Ask HN: Building an e-commerce site in 2016

3 pointsJ-dawg3 comments

A friend is starting a fashion business and has asked for advice about setting up an online store.

Do you recommend a particular framework (e.g. Magento)? Is it worth building something from scratch?

I would use everything but Magento. Actually, if i want something simple for someone who is not IT person themself i would probably use Shopify. For something personal, where i know i am going to hack some functionality into i really like Woocommerce because its so simple and comes with so many free plugins. Nice to get started.

Thanks, this is helpful. I'm not sure yet how involved I want to be. Can you give an example of the kind of custom stuff you can do in Woocommerce that wouldn't be possible in Shopify?

I am not 100% sure how strong the API of shopify is. But you depend on it. For woocommerce i can just write _bots_ that query the Database and create actions based on this. Next to the API, Monkey Patching, Plugins, Hooks and whatever else it ships with.

You always have more and better possibilities if you host yourself.

As concrete example. I am in the progress of automating a dropship business. Not sure how easy that would be with shopify.

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