Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

70 pointseconcon69 comments

What do you recommend to physical product business which gets about 25-100 sales a day?

In case you are curious, what I sell it's 3d printing fimament which I make in my garage: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922

I am a programmer but I do not like building something which already exists and e-commerce platform is boring for me also Shopify while is good but I need self hosted one for ideological reasons.

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Honestly - don’t.

Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.

For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...

In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...

You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure

Just to note that several issues you cite are handled can be handled by the payment processor like Stripe.

OT: why have you omitted the last two letters from each of the company names?

I put stars there because I didn’t want to directly advertise any. Those “vanished”...

> Those “vanished”...

Likely swallowed by the Markdown parser in HN, backend.

Good advice. While it might seem a good idea to hire some freelancer to set up self hosted ecommerce solution as it is cheaper, but looking in a long term, your eshop will need maintenance. Especially annoying with Wordpress and Woocommerce, when using lots of third party plugins. After few months you obviously think up a new feature or two, but original freelancer won't be available and you'll have to find a new one. He will have a hard time cramming in new features and installing updates. The cycle continues and usually such eshop becomes a mess. Slow loading times, unsecure, hard to implement new features. And if custom integration for local payments or delivery provider breaks one day - you are in real trouble.

Just adding to that (especially for software): not only was the development overhead minimal: I think setting up the shop, integrating the license key generation, determining all the pricing etc. took like 1 day including testing?! The savings on accounting were also significant. Had we been the direct seller, we would have driven the (tax) auditors fee ad absurdum. E.g., we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to, the tax audits would have taken ridiculously long and cost a lot, the paper trail (every sale an invoice that has to be kept on record...).

Instead: we only booked 2 revenues per month and that was it. We were not liable for the taxes, everything was taken care of.

I do think that purchasing these services makes small & large gigs easier than ever. Highly recommend.

Are you referring to using Stripe or Shopify?

I personally used Fastspring. I cannot talk about Stripe or Shopify. They also model your “shopping page” to fit in with everything else. So your customers have a consistent experience.

> E.g., we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to

You could have registered to "VAT Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS)" in one member state: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/i...

I would suggest Woocommerce. It has a huge community with almost any plugin or theme you can think about. I am not sure it makes sense to do it in your case, as you are likely to spend more time on the store, and less growing your business.

Some managed hosting options at different price levels: Kinsta.com WPXhosting.com SiteGround.com NameHero.com

Some themes, plugins, that can help you get up and running quickly: Elementor.com kadencewp.com/product/kadence-woo-extras/ wpastra.com/woocommerce/ commercegurus.com/product/shoptimizer/

Some other useful links to get you started: woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/ youtube.com/channel/UCjDuxPEhNQ2qn_qAdjRG4YQ/videos

Whatever you do, don't end up spending 6 months building something and miss out on 6 months of comission-free sales.

Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time be better spent on increasing sales?

(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to tinker with?)

There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product run by a few developers.

[1] https://freewebstore.com/

Woocommerce. Can you elaborate more on "ideological reasons"?

I'm genuinely curious why you don't feel ok to pay less than $1/sale to shopify to keep your store up & running but are ok paying much more on fulfillment/shipping.

I've a multiple stores and some stores get 5 sales a month on $10 item and for that I can't afford Shopify.

I am looking for something which I can host on my own as I've nearly free servers (I receive digital ocean credit through affiliate sales on the guides I wrote) so hosting is free for me and tinkering is free as there not much work where I working so I can fix my website in that time.

Also I don't like to pay monthly for closed source product. That's my ideological reason, it's low in priority but I always choose open whenever possible

OpenCart and Prestashop are open PHP/MySQL shops with a lot of available payment provider plugins.

i love wordpress+woocommerce instead of shopify because it's an easier system to manage security + hosting + speed + code if you know what you are doing. You don't really need paid plugins, just some PHP along the way and some free plugins will get you a long way. Esp paying < $100 for a shared cpanel or 1 of the better hosts $100-200/yr is still cheaper than Shopify's 30-70 USD a month.

Spree e-commerce is a solid Rails engine that can be used a fully skinnable site and offers a full API for any integrations, customizations, or other apps you want to hook up down the line. It also has robust configurations for your product line, fulfillment, and shipping setups. Have built enterprise-level online stores on it, but it is geared for business the size you describe.

https://spreecommerce.org/

I'm sure there are many but Solidus is one: https://solidus.io/

To add to that, Spree Commerce: https://github.com/spree/spree

Coincidentally, they both run on Ruby on Rails it seem.

Gonna check out these two they seem cool.

Solidus is a fork

Does anyone have experience working with Solidus and/or Spree at scale? I know that Solidus is a fork of Spree, and from what it seems, Shopify is based off of a heavily modified fork of Spree. Couple of questions:

- How easy is Spree/Solidus to customize?

- Why did Solidus fork from Spree? How does this factor into whether I'd pick one or the other?

- Are Spree and Solidus compatible with each other package ecosystem wise?

- Which one has the most traction as of right now? While Solidus seems to be a relatively recent fork, Spree still appears to have more activity. Why is this the case?

If you’re familiar with python and django, then saleor might be a good option: https://saleor.io/

I second that. Have used saleor for couple of Ecommerce stores. Has enough features to launch a store out of the box while lacking all the features that if incorporated would make the platform extremely complicated. You can take the community edition and extend it to meet your requirements.

Another good option here is Django Oscar. Probably a bit more complicated than Saleor, but it’s very powerful and customizable.

