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If $400 a year isn’t a trivial expense for an ecommerce store, you are probably wasting your time. You can go with woo, which is marginally free. But it takes

If $400 a year isn’t a trivial expense for an ecommerce store, you are probably wasting your time. You can go with woo, which is marginally free. But it takes a week to set up vs half a day with Shopify. So, wasting 35 $100 hours to save $400 is a bad decision. Then you have maintenance costs of a few hours a month. You could go with amazon. But to list your own product costs $39.99 a month, so $480 a year there too. (You might be able to go with $39.99 then downgrade, haven’t tried it) eBay and Etsy might work. Craigslist for sale postings are still free. But at the end of the day, if the store isn’t bringing it at least $400-500 a month it should probably be shuttered and move on to the next idea. There are definitely apps to do customizable combos and reserve but don’t pay. Customizing Shopify (or big commerce or volusion) is almost always cheaper in total cost than custom work until you have a huge base. I wrote software for 7 years. Now run 4 Shopify stores. I used to also run two woo stores. Shoping carts are complicated and boring. Shopify gets things right you wouldn’t know you need for three years. It’s the right place to start.

sireat 8y ago
I do agree that for pure ecommerce store MVP Shopify is the primary option. I was referring to use case that's been frequent in my experience: a brick and mortar shop wants the online shop capability but does not expect many sales from it. One case: a friend of mine is currently paying $45 a month for an ancient closed source PHP ecommerce solution and only bringing in $500 month in online sales (but regular foot traffic brings in much more). He'd love to go to something less expensive, but Shopify wouldn't really change much. I started setting up Prestahop for him, but realized even if I gifted him my time, the problem would be supporting it afterwards. Another thing with Shopify, it is not like $29 a month brings you instant happiness. There is a whole Shopify ecosystem with paid plugins etc. So you will need to spend time and get comfortable with Shopify just like you'd need to with Magento, Prestashop, woocommerce etc. Plus not owning your backend has its own set of problems. Thus Shopify is not necessarily the best long term solution.

sireat 8y ago

I do agree that for pure ecommerce store MVP Shopify is the primary option. I was referring to use case that's been frequent in my experience: a brick and mortar shop wants the online shop capability but does not expect many sales from it. One case: a friend of mine is currently paying $45 a month for an ancient closed source PHP ecommerce solution and only bringing in $500 month in online sales (but regular foot traffic brings in much more). He'd love to go to something less expensive, but Shopify wouldn't really change much. I started setting up Prestahop for him, but realized even if I gifted him my time, the problem would be supporting it afterwards. Another thing with Shopify, it is not like $29 a month brings you instant happiness. There is a whole Shopify ecosystem with paid plugins etc. So you will need to spend time and get comfortable with Shopify just like you'd need to with Magento, Prestashop, woocommerce etc. Plus not owning your backend has its own set of problems. Thus Shopify is not necessarily the best long term solution.