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As HN: Would you consider creating eCommerce features from scratch?
Would you consider creating eCommerce features from scratch?
I'm getting sick of frameworks getting out of date and growing to massive levels of complexity. Yet a shopping cart, payment processor integration, catalogue management are all solved problems in an eCommerce solution.
I want to make something simple and tailored to my little specialised shop. Would you spend the time building from scratch?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ranguna 5y agoI'm doing that with a team of 8 people and I do not recommend it. You'll find a bunch of small details that are pretty hard to find at hindsight. On a general overview you'll be like "it's just a cart, all you need to do is create it and CRUD items in it, easy" it's not. You'll start to go in details about which database to use, backup scheme, encryption for PII, scalability for your initial user base, details of crud etc When adding an item with a sku that already exists, do we want to sum it up to the existing one or add a separate entry? What if the existing item is on a different state? Is that even possible, the cart itself should be at different state. What about tracking refunds, taxes, inventory checks, etc etc What about managing product details and linking them with your orders? What about detecting fraudulent payments? Scratch that, what about handling payments? Payment details payment request, payment authorisation, payment capture, payment refunds etc What about invoices and transactional email for order confirmations? And logging all that for legal and debugging reasons? And you'll also need to keep track of your customer accounts, are you planning on building a CRM as well? Even if it's just mvp, you're going to fall into the another rabbit whole. There are teams of smart people out there, way smarter than you and me, that have went to the trouble of building these systems, now you just need to use them. Shopify, stripe, commercetools and a few more. My recommendation is to use them if your main objective is relatively quick turnaround.
- samwillis 5y agoI run an e-commerce site, we built it all from scratch (custom catalog, basket, checkout, order processing, the lot) starting back in 2012. We considered various platforms at the time and decided nothing fit what we wanted. It’s both a blessing and a curse, the flexibility to customise everything is brilliant. But the maintenance is an additional burden. If I was starting again now I would probably use shopify and heavily customise it with our own extensions. It would allow you to concentrate on your core business rather than solve problems someone else has before.