4 ms·

Probably shopify evangelist trying to promote the company without appearing to be promoting it. Shopify is just a glorified shopping cart like million others,

Probably shopify evangelist trying to promote the company without appearing to be promoting it. Shopify is just a glorified shopping cart like million others, so its no better than writing your own using frameworks available, which makes it trivial and even easier than shopify. If going by your logic its futile to even try to build own e-commerce store. Just use established platforms which offer marketplace. Since marketplace solves one of the biggest hurdle for an ecommerce which is visitors traffic which you can convert. Also with added advantage that visitor can combine things from multiple stores into a single cart, payment and logistics infrastructure.

tebbers 4y ago
You’ve never run an e-commerce store, have you? Building your own e-commerce framework cannot be easier than using Shopify, it just literally isn’t possible.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  But on the other hand, whenever I see a shop using Shopify, I feel the site being sluggish and the UX could be better. So it is not all about things being easy or not, but also about creating the best solution. What that means depends on the business and the employees. If you got no developers, then maybe your only option is to use something that is ready and needs no development. If the shop is your main business and you got good developers, then you might want to do one better, even if it takes time and effort. So I would not necessarily exclude the possibility, that creating your own might be best for you. You can still make use of third party APIs for things like credit card payment and so on. When you roll your own, you get to decide which parts you outsource and which parts you make yourself. This allows you to decide where you want to be flexible and where you limit yourself to what the limits of a third party software are.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    I only evaluated Shopify for a project, so I have limited experience. But from what I know you don’t need to use their CMS. They have a very well documented API so you can integrate with them as a backend service that just handles the e-commerce side of things. If you go that route it is on you whether your store is slow or not.
    - tbran 4y ago
      Indeed! I've been looking into trying out a JAMStack-style website using the Shopify API [0]. Some starter templates: Gatsby-Shopify: https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter Gridsome-Shopify: https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/ https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/ I wish Shopify's pricing page was clearer on which plan I need to use the API. [0]: https://shopify.dev/api/usage https://shopify.dev/api/usage
- dragonsh 4y ago
  > it just literally isn’t possible. Another hyperbole and marketing jargon (ecommerce systems are one of the easiest and most competitive with too many providers like shopify). You might not have tried options and frameworks available in market. Literally thousands of one-click install ecommerce systems ready to use is available for bare-metal, cloud, kubernetes, containers or even simple desktop machines. These systems comes with redundancy, high-availability, faster response time, integrated with payment provider, logistic provider of choice but also gives full control including source code (very different from walled gardens of shopify which indeed has access to customer data, payment, order information, inventory information of store owners without providing any source code). In functionality, templates and flexibility much better than Shopify. May be just change the tinted glass of promoting shopify and you might see thousands of other options in the market.
  - Closi 4y ago
    What you are describing isn't rolling your own (i.e. writing your own code) - it's installing pre-built software which was OP's point. And Shopify being the most common platform now, and quickest and easiest to get up and running, is probably why they used that as an example (i.e. you could have a decent looking matcha-tea store setup within an hour with all the payment methods you want).
  - tebbers 4y ago
    Haha so we’re comparing paying $29 a month for Shopify to setting up your own high availability Kubernetes cluster now. Brilliant. This is why I love HN, never change.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
colesantiago 4y ago
Not an evangelist at all, just common sense. The whole point of an ecommerce store is to sell products and get sales. Rolling an entire ecom store is already another job in of itself and reimplementing almost everything of the ecommerce stack doesn't make business sense. A wise business minded merchant can focus on selling from day 0, not on day 720. All while trying to duck-tape their fraud and analytics stack whilst looking for a programmer to maintain their contraption.
- dragonsh 4y ago
  > just common sense. Common sense is very uncommon :-). E-commerce stores are not easy as business, but very easy to launch today because technology is the easiest part of it. The biggest difficulty is getting traffic, then conversion to order, then with superior products, logistics and customer service retain the customer. No one can setup logistics, product catalogs, superior customer service from day 0, it takes quite a time and feedback loop. So remember in the grand scheme of ecommerce store for merchant time taken to build or launch a system is minuscule compared to other hard physical world problems they need to solve around products and services they are offering. Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify. Shopify is just one another provider with walled gardens. Shopify is popular not due to any innovation in technology or quality or speed, its popular because it spend literally billions of dollars of investor money in marketing. So they succeeded by throwing marketing money, not due to innovative technology.
  - yakshemash 4y ago
    > Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify. I am currently looking for a good solution to do just that, but don't know where to start. Do you mind sharing a few good ones?
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      That person you are replying to obviously has never worked as a merchant in e-commerce. The only people rolling out their own solutions nowadays are multi-million dollar brands that need custom solution. If you want to focus on selling and having a good backend platform, don't waste your time building your own stack and maintain it, the most important thing is to start selling and bring traffic to your website.
hoofhearted 4y ago
Shopify changed the whole shopping cart game! The way I explained it to my team, we wouldn’t be hosting product data on our servers anymore, and instead we add products similar to Amazon Seller Central. I was a hardcore Magento developer for over 10 years and wasn’t a huge fan of Shopify because I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t come up with any better solution in my head for hosting a webstore on our own distributed cloud stack. We were running Magento 2 for our website, and Lightspeed for our instore POS when COVID hit and we needed to start offering curbside pickup and local delivery. We tried to build our own bridge between the two services, and it was the worst experience. I started researching other shopping carts that had easy POS and curbside pickup integration and everything kept pointing to Shopify. I realized they host our product data similar to Amazon seller central, and give us a lighting fast storefront with a near 100 lightspeed SEO score, for cheaper than our current hosting bill. I was intrigued but still skeptical at that point. I then started looking at all the top trending websites like Colour Pop, Kylie Cosmetics, TB12, Tesla, Bomba Socks, Fashion Nova, and Death Wish Coffee.. What did they all have in common? I then hit BuiltWith to see what the current marketshare for shopping carts was for the top 1000 e-commerce sites online. I was stunned to see Shopify had majority marketshare compared to Magento 2 in the last few years. At that point I was sold and I convinced my team we were done with the days of hosting a Magento store. We migrated in less than 6 weeks and instantly saw a lift in sales and SEO.

