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Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
I am learning Python and Web Development. I want to set up an online store for my friend who does stitching work. She needs a site where she can display her designs and take orders for stitching.
As I am learning Python, I am planning to use framework : Sale or - http://getsaleor.com/ or Oscar http://oscarcommerce.com/.
For payment, I may use PayPal or Stripe.
Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent?
What services and technologies do you use when you'd like to quickly build a small online store?
- jordanmoconnor 8y agoCheck out https://www.starterstory.com/ https://www.starterstory.com/. There' a list of tools that these e-commerce companies use.
- patwalls 8y agoHey! Founder of Starter Story here! Check out the tools page - https://www.starterstory.com/tools https://www.starterstory.com/tools and you can see some of the more popular tools and who is using them. edit: And anecdotally, I've interviewed a few companies doing $100k/mo and loving Shopify and WooCommerce. I think those are great places to start.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoShopify or Etsy to MVP until there's traction. Don't prematurely optimize by thinking you need to use Django or write the shop yourself in the beginning. > Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent? Don't do this. Your time is worth something. Just keep an eye as things develop as to how you're going to get the data out of your prototype into a bespoke system, eventually. Source: I've helped ~5 people setup online shops this way, including quilting and artisanal yarn shops. Total time to setup was 2-3 hours per store with a screen share while on the phone with the person. EDIT: OP: To your point about learning Python; find small consulting projects that are just beyond your skill level, and take those on. Iterate along that path. This is not the path to your Python Enlightenment. I understand it's difficult to learn a programming language when you don't have a real problem to solve, I face the same problem myself.
- josefresco 8y agoThis is great advice. Anyone can setup a self-hosted ecommerce shop however, maintaining that software year 2, 3, 4 & 5 can and will be a giant pain for your average small biz. Source: I've helped ~50 small business owners setup ecommerce shops in my career.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoGood suggestion, but he said budget is very low, so is there a free solution out there?
- mkirklions 8y agoI use wordpress + woocommerce(amazon pay) I dont think this entire setup costs 200 dollars.
- Rjevski 8y agoWould not recommend anything Wordpress-based. That thing is a security and maintenance nightmare.
- richjdsmith 8y agoI'm currently the maintainer of a Woocommerce site. My client paid for a massive rewrite of the thing and despite me damn-near getting on my knees begging him to use Shopify, he stuck with WooCommerce. It is truly terrible. I cannot recommend enough to anyone to keep as far away from it as possible.
- mkirklions 8y agoCan you cite anything?
- dopamean 8y agoIt's 2018. There's almost zero reason to build an online store yourself if all that is being sold is stitching work. This sounds like a perfect use case for Shopify/Etsy/Big Cartel or any of the many sites that do this already.
- pwillia7 8y agoThere's even marketplaces for that kind of thing like craftsy.
- josefresco 8y agoThis. I work primarily with very small business owners. Early in my career I was all about open source and rolling your own. Lessons learned over the years (maintenance, compliance, shifting standards) and I now almost exclusively recommend using a third party provider.
- mkirklions 8y agoI dont use these sites, do you get user emails for follow up promotion?
- dopamean 8y agoDefinitely with Shopify. I have bought stuff from companies built on Shopify many times and I get all the normal promotional stuff you'd expect.
- pi-squared 8y agoWhat is more important for you - learning experience or getting your friend up and running fast? If it's the first - go with the frameworks you have listed but expect it will take longer than you thought before you can give her anything to work with. Like 10x longer. If it's the second - shopify or other mentioned in other comments.
- mythrowaway1124 8y agoUnless your product is an online store, don't code an online store.
- aerovistae 8y agoI don't really understand this sentiment which seems to be widely shared here. Stripe handles all the PCI stuff. What's wrong with coding up a basic store?
- magduf 8y agoExactly. PayPal is the same way: if you outsource your payment processing to one of these, then you don't have to worry about the PCI stuff. If you're intent on having a "uniform checkout experience", then it's much more difficult of course, but if you don't mind redirecting customers to PayPal to do the payment, then making your own basic store can save you a ton of money in fees.
