Hacker News Reader

If you have a small to medium sized shop, WooCommerce (now owned by Automattic) is a better solution and easier to deal with than Magento. For larger sites Magento is the go to, until you reach the threshold of a much more expensive paid solution.

I only briefly experimented with WooCommerce, so please correct me if any of this is incorrect.

My general issue with WooCommerce is being locked into Wordpress. I’m not a Wordpress expert, and it’s very difficult to determine when a security vulnerability (http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=2...) is serious enough to justify upgrading my WP version, which may break compatibility with not-yet-updated plugins.

Small and medium is also in the eye of the beholder I guess. If you’re selling less than a dozen items, with no need for configurable products, advanced pricing rules, bulk discounts etc, then Magento is probably overkill.

Simple fix, always keep your Wordpress up to date, I don't know why people in the CMS world have fallen into the trap of not upgrading. Drupal for example is notoriously hard to upgrade on point releases, Magento isn't much easier. Wordpress is fairly seamless, couple that with Cloudflare and your site is pretty secure from attack.

I also don't see how you can be "locked into" Wordpress either, it's actually one of the easiest CMSs to migrate into and out of. It gets flack for being widely used and running on PHP (so does Magento,) but it's widely used for a reason.

So, for an extension like Shipstation, which is how many ecommerce sites manage postage and labeling, I see that they haven't updated their extension since last year: https://woocommerce.com/products/shipstation-integration/. The listed compatibility is with WooCommerce 3.3.

Put yourself in the shoes of an ecommerce site operator. When a Wordpress minor release like 4.9 comes out, do I upgrade or not? How do I balance the security patches with the potential of breaking a critical part of my workflow?

EDIT: I meant WC 3.3. 4.1.19 was actually the plugin version

Prioritise upgrading WordPress over badly maintained plugins.

Same. I'd stop somewhat short of saying "I like Magento just fine." - but I'd admit to having continued to select it as the least-worst option, even after having been burnt by it several times previously.

Exactly this. We don't have the budget or the staff to build a custom CMS or ecommence solution, or to pay for the "big" players. Magento is actually great. With some optimizations, it can be quite fast- our site is pretty quick for what it is. Its also very extensible which makes it great to customize for our needs. And yes, the non-tech people can use the CMS part pretty easily.

What about Spree / Solidus?

It seems like many developers prefer this newer Rails-based shop to Magento in terms of being able to customize. I've been contemplating moving a medium sized shop to it given that it seems relatively easy to customize, but nobody has mentioned it here.

Anybody have any experience or input on either of these?

Me, me!

I picked up Spree in 2015, and still build with it on a weekly basis.

The platform and its ecosystem both have ups and downs, for example the order system is quite complex[1]. For another I have yet to find a perfect way to architect complex extensions.

Most of Spree's power lies in its models. In hindsight my advice to myself would be: start with spree_core, modify the API (I like using cart api's on the frontend) and replace the backend/frontend entirely.

[1] https://github.com/spree/spree/blob/3-5-stable/core/app/mode...

Glad to hear the models are sane. I'm trying to get off a horribly convulted system with many issues and have been keeping my eye on Spree for years. Any thoughts about choosing Spree vs Solidus at the point?

I basically have custom frontend everywhere including some of checkout and account pages, so I mainly need to replace cart and payments and checkout and may try to integrate at the API level and handle all UI custom.

I have a bunch of requirements that may need plugins: - Volume pricing - Personalization such that some products can exist in the cart multiple times, but each item has a unique ID - Upsells / add-ons for personalized product. I currently handle this hierarchy outside the cart, but it's brittle. There are thousands of different options per product and they change all the time. Quantities of these have different syncing rules in terms of their quantity vs their parent combined with quantities from an external data source e.g. address book. - Social login, potentially adding login and payments with Amazon. Pondering if it'd be best to go with Auth0.

Promotions seem really powerful which is good, because I use them heavily and would want to add custom ones.

Any thoughts, insights, suggestions given these goals? Looking to support 100k products and millions of promotions.

Sounds like an interesting project. I picked Spree over Solidus because Solidus is based on version 2.4 of Spree and I was already on version 3.0 at the time. The split was due to the company behind Spree being bought out but luckily for us another company stepped in and Spree is now moving quite quickly..

Have done personalised line items in the past, when adding to cart there is a function that checks not just the variant being added but the options being added with. The comparison hooks for these options are designed to be extended, so that one should be relatively easy. Complex price changes on orders/line items can be handled via adjusters. These also hook into orders and are very flexible (although I haven't had to build any).

Have also build custom integrations to sync inventory with an external source using webhooks, since everything is fundamentally just Rails underneath it's as easy as you might expect.

No experience with changing the auth system, but since there is a separate plugin for the authentication (spree_devise) I think the intention was/is to make it easy to swap out if needed. I don't know how easy that would be though. There is no address book out of the box (just a save last used address feature), that's one of the features I am finally adding now.

