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"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magent

by _csoo 7y ago

"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies. WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. And it's better than that, there's people with years and years of experience in modifying and creating plugins and themes so once you have enough $$$ from the basic setup, re-invest into the business and get better developer support for all the GPL'd plugins and themes you're using.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
> WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. My wife is starting a fashion business. This is a hill too high to climb for a non-technical user. She was up and running in 30 minutes with my credit card and Shopify earlier this week. We don't have time to maintain an instance, troubleshoot Wordpress theme and plugin incompatibilities, etc. That's time better spent on sales funnel optimizations, manufacturing product, and customer support. Would we consider more advanced ecommerce systems? Sure, when she hits $1MM/year in annual revenue. Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin) by taking care of the mundane. Make dollars, don't pinch pennies. See: "Dropbox is just ftp + git" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- omouse 7y ago
  I don't know, these options look just as much as "swipe credit card, get started" as Shopify's options: https://www.siteground.com/woocommerce-hosting.htm?afcode=d5848c3dbd9ad5d21d8e623ec04881b9&campaign=woocommercehosting https://www.siteground.com/woocommerce-hosting.htm?afcode=d5... * Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin)* That's fair. For business stuff I've swiped the credit card and paid for support as well. If the Shopify experience is easier than WooCommerce, etc. then I get it.
delecti 7y ago
"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you." Is this satire?
- omouse 7y ago
  I've set up ecommerce sites quite a few times and it was honestly 1 to 2 days of "work", install + configure and then the rest was customization which clients pay for and are patient for. We were ready to sell product within a day basically and then iterate from there based on client needs. I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and they can be as heavily customized as you want and rival whatever plugin-heavy Shopify sites are out there.
  - delecti 7y ago
    Someone who knows how to do all of those things, already knows that they know how to do all of those things. Nobody who uses a one-stop-shop like Shopify is duped into thinking it's something revolutionary. Either it's not something they know how to do on their own, not something they think is worth the trouble to do on their own, or not something they could afford to pay someone like you to do.
    - pmart123 7y ago
      It's not revolutionary, but even with the stated two days of work in the original comment, you probably are spending a couple years worth of dollars compared to just using Shopify ignoring the time to find said developer, maintain the relationship if something goes wrong, etc. if you are just trying to get an idea off the ground.
  - superhuzza 7y ago
    So someone could avoid paying you for setup and maintenance by paying an extra $15 bucks a month to Shopify? Seems like a pretty obvious choice for a small business.
simonh 7y ago
Which of those does the logistics and fulfilment part, which is really the heart of the article and the killer strategic step for Shopify?
ysavir 7y ago
> WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. So all the average person needs to set up shop is design skills, software engineering skills, understanding of servers and PII, and the time to do complete all technical tasks while also building up their actual product catalogue. That's a lot, and goes a long way in explaining why Shopify has a justified usecase.
- thegagne 7y ago
  And manage patches, worry about security, PCI compliance, data loss, etc.
  - larrywright 7y ago
    And HA, site monitoring... the list is long.
    - joshmn 7y ago
      Can't forget about performance.
inapis 7y ago
Maybe if you have a dev at hand who’s willing to help. You really can't expect a non technical user to follow all of that. Shopify really simplifies all of that into an hour and a credit card. Without Shopify you'll be saving at best 10-15$ per month which is not worth it when you take into account maintenance, basic security, programmers charges etc. Not to mention if something borks you'll have to wait for your developer to have time to tend to it.
sgerenser 7y ago
I already had a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running for experimentation and stuff but really wasn't doing much with. When my wife wanted a e-commerce store for her craft/jewelry business, I figured why pay $20+ per month for Shopify or Weebly when I can just install WordPress and WooCommerce and be good to go. So I spent an hour or two getting it set up and had the basics going. But she hated the web-based admin interface and it was way too cumbersome to get anything customized, products added, etc. In the end it just wasn't worth it and she's now on Weebly. Shopify and Weebly have their own faults and can definitely be a pain if you want to do anything off the beaten path, but for the non-technical user who just wants to sell things I see the value over a self-hosted Wordpress install.
- omouse 7y ago
  That's fair, the UX for Woocommerce does need a bit of technical hand-holding. Could be improved on, though it seems like the pressure from Shopify will force some improvement on that front.
RickS 7y ago
I am plenty technical to do this and it still sucks. We moved to shopify from a plumbed-together solution like that and it's a world of difference. First, shopify is like $30 for a month. I'm $30 for a few minutes. The cost savings are laughably huge. And shopify's better anyway! Their plugin ecosystem is great, the admin tools are built specifically for merchant admin types (as opposed to boil-the-ocean blog admin UI with merchant UI hacked on top of it), so my cofounder/brother, who handled listing and fulfillment and that sort of thing, had a much easier time with it. Shopify could literally 10x their price and it would still be a great deal. And this is for a lifestyle-sized biz. few $k/mo in transactions. For anyone doing this "for real", it's a rounding error. Their plugin and theming is a joy on the dev side as well. Great docs, easy to get a sandbox account, theming in Liquid is a joy for anyone who's done jinja/handlebars/etc, their default themes have beautifully documented CSS. I would, as the developer, literally pay my own money for shopify to be part of the stack just to abstract all that crap away from me. The time savings for me alone justify it.
- joking 7y ago
  you seem to forget about the credit card rates, which are the 2.9% of your sales. I don't know in other countries, but where I live you can get the same conditions than for a physical pos terminal from a bank with around 1% rate. a 2% of your sales can easily grow to something that you can optimize.
  - RickS 7y ago
    I did almost mention those. Negotiating POS rates is in the realm of much bigger shops than I've run. At the 100k/mo mark, that's $2k/mo, which... I'd honestly still take shopify, but yeah, it starts to be worth asking about. Shopify is a hair more expensive than some competing processors, but when I last dealt with it, they were in league of paypal, stripe, square, etc, so it wasn't a differentiating factor for us, and I suspect that's true for most businesses of our size.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      Of course it's not perfect and would eventually be re-engineered, but I'd happily pay $3K/mo to make $100K/mo.
pbreit 7y ago
I don't think it's worth a downvote but what you list out is one of the worst examples of "why use SaaS? this convoluted self-assembled mish mash of randomness already exists" I've seen.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sarora27 7y ago
former Magento employee here...what you're describing is a TON of upfront technical investment for an e-commerce merchant who is just getting started. The platforms you've mentioned are ideal for merchants who are starting to hit $5M to $10M in annual revenue and need to innovate on their storefronts in order to continue achieving growth. For someone at the beginning of their ecommerce journey, Shopify is the BEST way to start making money almost immediately.
projectramo 7y ago
And who needs Shopify fulfillment? Just set up 10-20 warehouses, hire a few hundred workers, train them, get an HR rep, IT, finance, and support, and you're off to the races! Kids are so lazy these days, with their long hair and their rock'n'roll music.
jasonv 7y ago
I'm sure if you surveyed Shopify customers, many of them couldn't handle any of that, nor could they afford to pay for bespoke services to handle that. And there may be a split between the most successful and least successful customers of Shopify, but Shopify gets to make money off both.
idlewords 7y ago
This comment should be preserved in amber for when future generations ask, "What was HN?"
LargeWu 7y ago
Shopify is only $30/month for its basic plan. I can't imagine a situation where somebody with a successful online store would be sweating that $10. I also can't imagine a store that would be successful at $20/mo on WooCommerce, but not at $30/mo on Shopify. I say this as somebody with several past and current Shopify stores.