- wehere1111 8y agohow do you do inventory management? variants? promotions? etc etc etc
- Can_Not 8y agoOP's friend needs a store quickly, and probably wants a stable, feature-rich, ready to use store. OP most likely does not want to get blind-sided discovering that the plethora of currently existing solutions have upwards of well over $1 million dollars of labor-hours (features, QA, documentation) put into them. Magento might even have over $1 billion in labor-hours. Rolling your own out of simple ignorance regarding what exists is already rather dumb, but the surprise finding out that making anything worth using is a full-time job will be soul crushing, depressing, and may even damage OP's relationship. Writing an ecommerce CMS because you are educated on what exists and want to innovate is a completely different matter.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoYou also need to take care of: Catalog/pricing/inventory management Category/multiple product display/design Search Single product page display/design Shipping options Checkout, aside from payment (partial flow, or completely externally hosted?) Order management (how to get orders out of the system and into a warehouse to be packed) Promotions and discounts (will you have coupons?) Customer feedback/product reviews Contact me/us And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Source: I work for an ecommerce consultant (I use/live in Salesforce Commerce Cloud/formerly Demandware)
- mattkevan 8y agoAgree with the other posts here. Don’t write your own store. Shopify/Squarespace/Sellfy etc. are much cheaper and lower risk, at least to start with. From experience PCI compliance and tax rules are pains you do not want to deal with. I’d only ever recommend custom coding if you have some extremely specific requirements. Even WooCommerce on Wordpress would be a better starting point. If you want to tinker, you could build a store using a static site generator like Jekyll combined with a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage the inventory and something like Snipcart [0] for e-commerce functionality (I’m working on a site that does this). [0] https://snipcart.com https://snipcart.com
- dfee 8y agoWow. I’ve been down a rabbit hole with cart building and DB design and never realized that Snipcart existed. What other magic is out there?
- nkg 8y ago+1 Snipcart looks neat. Actually I was just showing it to a teammate.
- thirdsun 8y agoIt's rarely mentioned, but if you like Snipcart, Shopify also offers a custom solution for storefronts and static websites: https://help.shopify.com/api/custom-storefronts/js-buy-sdk https://help.shopify.com/api/custom-storefronts/js-buy-sdk You basically get all the benefits of Shopify's excellent, easy to use admin/backend area while building a custom frontend on top of it.
- fergyfresh 8y agoDon't write off saleor though. It's basically fully featured OOTB, all you really have to do is integrate payments and your own AWS setup if you don't wanna use Heroku. Probably easier than using Squarespace and def cheaper. I haven't looked into Shopify or Sellfy though. It has taxes and configurable shipping costs by region. I was going to use Shopify or Squarespace until I found saleor. I definitely agree with using Etsy first though to gain traction before trying to get higher margins by rolling your own.
- elicash 8y agoI haven't used it, but you might be interested in https://craftcommerce.com https://craftcommerce.com
- rjavens 8y agoI'd recommend this as well. I've got a little bit of experience with it and it was easy to set up and integrates really nicely with Stripe. Can't recommend Craft enough as a CMS.
- yurishimo 8y agoIt's also $999 for use on a live website. It's a dark pattern that they don't expose the pricing requirement except at the bottom of the home page. I can buy a lot of hosting on different platforms for a thousand bucks.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cdjk 8y agoShopify or something like that unless you have very specific requirements. And if you’re asking in HN you don’t have very specific requirements.
- dataminded 8y agoWordpress + Woocommerce on Lightsail
- projectramo 8y agoThis is how I would do it, step by step: 1. Read through the django documentation and try to set up a single site. 2. Realize I was reading django 1.6, and my system had v 1.8 which broke a few things 3. Get on Upwork to hire someone to do it for me 4. Get frustrated with the quality of applicants, but have hope for one person who made the interview 5. Go back to Django and decide that Rails is the right way. Struggle with RVM. 6. Hire the person on upwork, and be disappointed with the first version. Ask why they decided to use wordpress and a custom PHP widget. 7. Go back to Django and get a basic blog up and running 8. Finally pay someone a decent amount on Upwork who sets up the store in no time. Unfortunately, there is no known shortcut.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoUnfortunately, there is no known shortcut What about just jumping to step 8 immediately?
