Eric Bishop's Webpage

In March of this year I released a project that I had been working on over the span of a few months, erichastourettes.com. The short pitch of the site is that I sell clothing and donate all of the profit to the Tourette Association of America. I would also describe it as the most elaborate joke of my life. I took the work very seriously, but I wanted the end result to be lighthearted and funny. In the end it paid off, I’ve gottens so many awesome, rewarding reactions to the project and the merch, and the site has grossed around $1400 and 27 total orders.

This was my first time taking a project from it’s inception and seeing it through by myself. It was some of the most fun I’ve had programming (which happens to be fun anyways). I built the front end using Hugo and Bootstrap, created a backend API for handling the ecommerce functionality using Golang, and of course I managed the whole product and business side of thmanaging tasks such as user cart and session handling, as well as interfacing with the APIs of Stripe (payment processor) and Printify (print-on-demand service) for checkout and order creation functionality. e project as well. A lot of thought was put into every aspect of the project even where it may not be apparent. Despite some challenges and my lack of experience, I delivered a fully functional site and a pretty robust backend, managing tasks such as user cart and session handling, as well as interfacing with the APIs of Stripe (payment processor) and Printify (print-on-demand service) for checkout and order creation functionality.

As far as the product and business side go, I just wanted to keep the options simple and make the checkout flow as quick as possible. Print-on-demand does not boast a stellar profit margin, but I still wanted things to be reasonably cheap so people would actually buy them. The front end is really what I focused on first, but it helped me build up the momentum I needed in order to tackle the backend. When it comes to ecommerce, I learned that its crucial to minimize the amount of time it takes for a customer to select a product and place their order. Having a thousand options or an unintuitive checkout flow would interfere with that.

I’m honestly very proud of this dumb, silly project. The fact that people have gotten a few laughs out of it is means a lot to me, and I’m looking forward to using the experience I gained in the future.