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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

"Just combine these 6 things and it's just as easy as a single tool that does it all for you."

Is this satire?

No, it's the standard response from some open source people for any proprietary end-to-end solution. The most famous example was this response to the launch of Dropbox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

some open source people

Hey now, stop with the name-calling :P I work on and use proprietary end to end solutions for ecommerce (but not Shopify).

Woocommerce wins for me because it lowers development costs and costs are lower overall. My perspective is definitely someone who has developed ecommerce sites, not solely as a non-technical user, and for me it's very advantageous to lower costs by using and modifying GPL'd plugins and themes.

I guess Shopify has 4000 employees and enough cash and enough direction to come out of box with a good UX and good defaults and that's good enough for nontechnical users.

I'm a technical user, and good UX and good defaults are something I often spend money on.

I’m a technical user, and if I needed to sell goods online I’d use Shopify. It’s precisely because I’m a technical user: I know all the things you you have to worry about, and I’d rather not. There surely a scale where it makes sense to roll your own e-commerce platform, but it’s substantially higher than people seem to think.

Yup. I've taken some MBA classes, and one (in retrospect obvious) thing I latched onto is the idea of opportunity cost: you can never do everything you are capable of doing, and each thing you do comes at the expense of something else. So, focus on doing the things that (depending on your goal) are most fulfilling and/or most profitable.

Amusingly, grasping that concept was a big factor in my decision to put my MBA degree on hold...

There is one other reason to do things: you cannot trust anyone else to do it. Fullfilling and/or profitable are hopefully the only ones that apply, but sometimes you have to do something because the risk is too high...

I’m not sure that applies to the Shopify argument here, but maybe you didn’t intend it to.

Hopefully - for Shopifys sake - it doesn't apply.

An example of how it could apply is if shopify were to "go down" often thus driving your customers to your competitors that roll their own solution that has good uptime.

What a gem, thx.

Do this, and this, and this, and that, and this, and that and this, and in a few days, you're halfway to this readymade offering that would have you up and running in minutes. I don't understand how anyone can type that out and not realise halfway through how ridiculous they're being.

Even for technical users / developers, their time is better spent than fiddling around with 10 different tools.

> Even for technical users / developers, their time is better spent than fiddling around with 10 different tools.

This might or might not be true. Fiddling with 10 different tools often gives you are much larger level of control. If you need some control that you get with 10 different tools that the single source doesn't do then you are stuck with 10 tools. The downside of course if you now need to fiddle with 10 different tools.

Make the correct decision for your situation.

I've set up ecommerce sites quite a few times and it was honestly 1 to 2 days of "work", install + configure and then the rest was customization which clients pay for and are patient for. We were ready to sell product within a day basically and then iterate from there based on client needs.

I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and they can be as heavily customized as you want and rival whatever plugin-heavy Shopify sites are out there.

Someone who knows how to do all of those things, already knows that they know how to do all of those things. Nobody who uses a one-stop-shop like Shopify is duped into thinking it's something revolutionary. Either it's not something they know how to do on their own, not something they think is worth the trouble to do on their own, or not something they could afford to pay someone like you to do.

It's not revolutionary, but even with the stated two days of work in the original comment, you probably are spending a couple years worth of dollars compared to just using Shopify ignoring the time to find said developer, maintain the relationship if something goes wrong, etc. if you are just trying to get an idea off the ground.

So someone could avoid paying you for setup and maintenance by paying an extra $15 bucks a month to Shopify?

Seems like a pretty obvious choice for a small business.

There's also a %tage of sales where the 'build vs buy' argument makes sense in the other direction. Obviously, most sellers of physical goods have better reason to focus on growing revenue and promotional activity, not cutting costs. That break-even point (I think) is some where around $250K/yr revenue, but that calculation depends on margins and the relevant industry matters (from a future planning perspective).

I'm not a huge fan of Shopify. Their default setup and theme requirements are abysmal.

But it's light-years ahead of WordPress+Woocom.

Neither of these are well set to run a proper ecommerce without heavy customizations though.

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