- projectramo 8y agoI tried that, and it turned out I was actually at step 3.
- a_imho 8y agoWordPress with WooCommerce. In the end there are only a handful of subtle differences between off the shelf solutions.
- mkirklions 8y agoThis does the job for me. Plus then you get a wordpress/php website. Im very happy now that I understand php and was able to make a custom theme.
- jkkorn 8y agoThe comment section is ripe with "over engineering"suggestions. If you're looking to build an online store so you can get a deeper understanding of Python: go ahead. If you're actually looking for the most efficient way of putting up something online and start selling, you're better of hitting WooCommerce, shopify, etsy or looking at other solutions on ProductHunt. Best :)
- pasta 8y agoMost people don't understand that a webshop is like a normal shop: hard and lots of work: Writing good text Taking good pictures Handling sales and delivery Handling returns (yes people will return sometimes) So I agree with most people here: don't roll your own shop but invest time in running your shop.
- mattkevan 8y agoAlso marketing. Running a successful online shop is 70% marketing, 30% everything else. Mucking about with technology should be a fraction of that. As someone who loves mucking about with technology, I got the balance very wrong with my first shop – spent so long getting it working and keeping it working I had no to time to tell anyone about it.
- gav 8y agoI would suggest that you want to get that marketing number as close to 100% as possible. Spending time on anything technology related at the start is really a distraction from the important goal of understanding products, pricing, and customers. Any time spent on technology beyond that of doing the minimum required to make selling possible is a premature optimization.
- bo1024 8y agoBut those all sound like things that have to be done regardless of whether you code your own website or use something like etsy. So are you just arguing that coding a site takes time away from doing those things?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Galaxeblaffer 8y agoTo the rest of the posters... __READ__ what he is writing.. He want total control and a low budget. Have any of you even tried Shopify ? It's low control and it's expensive as hell. Ok, so i'm actually running a pretty large store on Django Oscar. But i would say that it really depends on what you are building The only reason i choose Django oscar over something like shopify is that we sell a highly customizable product and needed total freedom to try out different ways of giving discounts and creating vouchers. If you just sell standard products then don't bother. I will give credit to the creators of Django Oscar for building a highly customizable framework and if you know your way around Django, the overhead of using it shouldn't be too large.
- akx 8y agoThe OP probably actually doesn't want total control, they just think they do for whichever reason. As for the price, $29/mo + 2.9% for Shopify Basic isn't bad. It's basically covered (one should hope) by a couple sales per month, especially for bespoke stitching products.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- exodust 8y agoSo when someone says they "want total control", your response is "no you don't". Wow. Are you a sales rep for Shopify? That $30 per month fee is bad.
- akx 8y agoNo, my response was that they _probably_ don't, if they'd evaluate that viewpoint further. Especially as a software dev/engineer, it's all too easy to think that you need absolute control. And no, now that you ask, no I'm not. I _have_ been the lead developer for at least 3 e-commerce systems though, so I know it's not trivial. Why do you think the fee is "bad"?
- 8y ago
- 0x4f3759df 8y agoIt seems like a good way to learn Python, but after you've learned enough you will lose interest in maintaining your friend's web store for practically no money.
- IloveHN84 8y agoOpenCart 100%
- handbanana 8y agoShopify. And if they start selling a lot and ship things themselves, have them look into shipping software as well (where you can buy and print postage/labels and get shipping rates for packages online)
- thatthatis 8y agoShipstation is probably the right shipping software to start with. It.Just.Works.
- handbanana 8y agoCare to expand upon that?
- cridenour 8y agoI've used Saleor before and while it was great, I was pretty familiar with Django at the time and worry it could be overwhelming as a way to learn. I've also used Wordpress + WooCommerce so if you can find a theme you like, it's a great way to get something up in < 4 hours so you can hack away on Saleor for the next few weekends.