tebbers 4y ago

You’ve never run an e-commerce store, have you? Building your own e-commerce framework cannot be easier than using Shopify, it just literally isn’t possible.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
But on the other hand, whenever I see a shop using Shopify, I feel the site being sluggish and the UX could be better. So it is not all about things being easy or not, but also about creating the best solution. What that means depends on the business and the employees. If you got no developers, then maybe your only option is to use something that is ready and needs no development. If the shop is your main business and you got good developers, then you might want to do one better, even if it takes time and effort. So I would not necessarily exclude the possibility, that creating your own might be best for you. You can still make use of third party APIs for things like credit card payment and so on. When you roll your own, you get to decide which parts you outsource and which parts you make yourself. This allows you to decide where you want to be flexible and where you limit yourself to what the limits of a third party software are.
- dgb23 4y ago
  I only evaluated Shopify for a project, so I have limited experience. But from what I know you don’t need to use their CMS. They have a very well documented API so you can integrate with them as a backend service that just handles the e-commerce side of things. If you go that route it is on you whether your store is slow or not.
  - tbran 4y ago
    Indeed! I've been looking into trying out a JAMStack-style website using the Shopify API [0]. Some starter templates: Gatsby-Shopify: https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter Gridsome-Shopify: https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/ https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/ I wish Shopify's pricing page was clearer on which plan I need to use the API. [0]: https://shopify.dev/api/usage https://shopify.dev/api/usage
dragonsh 4y ago
> it just literally isn’t possible. Another hyperbole and marketing jargon (ecommerce systems are one of the easiest and most competitive with too many providers like shopify). You might not have tried options and frameworks available in market. Literally thousands of one-click install ecommerce systems ready to use is available for bare-metal, cloud, kubernetes, containers or even simple desktop machines. These systems comes with redundancy, high-availability, faster response time, integrated with payment provider, logistic provider of choice but also gives full control including source code (very different from walled gardens of shopify which indeed has access to customer data, payment, order information, inventory information of store owners without providing any source code). In functionality, templates and flexibility much better than Shopify. May be just change the tinted glass of promoting shopify and you might see thousands of other options in the market.
- Closi 4y ago
  What you are describing isn't rolling your own (i.e. writing your own code) - it's installing pre-built software which was OP's point. And Shopify being the most common platform now, and quickest and easiest to get up and running, is probably why they used that as an example (i.e. you could have a decent looking matcha-tea store setup within an hour with all the payment methods you want).
- tebbers 4y ago
  Haha so we’re comparing paying $29 a month for Shopify to setting up your own high availability Kubernetes cluster now. Brilliant. This is why I love HN, never change.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