by _csoo 7y ago

toomuchtodo 7y ago

> WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races. My wife is starting a fashion business. This is a hill too high to climb for a non-technical user. She was up and running in 30 minutes with my credit card and Shopify earlier this week. We don't have time to maintain an instance, troubleshoot Wordpress theme and plugin incompatibilities, etc. That's time better spent on sales funnel optimizations, manufacturing product, and customer support. Would we consider more advanced ecommerce systems? Sure, when she hits $1MM/year in annual revenue. Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin) by taking care of the mundane. Make dollars, don't pinch pennies. See: "Dropbox is just ftp + git" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

omouse 7y ago
I don't know, these options look just as much as "swipe credit card, get started" as Shopify's options: https://www.siteground.com/woocommerce-hosting.htm?afcode=d5848c3dbd9ad5d21d8e623ec04881b9&campaign=woocommercehosting https://www.siteground.com/woocommerce-hosting.htm?afcode=d5... * Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin)* That's fair. For business stuff I've swiped the credit card and paid for support as well. If the Shopify experience is easier than WooCommerce, etc. then I get it.

delecti 7y ago

"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you." Is this satire?

omouse 7y ago
I've set up ecommerce sites quite a few times and it was honestly 1 to 2 days of "work", install + configure and then the rest was customization which clients pay for and are patient for. We were ready to sell product within a day basically and then iterate from there based on client needs. I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and they can be as heavily customized as you want and rival whatever plugin-heavy Shopify sites are out there.
- delecti 7y ago
  Someone who knows how to do all of those things, already knows that they know how to do all of those things. Nobody who uses a one-stop-shop like Shopify is duped into thinking it's something revolutionary. Either it's not something they know how to do on their own, not something they think is worth the trouble to do on their own, or not something they could afford to pay someone like you to do.
  - pmart123 7y ago
    It's not revolutionary, but even with the stated two days of work in the original comment, you probably are spending a couple years worth of dollars compared to just using Shopify ignoring the time to find said developer, maintain the relationship if something goes wrong, etc. if you are just trying to get an idea off the ground.
- superhuzza 7y ago
  So someone could avoid paying you for setup and maintenance by paying an extra $15 bucks a month to Shopify? Seems like a pretty obvious choice for a small business.