- p0nce 8y agoDon’t write your own store, since GDPR and EU VAT it's absurdly complicated to be compliant.
- elvirs 8y agowell, everybody already said shopify but if you want completely free then you can try Square. They are very limiting when it comes to design though.
- petepete 8y agoA friend asked me the best way to start a few months ago. I advised her to use Squarespace for a while and if her idea takes off, perhaps then look at something a little more bespoke. She ignored me and contracted a local development company, ended up paying £1200 for a Wordpress/WooCommerce site that could have been set up for peanuts.
- zodPod 8y agoGood. Sometimes people need to learn hard lessons. It's kind of nice to hear that she spent way too much money in the end. Hopefully her business takes off still but I get really tired of people asking for my advice and totally ignoring it.
- EADGBE 8y ago'She don't know what she don't know'. I bet she thought/thinks she was getting a bargain.
- keypress 8y agoSo some simple maths, today Shopify medium offering is £60 per month. So that's 20 months worth of subscription. Not including any payment tax. £1200 for a 'finished' e-commerce site, with training and hosting, sounds fine to me.
- JS_Moneyboy 8y agoI write an amazing, arcane shopping cart in common lisp and host it via CGI on IIS
- jotm 8y agoDrupal or Wordpress, full control, very low budget, very low expertise needed. From a business owner's point of view, Drupal and Wordpress are amazing. But if you ask any coder, they'll tell you they're a pile of shit, so don't ask :).
- Kluny 8y agoAs a professional WordPress developer, WordPress is a non-stop frustration to work with. But as a blogger, I couldn't be happier with it. I have full control of my content and I'm not reliant on any company for hosting, software or anything else.
- richjdsmith 8y agoPlease for the love of all that is good in this world, don't use Woocommerce. I maintain a WooCommerce site - it is a fucking nightmare. Oh, as for "saving money" by choosing Woo over Shopify, in the end you pay for plugins bringing you the same functionality already built into Shopify.
- yurishimo 8y agoOne thing Woo has over Shopify is the control of the data. Self hosted will always offer more control to the store owner in every aspect of the business. I agree, not a good idea to choose Woo for cost savings alone though if you can get by on the services provided by Shopify.
- thatthatis 8y agoControl over data cuts two ways. If you control it, you also have to secure it.
- wizzzzzy 8y agoOut of curiosity, what is it you've found such a nightmare? I've worked on numerous woocommerce sites and have generally found the experience fine.
- x3sphere 8y agosame. Maybe it was awful in the past, but I've had no issues with Woocommerce in the past 2 years or so. I suppose it can get messy if you are working with some poorly coded plugins, but the base WC, works pretty well. I looked at Shopify but it looked like a huge headache to customize - seems it would be a good option if you want more of a turn key experience though.
- thatthatis 8y agoAnd you pay in setup time, and in developer maintenance time. Woo is a siren song. It has a seductive appeal: free, complete control. But then you spend 40 hours setting it up vs 5, and 10-20 hours a month maintaining it vs 0, and 20 hours getting your pages to load fast enough. And then updating plugins. And updating plugins. And updating plugins. in the end, most stores are better on Shopify or Big or Volusion.
- wilsonfiifi 8y agoYou could use an ecommerce API like Motlin [0]. This should allow you to have more control over the site and offload the ecommerce logic and processing to a 3rd party until you're confident you can roll your own. Haven't had the opportunity to use it personally but it seems like a good place to start. [0] https://moltin.com/
- ciaranconnor 8y agoI know I'm late to the party, but moltin is far from cheap, which is a shame, as it's a very interesting approach. As far as I'm aware, they still offer a free tier of 30k API operations per month, which apparently approximates 10k page views - which is very kind of them. However, I had to email them to get pricing information, and was informed their pricing _starts_ at $1k/month (I was actually quoted $12k/year) for 250k operations (i.e. ~80k page views). Ouch. To make matters worse, they use to charge $49/month for 300k operations [1]. I was informed that this was very out of date information, as apparently they've got a new logo and everything since then. But still, I feel bad for anyone who got vendor-locked to them. All in all, probably not a bad product, but definitely one to avoid for scenarios like OP's. [1] https://www.g2crowd.com/products/moltin/pricing https://www.g2crowd.com/products/moltin/pricing
- Hackwar 8y agoJoomla and Hikashop. Yes, it is more work to set up than simply using shopify, but you are independent, you are flexible, it is cheap and when something like GDPR comes around the corner that prevents a system like shopify (or shopify is bought by Amazon or similar) you still have your shop. It is also Opensource. Also, if you are selling stuff that might be against the terms of shopify, your shop might get deleted, but not if you role your own installation. Definitely don't invent your own shop system, but use your own installation and an opensource solution.
