I’ve talked a little about the secret project a few times but now, finally, the secret is out. It’s called Heartland Stores.

Heartland Stores is not your typical yadda-yadda web store front. Actually, it’s not like that at all.  Heartland Stores wants to help non-profit organizations with doing product fundraisers.  It’s really very simple — instead of going door-to-door to your neighbor or taking a sheet to work, you send a link to the Heartland Stores website that has your organizations name.  When someone follows that link and buys some product, your organization gets part of proceeds — a large part, in fact.  The products are shipped directly to the buyer and the organization gets a check from Heartland Stores.

Sounds simple, right?  Well, yeah, it is.  There’s no money to gather, no product to distribute — just have people click on the link and go shopping.

And wouldn’t you know?  We are finally having our first fundraiser from the folks at Lost and Found, Inc.   I would like to thank them for taking a chance on an experimental way to do fundraising.

Other people can talk more about the business side of Heartland Stores. It probably doesn’t need to be mentioned that I did the technological stuff, right?  So let’s talk about that . . .

The store itself is ran by Django using a shopping cart called Satchmo.  I customized Satchmo a bit to do our “link to an organization”, and let Satchmo do all the payment processing, etc. The layout and the menus done with YUI.  And the fine folks at Joyent are hosting us.

So that’s it — that’s the secret project. It seems like a new child has been born.  But it hasn’t been easy up to here and it won’t be easy after this, either.  The site will evolve, our business will evolve and our customers will, too.