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Does anyone have any experiences with Saleor? Shopify's tech seems like a clusterfuck by 2021 standards in a lot of ways (Liquid templates make theme reusabilit

Does anyone have any experiences with Saleor? Shopify's tech seems like a clusterfuck by 2021 standards in a lot of ways (Liquid templates make theme reusability a pain or borderline impossible; backend issues mentioned in this thread), and yet, I'm not sure any of its mature proprietary competitors (Magento, BigCommerce, etc) are any better; if anything, I consistently hear that they are worse with some caveats. What I am trying to figure out is if Shopify is "bad" or just "warty" -- I realize that is subjective and heavily depends on what one is trying to use it for, but it's still a challenge to reason about.

jconley 6y ago
We use a forked and heavily modified Saleor at Brava (https://www.brava.com https://www.brava.com). Our version is over two years old. It brings with it all of the headaches of running your own eCommerce. At the time we chose it because of our requirements. If you want to geek out and implement lots of custom eCommerce stuff then go for it. It's a pretty good platform, but it's custom eCommerce, and eCommerce is complicated. If I just wanted to sell things I'd personally use Shopify or Webflow or such.
- intermiras 6y ago
  Thank you for the trust in Saleor jconley - Brava looks great! Mirek from Saleor here. While we originally started with the idea of fork-it-and-make-it-your-own, a huge part of our effort over the last 2 years was to provide enough API and structure to help avoiding forking. Extensibility through our plugins and extensions system (Saleor Apps) has became one of the big goals of the project and most big brands today don't take the forking route anymore. It's all about front-end development now with Saleor (where we recommend using NextJS or Gatsby as a "glue" for a JS/TS app). To further free developers' time we also developed Saleor Cloud and the burden of maintenance, upgrade and performance are on us.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Hi -- glad to see you in my subthread! First of all, Saleor's codebase seems a lot closer to modern modularity than the rest of the open source e-commerce system, and so I like it architecturally from a high level. The main wrinkle I've seen, as you mention, is that I'd love to use Saleor in django as an app without having to fork it, which as of when I last looked at it (about 4-5 months ago) still wasn't possible. This is because what I'm interested in is doing interesting things with the Saleor backend using it as a library not as a server, so to speak. That is to say, I'd like to be able to `pip install saleor` on my existing django backend, plug it into my app, and away I go without too much issue. How far away is Saleor's backend from this right now? Is this doable and it's just a matter of a finite number of steps, or are there deep structural challenges to supporting this sort of use case? Thanks!
    - intermiras 6y ago
      Thanks! I see what you're saying about Django apps but currently this is not a priority and taken the size of the project wouldn't be easy.

jconley 6y ago

We use a forked and heavily modified Saleor at Brava (https://www.brava.com https://www.brava.com). Our version is over two years old. It brings with it all of the headaches of running your own eCommerce. At the time we chose it because of our requirements. If you want to geek out and implement lots of custom eCommerce stuff then go for it. It's a pretty good platform, but it's custom eCommerce, and eCommerce is complicated. If I just wanted to sell things I'd personally use Shopify or Webflow or such.

intermiras 6y ago
Thank you for the trust in Saleor jconley - Brava looks great! Mirek from Saleor here. While we originally started with the idea of fork-it-and-make-it-your-own, a huge part of our effort over the last 2 years was to provide enough API and structure to help avoiding forking. Extensibility through our plugins and extensions system (Saleor Apps) has became one of the big goals of the project and most big brands today don't take the forking route anymore. It's all about front-end development now with Saleor (where we recommend using NextJS or Gatsby as a "glue" for a JS/TS app). To further free developers' time we also developed Saleor Cloud and the burden of maintenance, upgrade and performance are on us.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Hi -- glad to see you in my subthread! First of all, Saleor's codebase seems a lot closer to modern modularity than the rest of the open source e-commerce system, and so I like it architecturally from a high level. The main wrinkle I've seen, as you mention, is that I'd love to use Saleor in django as an app without having to fork it, which as of when I last looked at it (about 4-5 months ago) still wasn't possible. This is because what I'm interested in is doing interesting things with the Saleor backend using it as a library not as a server, so to speak. That is to say, I'd like to be able to `pip install saleor` on my existing django backend, plug it into my app, and away I go without too much issue. How far away is Saleor's backend from this right now? Is this doable and it's just a matter of a finite number of steps, or are there deep structural challenges to supporting this sort of use case? Thanks!
  - intermiras 6y ago
    Thanks! I see what you're saying about Django apps but currently this is not a priority and taken the size of the project wouldn't be easy.