- scoot 8y agoAnyone know of an online store that lets you set up a revenue share with the content creator (similar to ThemeForest etc.)?
- matte_black 8y agoHow about a minimal static page with an email address or phone number at the bottom for placing orders? Sounds very custom and high end. Total control over the customer relationship. Even GDPR compliant.
- ibdf 8y agoIs this 1999?
- bo1024 8y agoFrom my armchair, this solution sounds great. The only drawback is that discoverability is difficult -- sites like etsy probably bring you some marketing for free just by showing up in searches.
- matte_black 8y agoYes, but even if you have a product on Etsy you will still have to advertise to make it successful. The difference with a static page is you can have a very optimized experience that loads fast for users all around the world. And with a myriad of options for people to contact you, you can engage in real conversation that will have a much higher chance of making a sale. Indeed, by slowing down the checkout process and weeding out impulse buyers, you can paradoxically break into higher quality sales for high value or custom crafted items.
- rblion 8y agoShopify and/or Wordpress. You can get so much done with those two but a lot of developers I know just dismiss them. Not sure why.
- jventura 8y agoLike other posters, I suggest to test the market before writting your own software. A client of mine is using https://shopk.it https://shopk.it for the store front, and it seems quite ok at 10€/month. It allows you to have your own domain attached to it, but you have to pay a little extra for https (which is kind-of strange, but...).
- onetokeoverthe 8y agoThanks for crashing my browser. Shopk.it broke my internet.
- blairanderson 8y agoI'd say it depends on what you're selling but most people should use Shopify and plug into Amazon for better distribution. Truth of the matter is if you're spending time building the store, you won't be spending enough time building the products or marketing them. source: I help large(and small) companies strategize and manage roughly $25m/year of eCommerce sales.
- codyzazulak1 8y agoI've posted once in this thread already, but I can't stress enough that you should use Shopify. Not only that, but there's an excellent article front page regarding selling online here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17239128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17239128
- exodust 8y agoAnd I can't stress enough that they should not use Shopify. They said "total control" and independent. That is the opposite of what Shopify provides. It sounds like you love Shopify, that's great for you. Some of us like to actually develop websites and customise the checkout proecess, the cart, the categories, the product pages, the collections, the wishlists, the account membership, the invoices, reports, .... the whole lot. It's good to have control rather than be tied to some fast food e-commerce solution.
- jrs95 8y agoSalesforce Commerce Cloud! Just kidding. Don't use this unless you truly hate yourself.
- HenryTheHorse 8y agoThat's Demandware, right? I am not familiar with the product, but what did you not like about it?
- jrs95 8y agoIt is Demandware. The pricing is awful (a flat rate of hundreds of thousands + 3.5%), the old pipeline based model is awful, and even the new JS based replacement isn't great. It has the ability to run "jobs" but the error reporting around them tends to suck & so does the coordination aspect of it. Importing data is a pain, there's XML everywhere and the schema borders on being nonsensical. The underlying tech is just old and shitty and you can tell. Not worth what they're charging for it IMO. I'm hoping to investigate Shopify Plus as an alternative. Not sure what kind of functionality it might be missing vs Demandware, but the difference in pricing alone is worth it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- h3cate 8y agoI work for a company called shopblocks (https://shopblocks.com https://shopblocks.com) where you can create a e-commerce site and have full control over the layout. I can highly recommend!
