytics, which at this point only collect information regarding user bans on the control panel. However I am currently implementing the ability to share analytics regarding Donation Store payments. This information will be sent to our servers and shared safely across the entire Donation Store network. Payment information and chargeback information will be collected when either occur. User reports and a chargeback threshold will also try and stop players from purchasing. I.e if a user has a certain threshold and they try to login with their username they are banned from purchasing on the store.

As for servers like Hypixel, no I do not think the sole reason they use Buycraft is because of Fraud Protection. As Sam said, the problem lies with the payment handler. Unfortunately there are some simple ways to work around some of their implemented security measures.

 

[traditional]

I am gonna be honest, this looks very nice and professional. I wish you the best of luck.

 

[Mark Barrett]

I am gonna be honest, this looks very nice and professional. I wish you the best of luck.

Thank you I really appreciate the positive feedback!

 

[Mark Barrett]

Maybe you should add a lite version for like 20$ ...

Unfortunately we cannot add a version for that price that gives people complete access to source code as we cannot limit what the user can do with that code. Perhaps in the future we can create a basic version that has a stripped back feature set and offer it for that price. Or even a hosted version. But as of now we can only offer the prices we have for the release on the 22nd.

 

[Sleepyxd]

looks really nice! Good luck

 

[Mark Barrett]

There has been a delay with the release, however it is coming soon. Also, Xsolla is no supported!

 

[RoboMat2.0]

You can release a cheaper self hosted version and protect code with ioncube php encryptor. WHMCS uses it. And it can't be unencrypted. The customer just has to get a free. simple PHP zen extention to load the protected code.

 

[Yandere]

I like it