simonh 7y ago

Which of those does the logistics and fulfilment part, which is really the heart of the article and the killer strategic step for Shopify?

ysavir 7y ago

thegagne 7y ago
And manage patches, worry about security, PCI compliance, data loss, etc.
- larrywright 7y ago
  And HA, site monitoring... the list is long.
  - joshmn 7y ago
    Can't forget about performance.

inapis 7y ago

Maybe if you have a dev at hand who’s willing to help. You really can't expect a non technical user to follow all of that. Shopify really simplifies all of that into an hour and a credit card. Without Shopify you'll be saving at best 10-15$ per month which is not worth it when you take into account maintenance, basic security, programmers charges etc. Not to mention if something borks you'll have to wait for your developer to have time to tend to it.

sgerenser 7y ago

I already had a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running for experimentation and stuff but really wasn't doing much with. When my wife wanted a e-commerce store for her craft/jewelry business, I figured why pay $20+ per month for Shopify or Weebly when I can just install WordPress and WooCommerce and be good to go. So I spent an hour or two getting it set up and had the basics going. But she hated the web-based admin interface and it was way too cumbersome to get anything customized, products added, etc. In the end it just wasn't worth it and she's now on Weebly. Shopify and Weebly have their own faults and can definitely be a pain if you want to do anything off the beaten path, but for the non-technical user who just wants to sell things I see the value over a self-hosted Wordpress install.

omouse 7y ago
That's fair, the UX for Woocommerce does need a bit of technical hand-holding. Could be improved on, though it seems like the pressure from Shopify will force some improvement on that front.

RickS 7y ago

I am plenty technical to do this and it still sucks. We moved to shopify from a plumbed-together solution like that and it's a world of difference. First, shopify is like $30 for a month. I'm $30 for a few minutes. The cost savings are laughably huge. And shopify's better anyway! Their plugin ecosystem is great, the admin tools are built specifically for merchant admin types (as opposed to boil-the-ocean blog admin UI with merchant UI hacked on top of it), so my cofounder/brother, who handled listing and fulfillment and that sort of thing, had a much easier time with it. Shopify could literally 10x their price and it would still be a great deal. And this is for a lifestyle-sized biz. few $k/mo in transactions. For anyone doing this "for real", it's a rounding error. Their plugin and theming is a joy on the dev side as well. Great docs, easy to get a sandbox account, theming in Liquid is a joy for anyone who's done jinja/handlebars/etc, their default themes have beautifully documented CSS. I would, as the developer, literally pay my own money for shopify to be part of the stack just to abstract all that crap away from me. The time savings for me alone justify it.

joking 7y ago
you seem to forget about the credit card rates, which are the 2.9% of your sales. I don't know in other countries, but where I live you can get the same conditions than for a physical pos terminal from a bank with around 1% rate. a 2% of your sales can easily grow to something that you can optimize.
- RickS 7y ago
  I did almost mention those. Negotiating POS rates is in the realm of much bigger shops than I've run. At the 100k/mo mark, that's $2k/mo, which... I'd honestly still take shopify, but yeah, it starts to be worth asking about. Shopify is a hair more expensive than some competing processors, but when I last dealt with it, they were in league of paypal, stripe, square, etc, so it wasn't a differentiating factor for us, and I suspect that's true for most businesses of our size.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    Of course it's not perfect and would eventually be re-engineered, but I'd happily pay $3K/mo to make $100K/mo.

pbreit 7y ago

I don't think it's worth a downvote but what you list out is one of the worst examples of "why use SaaS? this convoluted self-assembled mish mash of randomness already exists" I've seen.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sarora27 7y ago

former Magento employee here...what you're describing is a TON of upfront technical investment for an e-commerce merchant who is just getting started. The platforms you've mentioned are ideal for merchants who are starting to hit $5M to $10M in annual revenue and need to innovate on their storefronts in order to continue achieving growth. For someone at the beginning of their ecommerce journey, Shopify is the BEST way to start making money almost immediately.

projectramo 7y ago

And who needs Shopify fulfillment? Just set up 10-20 warehouses, hire a few hundred workers, train them, get an HR rep, IT, finance, and support, and you're off to the races! Kids are so lazy these days, with their long hair and their rock'n'roll music.

jasonv 7y ago

I'm sure if you surveyed Shopify customers, many of them couldn't handle any of that, nor could they afford to pay for bespoke services to handle that. And there may be a split between the most successful and least successful customers of Shopify, but Shopify gets to make money off both.

idlewords 7y ago

This comment should be preserved in amber for when future generations ask, "What was HN?"

LargeWu 7y ago

Shopify is only $30/month for its basic plan. I can't imagine a situation where somebody with a successful online store would be sweating that $10. I also can't imagine a store that would be successful at $20/mo on WooCommerce, but not at $30/mo on Shopify. I say this as somebody with several past and current Shopify stores.