- rwhitman 8y agoAs someone who's done quite a bit of e-commerce solutions architecture for ecommerce businesses leveling up, I can say without a doubt the worst solution you could choose for a newly created store in 2018, would be roll out a home grown build. You need to choose the solution that is best for your friend's business over the long term, not what is most interesting as a dev. Use Shopify, as it's the most scalable over the long run, without a dev needed to keep the lights on. But even something like Etsy will do. Do not go with Django / Python, and I say this as a Django dev myself. The second you get a higher priority project, your friend will be in a real jam. Maintenance with Django / Python is prohibitively expensive with freelancers, and needs a high level of engineering skill to keep up with business requirements over time. Particularly things like packages & dependency upgrades, can lead to tech debt with cascading maintenance costs and increase likelihood of outages. Enough is changing in ecommerce around 3rd party vendor dependencies, security standards and regulations, that an un-patched Django site can get burned pretty quickly. The cost of migrating to another ecommerce platform from something proprietary can become extremely expensive as well, so do your friend a favor and choose a scalable saas platform that will last. Good luck.
- kabren 8y agoEtsy, Shopify, something like that. As someone else here said, when running your own store, you want to get as close to spending 100% of your time and energy on marketing and closer to 0% of your time on tinkering with technology. Etsy is nice, because you have some eyeballs built in.
- eyroot 8y agoWhat about Magento? :)
- kenrose 8y agoBought by Adobe... likely killed within a year. :)
- notaspider 8y agolol do NOT use Magento (unless you like headaches and bugs)
- Hoasi 8y agoI'd recommend Gumroad for something like this. One of the fastest, easiest ways to get a small shop going. The interface is very intuitive, but what makes Gumroad stand out is that e-commerce couple with basic CRM. A sound approach to sell craftwork while building an audience. Your friend can start with the free plan. You don't get full control yet—although an open-source version is planned. But as others have said it, it is not worth the pain when starting out.
- Kagerjay 8y agoI think for small stores shopify or woocommerce / wordpress / ebay / etsy / amazon or whatever works just fine. Especially if you need to validate your store as well. You can get a store up in a few hours if you are dealing with a few hundred SKUs. You can add all the data there manually through the CMS or with an excel / FTP import. For many places, this is good enough. For larger stores, I consider the following approach - Develop agnostically. This means don't build with any stack of tools in mind. I have a prepros-sass-pug-typescript template here https://github.com/Kagerjay/prepros-pug-sass-typescript-boilerplate https://github.com/Kagerjay/prepros-pug-sass-typescript-boil... specifically for generating an ecommerce frontend multipage mockup. Every ecommerce site is going to be built in HTML/CSS/JS regardless of what backend languages or frameworks you decide (PHP, python, etc). All you really need is a home page, category grid, product grid, product page, and checkout page. Throw in dummy data here, and then use whatever backend system and/or framework afterwards. - Doing any backend development is just reinventing the wheel. Ecommerce is tried and tested already. Things like how to handle an abandoned shopping cart, security, etc. You shouldn't be doing these things honestly. Let someone else do this, or use a library if you have too. You'll need to evaluate backend / ecommerce framework depending on your requirements though. - Frontend, data, and your product / marketing are the most important things for an ecommerce site. Your customer is not going to care about your backend. Chances are you might migrate your ecommerce backend down the road anyhow. In summary, if you want to start from scratch, and want full control/portability, consider building your own frontend mockup for each unique page type (category landing, product landing, etc). Expedite this process by using a CSS framework like Bootstrap. Learn how to organize CSS code with Sass. Worry about backend later. You should have an idea of what content / data is going to appear on the frontend, and where it all ties in. If you need to dial back even further for a truly agnostic approach, consider UX design only. This will also shorten the gap in explaining to your developer, should you outsource to one, what the final site should look like and do. If none of the above matters, just use shopify or and throw your pictures + content and a template, call it a day. Backend I personally have seen many successful custom enterprise level stores using Laravel+PHP+MySQL+Some-Javascript-libraries (image LazyLoading)+PHP-libraries(shopping cart functions). You can analyze what tools a store is using through wappylzer. Some tools for doing a simplistic hosted backend include 3dcart and snipcart if you want to forego backend all together. Finally, what ecommerce framework you use also depends on what your selling. If your selling high markup goods, such as T-shirts and stitching work, 2.9% cut from shopify is going to be irrelevant. If you sell industrial equipment, 2.9% is like half your profit margins.
