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Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to them is a good thing in my book.

I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the API without throttling or losing connection.

I don't really know if BC is a viable alternative to Shopify, but the e-commerce space is very much unsolved. No other industry in the world would tolerate Shopify, Solid Commerce, Channel Advisor, and Megento, and so on, as their top platforms. It's a sad mess of uninformed companies attempting to build for an industry they have zero knowledge of, and the sellers are squeezed dry for systems with broken and missing features.

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I could not agree more. I started a wholesale business 4 years ago and needed a website where my customers could place and track their orders while I could control the business using the back office. None of the solutions on the market offered even majority of the features I needed without trying to charge me close to a thousand dollars per month on top of setup fees. It does feel like the solutions are thought of and built by people who never ran a ecommerce wholesale/retail business.

I went from e-commerce to programming. Of course, being knowledgeable about the space, I interviewed at a lot of companies in the space.

It confirmed what was obvious as a customer. None of these companies have anyone working for them who was in the space. The founders mainly see an opportunity for disruption, which is trying to kill off an infinite hydra.

If any of them were knowledgeable of the space, they'd know that absolutely no one in e-commerce earns more than $20 per hour, even after a good 10 years in the field. Experts are cheap to pluck up. Crazy.

FLOSS looks like a system built by somebody who has seen a forklift in their life :)

FLOSS isn't the name of dizzystar's project; it stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software. (itemhut is apparently the FLOSS software referenced) :-)

What frustrates you about Shopify that you wish could be better?

One of the worst and most indicative things about the Shopify developer ecosystem is that there is no first-class support for source control - of any type - in Shopify's online theme editing system. It is expected that if you wish to integrate any nontrivial application, you'll give access to your full admin panel to low-paid, marginally-English-speaking integration techs at the app developers, and they will edit your live theme code. Woe to anyone trying to integrate two such applications at once - what usually happens is one app's devs will give up mid process due to the interference of the other, and leave you high and dry. I've had to "rescue" botched integrations by pulling down historical theme versions, manually diffing them, and retroactively committing changes into an offline Git repository just to make sense of who touched what.

It's impossible to customize the information collected at checkout, including structured shipping instructions, so there are various hacks around doing this on the cart page. It's impossible to customize pricing for certain classes of logged in users, beyond simple discounts that wreak havoc on your accountants trying to get effective line item prices into their systems. Adding structured data to any objects requires parsing description text in the template language and makes you wish you had the flexibility of the Salesforce API... and just typing that sentence makes me shudder.

For those without the training or resources to build a full-stack modern website, Shopify is far better than the alternative of adding shopping cart widgets to Wordpress or Squarespace. But it's far from perfect, and its capabilities as a frontend platform have stagnated: https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog . Knowing what I know now, I'd recommend that anyone with full-stack experience jump directly to https://spreecommerce.org/ or http://getsaleor.com/ - a higher learning curve, but when you inevitably hit the ceiling of Shopify's capabilities you'll wish you'd used one of those.

just use shopify slate and github

We already do for our core theme development... but I have never seen an app integration team be willing to use anything other than the native interface.

Shopify lied to me while I was evaluating it and said if I signed up for a subscription then they'd allow me to fix the colour of the checkout button. They host the checkout process on their own site and automatically swapped the text colour to the opposite of the rest of my site.

After I signed up they basically said tough sh!t, they don't actually have a way to change the button text colour.

Shopify plus allow you to adjust the checkout styling and template.

I wasn't going to pay hundreds of dollars per month to change the colour of a button.

I did mention that when they said some rubbish about it being for security etc. If it's insecure then why allow it if I pay more?

But yeah, you're right. I guess they lied to me twice.

To be clear, they did say they'd change it for me if I signed up to any plan.

for example not being able to specify that this product weighs 80 pounds and is shipped in two separate pieces. Shipping 1 large box costs less than shipping 2 boxes half the size and this was making us lose money on automatically calculated UPS shipping fees

I agree it's frustrating. I have founded a company that develops only B2B ecommerce solutions and it's much more complicated than B2C.

There are soooo many different combinations of how you can do certain thing, and in most cases you need to adapt the software to existing process instead of improving it. There was a comment that most of these solutions are slow, know you know why.

We do a lot of integrations with ERP systems and that is another big headache. Their support, not working software, bad or no API support, and their hidden fees are just awful. Then you realize that there are about 10-15 big ERP players in the world, and about 20000 smaller ones (probably every small village has one ERP provider).

what's the company name? if its not a big secret since you created a throwaway just to post this reply:)

Everything. It's just awful.

All apps break, costing incredible money, hyperactive policies that toss sellers under the bus, they blame everyone else and nothing is their fault. Well, okay, every developer is a moron and Shopify is perfect.

Weird, as person 7 years in to running an online store on Shopify I absolutely love their product and their customer support is amazing.

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