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This article, whilst quite clearly an advertisement ("this is so complex - use our service!"), actually does a decent job of illustrating just a tiny fraction o
by s_severus 6y ago
This article, whilst quite clearly an advertisement ("this is so complex - use our service!"), actually does a decent job of illustrating just a tiny fraction of the complexity of correctly modelling an e-commerce system.
For the past 2 years I've been working full-time on an open-source headless e-commerce framework (https://www.vendure.io/ https://www.vendure.io/) so I can attest to this.
Small illustrative example: I have spent the past 2 weeks re-working our tax handling to handle scenarios like this:
- An order contains 5 products, some of which have different tax rates. Order total is $100.
- A $10 coupon code reduces the order to $90.
- The order is completed and shipped. Later on the customer wants to return and get a refund on one of the items. How much do you refund?
The answer is that you need to prorate (distribute) the $10 discount proportionally over the 5 items, so that when refunding, this order-wide discount is taken into account.
After extensive research (much of which I wrote up here: https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/issues/573 https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/issues/573), I was rather surprised to find that the majority of well-known OSS e-commerce frameworks don't handle this properly.
On top of the things mentioned there are a whole host of other major topics of concern, e.g.
* stock control & tracking
* fulfillment & shipping integration
* payment integration
* promotions
* account management (email verification, password resets etc)
* product images / asset management
* multiple sales channel, multi-currency, multi-language support
For those interested, my project is approaching v1.0 so I've just about got a handle on all of the above. Phew!
- arichard123 6y agoI agree. I've spent 14 years building ecommerce sites, and the hardest thing for me was dealing with bundles. My client sells cot beds and mattresses, that come from separate suppliers as bundles. And once the bundle feature was added they went to town with it, but it makes stock hard, it makes forecasting hard, it makes promotions hard, it makes shipping hard. It's much easier when you sell items in multiples of 1, with each item priced and discounted individually. Good luck with your project.
- thesimon 6y ago> Order total is $100. - A $10 coupon code reduces the order to $90. - The order is completed and shipped. Later on the customer wants to return and get a refund on one of the items. How much do you refund? Especially fun if the minimum order value for the coupon code was $99 and the product returned costs $5.
- robric 6y agoThis is awesome OSS, thanks for sharing it and giving a specific example of the problems it solves. I also got a kick out of how you called the article an advertisement then went on to advertise your own project. Really though, nice OSS. I watched the video on your site and it looks like a cool solution for people getting started with e-commerce. Much more flexible and customizable than Shopify and BigCommerce.
- s_severus 6y agoOK ok, the irony of calling out the content marketing and then promoting my project is not lost on me :D But to clarify, calling it an advertisement is not necessarily a condemnation. Content marketing articles can be fine when they actually contain some substance, which I believe this one does. And thanks for checking out the project and your kind words.