- mozumder 8y agoEvery new brand in the fashion industry is using Shopify, even those with a bit of name recognition.
- wehere1111 8y agodo NOT write your own shop. you're putting your friend in a shit situation when 1 year from now, you're too busy and she needs to find a contractor to add a feature on top of your custom framework, when if you did the right thing in the first place and built it with Shopify, she could find someone super easily
- microdrum 8y agoIf it's an affiliate shop (i.e. Amazon Associates), I recommend https://wpcommission.com https://wpcommission.com + WordPress.
- funwie 8y agoAre there any online services that offer all the features needed for the online store? If yes, then why build? If no, can you customise the service? If not, then build and make use of available code (libraries, apis, framework) doing it by yourself will be a great learning experience but costly one. Wish you and your friend all the best with your online store.
- dade_ 8y agoHave you looked at cartridge? It is based on Mezzanine which is really just Django. Decent feature set, though not extensive. Completely open source. mezzanine.jupo.org https://github.com/stephenmcd/cartridge https://github.com/stephenmcd/cartridge
- sdnguyen90 8y agoExpanding on what other people have said with some anecdotes: Most developers who don't have operational experience of a ecommerce business will recommend some kind of open source cart. If they're in the WordPress community they'll recommend Woocommerce. If they're used to building web apps they'll recommend something built on top of their framework of choice. Almost everyone who has experience working on a successful ecommerce business will tell you to use Shopify. It has all the basic tools you need to run a successful store. If your store is a failure on Shopify, then it would probably be a multitude worse on a custom built cart. As stated in other comments, the actual cart is a cost center in a ecommerce business. There are stores using themes with minimal modifications doing millions in sales. On the contrary, you could have the most well built site and still have no sales. If you want to put your technological skills to use, use it on things that generate traffic like content or marketing.
- exodust 8y agoPerch Runway is good, it's a one time initial cost then nothing further. It's a full CMS website solution where the shop is one of the add-ons (shop.perchcms.com). It's all about full control, you make your site exactly how you like, and host it wherever you want. Look it up and read over the features to see if suits your needs. I built a store with Perch and it was extremely snappy and worked well. It won't take a day to build, it will take longer, like anything worthwhile. Don't use Shopify or boring solutions like that if you want full control. Get stuck in and make an original, responsive store!
- mychael 8y agoSaaS founders: Observe how frequently Shopify is mentioned in this post. This is the goal.
- leetbulb 8y agoI've found https://schema.io https://schema.io to be pleasant to work with. Check the docs, seriously, it's cool - there's a reason why it's called "schema".
- neya 8y agoI wrote my own over the last two years[1] and it has served me really well. I've designed it in a way that can support multiple sites from a single node, so, it's really a very pleasurable experience now. I enjoy working on it, fixing bugs and thinking about the strategic direction for this project. I don't use Shopify for many, many reasons[1] If you want to setup a quick store in just under a week of development, I highly recommend using Jekyll + PayPal. Contrary to popular believe, PayPal actually converts better than rolling out your own integrated solution based on Stripe/etc. I run a couple of dropshipping stores based on my stack, so please feel free to ask me anything :) [1] https://medium.com/build-ideas/my-journey-of-writing-an-e-commerce-engine-from-scratch-wip-ff4adb54c352 https://medium.com/build-ideas/my-journey-of-writing-an-e-co...
- borplk 8y agoBe a good friend and set them up with an existing solution like Shopify :)
- mkbkn 8y agoI don't have much to say, I go with most of the commenters saying go with Shopify like platform. In that case, I would like you to check ecwid.com, it's similar to Shopify but also offers a lifetime-free starter account. So you can play with it until you hit the profits and then you may move on to Shopify if it doesn't feel right.
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