I think you could go one of two ways with this, either a) keep your code light using decorators etc and try to do everything the 'Spree' way so that you can benefit from an easy upgrade path or b) fork spree entirely and manually bring in updates from upstream. I am slowly leaning towards b) because Spree has some design decisions that are incredibly powerful but also make everything much more complicated. Mostly I am referring to the ability to split shipments on checkout here.. I spent hours tracking down a specific line that was rejecting a shipment once. I gave up entirely and replaced spree_frontend early on, but I am mostly a frontend developer.

Thanks for insights here. Funny you mention split shipments because that's a current tricky area for me and one I wish my commerce system could handle. I create potentially many shipments from orders right now based on inventory, the types of add-ons chosen, where the buyer is, and current workload. Unfortunately right now, this is all done in a separate system so it's difficult to provide customers with good visibility on shipping times of each product up front.

Hmm. The one thing that stuck out to me was "millions of promotions" - how are you quantifying that?

Are you developing/looking to develop this yourself internally as a retailer, or are you building this out on behalf of a retailer? Some of the other bits you've mentioned certainly sound complex (although this might be how you've approached these combinations of options and products), but not outside the realm of a Spree/Solidus or Workarea style implementation.

I'm developing internally as a retailer. Having millions of coupon codes or gift cards is important for sales and doing deals with partners or sites like Groupon. Then, with many items across many categories, as well as tons of add-on options, application and stacking of multiple rules needs to be powerful, but it seems like Spree now provides all the tools to make that manageable.

Also a note around the number of products, I think you would be okay, promotions - see other comment, dynamic adjusters would be fine I think.

One thing to watch out for is Spree leaves cart level orders in the database, and deleting an order is not trivial. I have a cron job that deletes incomplete orders over a certain age, made after I realised ~90% of the database size was made up of abandoned cart data.

Thanks that's good to know. Since I'm selling personalized things I'd probably keep all of the abondoned carts around so they're still there when people return. My current database stores all the abandoned carts in serialized blobs with Java objects so anything is better than that for maintenance!

May I ask, what ecommcerce solution differs in say Shopify, then mid level Magneto, or larger Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

I mean the hardest thing, after the initial set up is on logistics and Services. What sets them apart in different level as you described?

So far the only somewhat sane alternative is prestashop.

At least I don't worry what breaks this time on a security update, which is a real PITA with magento. For updates to magento shops I schedule time, for updates to prestashop I press a button..

Prestashop in my experience is not anywhere close to sane. The code is a shitshow, the transition to symfony/twig has been slow and chaotic, and even if you try to help fix issues you are met with nothing but silence.

I'm not saying magento is better, but prestashop isn't in any way sane.

We actually used to run our site off of Prestashop. The biggest reason that I saw to switch was because of the lack of integrations with some of our operations tech stack. For example, Freshdesk has an official extension/add-on for Magento, but on PrestaShop the only add-on is a $39.99 option made by a 3rd party developer.

Prestashop is probably easier to administer than Magento, but that comes with tradeoffs because of its smaller developer ecosystem.

Understood, it might not fit for every shop. For quite a lot of shops it works quite well though.

I guess that it wasn't so much that the add-on came at a cost, but more that it was:

a) a 3rd party developer

b) the only option

As you said it was just one of your issues.

A really solid alternative was Lemonstand, then they decided to do the SAAS dance and lost most of their fan base.

Sylius : the Symfony framework ecommerce offering is the only platform we've found to offer the proper combo of features, scalability (this was huge), flexibility, true framework backing in symfony, and a proper deployment model. It's a very exciting platform finally after having so many fall short for so many reasons; we really liked Lemonstand v1 but hated being forcedinto thei SaaS model which totally killed our app extension bundling applications business model. So, seriously check out Sylius.

Have you looked at Shopware? Having worked with many PHP-based ecommerce systems I like it the most.

If you're doing several millions in revenue, you should probably be using Shopify and not dealing with the costs to host, secure and maintain Magento. Magento is mid cap from $10 million revenue to $100 million in revenue. Anything above that $100 million you're running your own WMS/WCS, OMS, CMS etc.

I'm not claiming that it's one size fits all, but I think recommending a platform based off of revenue size is foolish. In my particular case, we maintain warehouses in 3 different states. Shopify does not offer a viable solution for managing multi-location shipping and inventory management. We also have a hybrid B2B/B2C business model, so several of our distributors log into the site to place purchase orders, and we can create quantity discounts and group based pricing. None of this is possible in Shopify. I would be stuck paying a monthly subscription fee for something like this: https://apps.shopify.com/customer-pricing.

On the other hand, MVMT Watches did $60 million in revenue in 2016, and is still on Shopify. Bombas socks did $50 million in 2017, and is still on Shopify. For many companies that sell a focused class of item, Shopify may well be the better solution for them.

Somewhat tautologically, the best ecommerce platform is the one that best suits your needs.