colesantiago 4y ago

Not an evangelist at all, just common sense. The whole point of an ecommerce store is to sell products and get sales. Rolling an entire ecom store is already another job in of itself and reimplementing almost everything of the ecommerce stack doesn't make business sense. A wise business minded merchant can focus on selling from day 0, not on day 720. All while trying to duck-tape their fraud and analytics stack whilst looking for a programmer to maintain their contraption.

dragonsh 4y ago
> just common sense. Common sense is very uncommon :-). E-commerce stores are not easy as business, but very easy to launch today because technology is the easiest part of it. The biggest difficulty is getting traffic, then conversion to order, then with superior products, logistics and customer service retain the customer. No one can setup logistics, product catalogs, superior customer service from day 0, it takes quite a time and feedback loop. So remember in the grand scheme of ecommerce store for merchant time taken to build or launch a system is minuscule compared to other hard physical world problems they need to solve around products and services they are offering. Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify. Shopify is just one another provider with walled gardens. Shopify is popular not due to any innovation in technology or quality or speed, its popular because it spend literally billions of dollars of investor money in marketing. So they succeeded by throwing marketing money, not due to innovative technology.
- yakshemash 4y ago
  > Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify. I am currently looking for a good solution to do just that, but don't know where to start. Do you mind sharing a few good ones?
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    That person you are replying to obviously has never worked as a merchant in e-commerce. The only people rolling out their own solutions nowadays are multi-million dollar brands that need custom solution. If you want to focus on selling and having a good backend platform, don't waste your time building your own stack and maintain it, the most important thing is to start selling and bring traffic to your website.

hoofhearted 4y ago

Shopify changed the whole shopping cart game! The way I explained it to my team, we wouldn’t be hosting product data on our servers anymore, and instead we add products similar to Amazon Seller Central. I was a hardcore Magento developer for over 10 years and wasn’t a huge fan of Shopify because I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t come up with any better solution in my head for hosting a webstore on our own distributed cloud stack. We were running Magento 2 for our website, and Lightspeed for our instore POS when COVID hit and we needed to start offering curbside pickup and local delivery. We tried to build our own bridge between the two services, and it was the worst experience. I started researching other shopping carts that had easy POS and curbside pickup integration and everything kept pointing to Shopify. I realized they host our product data similar to Amazon seller central, and give us a lighting fast storefront with a near 100 lightspeed SEO score, for cheaper than our current hosting bill. I was intrigued but still skeptical at that point. I then started looking at all the top trending websites like Colour Pop, Kylie Cosmetics, TB12, Tesla, Bomba Socks, Fashion Nova, and Death Wish Coffee.. What did they all have in common? I then hit BuiltWith to see what the current marketshare for shopping carts was for the top 1000 e-commerce sites online. I was stunned to see Shopify had majority marketshare compared to Magento 2 in the last few years. At that point I was sold and I convinced my team we were done with the days of hosting a Magento store. We migrated in less than 6 weeks and instantly saw a lift in sales and SEO.