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I built an entire custom e-commerce platform - product catalog, cart, checkout, CRM, order tracking, fulfilment management and back office. The site is a print
by samwillis 4y ago
I built an entire custom e-commerce platform - product catalog, cart, checkout, CRM, order tracking, fulfilment management and back office. The site is a print on demand store, using contract printers. In hindsight I wish I had gone with either an off the shelf package or taken the punt on Shopify (this was 2012).
My assumptions around how much integration our custom product customiser/editor needed with the rest of the e-commerce platform ware wrong. I thought I need a user system and "saved designs" for the customers, but that's somewhat rarely used, and could have been bolted onto a standard system.
Maintaining and updating it is extra work over what the core business is, there is now a lot of custom code to fix old assumptions and implement features that we didn't previously expect. All of which come as standard with Shopify.
We also believe that customers are increasingly used to seeing the Shopify checkout, it is a reassuringly familiar experience. I suspect it has a measurable effect on dropouts.
If I was to start again now I would 100% just use Shopify, no question. We are considering a large project to move to it. It would be quite satisfying to delete all that code. But it would probably bring new problems, and thing we are used to being able to customise that we will be unable to.
Do I regret doing it? No not really, hindsight is 20:20. A lot of lessons were learnt, but that enabled us to build a successful business.
- 20after4 4y agoI did this same exercise circa 2002. At the time there really weren't any good options (at least none that I was aware of) so I was pretty much charting my own territory. It took the business well past $1,000,000 in revenue before they switched to some off the shelf package long after I had moved on. I guess it wasn't too bad for a comp-sci student with no e-commerce experience and little serious programming experience.
- adamw2k 4y agoToo funny - did the same thing in 2009 for a print on demand greeting card site. Wonder how many of these are still around. Cardstore, Greeting Card Universe, SendOutCards, etc. There was a moment ~ 13-15 years ago...
- schappim 4y agoWe are repeating this process because the Shopify API, library infrastructure, making it difficult for us to manage our 30K products. It takes 5 hours to sync our catalogue via the Shopify REST API. The once amazing Shopify API gem regularly breaks. Additionally, the admin interface is slow and buggy, lacks the necessary information to effectively pick and pack orders at scale, and is unable to handle multiple kinds of inventories (local vs supplier inventory) and lead times. Furthermore, it takes 47 clicks to ship a product (together with Australia Post), whereas our system can do it with one click. This saves us just under 2K hours per year. Our system also integrates with a robot[0], which can automate the shipping process further. Our system removes the siloing of data which is a huge problem when it comes to effective ecommerce customer support, and followup service. An example of this, our system tracks deliveries to customers, so we can touch base with them when an order is delivered, or reach out when an order is awaiting collection at Australia Post. [0] https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-that-ships-other-raspberry-pis https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/pages/the-raspberry-pi-...