I'm surprised no one mentionned Prestashop here. Aside WooCommerce this is a really solid solution since years now, that can scale and have real plugin official marketplace with verified contributors. WooCommerce has way more hassle ...

I dislike the monthly fee for Shopify apps so I go with WooCommerce most the time. I like designing in Elementor, but the Storefront theme is free and decent out of the box.

If it's for a site I want to get up fast I'll go with Shopify.

Yes some of my websites sell 5 items a month and Shopify gets expensive for that too

Woocommerce is built on top of Wordpress and is open source.

I want a simple GUI to manage the store & output a static site & manage hosting with terraform files/CDN for any cloud vendor. Lambdas for billing & SQLite/Redis for storage.

Several people mentioned Magento already. For your project, I'd stongly add suggest you should ignore that. While Magento has loads of features build it, it also misses some, I'd consider important. You can not create a custom invoice template out of the box for example.

If you are a somewhat experienced developer, Sylius might give you a good experience and code quality. We build a shop on an earlier version, and it runs solid - not a single downtime in years.

And talking about downtime, see that you get a solid webhost. A clients shop had ~1h downtime a day (!) that nobody could explain. Same setup on a new host runs for a couple of weeks now without issues.

What's the problem your trying to solve?

Paypal button on a static site?

Dont like Paypal, you can use crypto (it's the only thing one can actually self host as in receiving payments)

In case you're into Python, try Odoo community edition. There are integrations for PayPal, Stripe, UPS and whatnot. As an ERP system, an Odoo Webshop is integrated with Sales management, warehouse management etc. For me that's a big benefit.

Magento is still free isn't it? And by adding M2EPro your products & inventory can also list on Amazon and eBay's global sites at the same time that they're on your website.

M2EPro is also free up to a certain (quite high) monthly sales volume

While magento 2 CE is indeed free, it's a horrific mess that I wouldn't recommend to anyone let alone someone who needs a store with only 20-100 orders/day.

Don't self-host. Just get Shopify and be done with it. You should be focused on running your business not fussing around with the tech. Any time you spend doing that is time you aren't spending on selling.

Give a look st Sylius. https://sylius.com/

It written in PHP and has clean and modern codebase what is great if you need some custom development

So what would be the the most simple and cheap non-self-hosted shop and site architecture for small businesses that would enable sales globally?

Are there any tutorials/blog posts on this topic?

Woocommerce on it's own VPS running CentMinMod: http://centminmod.com/ I help manage an Ecommerce site which gets 10,000 vistors a month, and our $20 per month Linode instance + Centminmod handles that level of traffic easily. As for Wordpress themes I'm a big fan of GeneratePress. https://generatepress.com/

Just use woocommerce. As long as you keep the number of installed WordPress plugins minimal and keep them up to date every couple weeks, you're golden. The biggest issue with WordPress ecosystem is the varying qualities of 3rd party plugins which give it endless security issue, but as long as you keep those minimal, a woocommerce store is very solid choice as woocommerce is a first part plugin with solid attention from automattic.

I'll vouch again for WooCommerce. I've built multiple sites with it for clients and it's ideal for a small business with tech-savvy operators.

Hey econcon, I built One Item Store, which solves your exact problem: https://oneitem.store

You can just set up a really simple page, accept payments, and manage orders.

I built a simple example site for your filament: https://oneitem.store/3dfilament

Let me know if you want any more info :)

I created belgianbrewed.com ( fully custom). It's a lot of work, even less obvious things like E-commerce filters.

Tax is hard depending on the country, eg. For Belgium/Europe it's pretty easy. = Tax calculated in the country of residence only.

There are plenty of alternatives beyond woocommerce/Magento. I use woocommerce for another one, but it requires some maintenance.

Just make sure you can easily extend it.

What programming language so you use?

If you're comfortable with PHP, Shopware & Sylius (both built on Symfony). For Python, look at Saleor. If you don't want to live in a world of pain ( see looping__lui), use a SaaS solution like Snipcart or BigCommerce (which has very competitive rates vs. Shopify). Use the time to learn how to market your product, run ads, create content and grow your business.

Sylius should be seen more as a framework. And while it is full featured, it also is maintenance.

Workarea is a rails engine you can host yourself, I do integration work for retailers but the core of it is OSS. Lots of plugins, and they're easy to create.

https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea

License is a non starter:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work without an additional license agreement with WebLinc so long as you do not use the Licensed Work for a Commerce Service.

> Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate.

doesn't that convert the license to "Version 2.0 or later of the GNU General Public License"?

Check out Shopaholic for October CMS: https://octobercms.com/plugin/lovata-shopaholic (Disclaimer: I'm the lead maintainer for October CMS but I have no affiliation with Shopaholic).

I'll put Snipcart (https://snipcart.com/) in the ring. It's nice because it has only the server logic part in the cloud but it's very easy for a programmer to set up and do themselves.

Reading through these replies makes feel like the only person who doesn't sell something and made me curious about what people here are selling.

Slightly off topic I know, but anyone care to share what product or service they use these services for?

Recently had some experience with nopCommerce and it's been neat to work with.

Prestashop, WooCommerce, Snipcart, Magento, are all decent self-hosted solutions.

Open Cart is a near solution

https://commercejs.com/ looks like nice platform.

They have a plan with 0 upfront cost, you only pay % of transaction.

Can try snipcart.com

You can build a very basic static frontend (HTML/JS) and they will host all the backend stuff and process the payments. 2% fee + payment gateway.

If you can't afford the shopify fees you don't actually have a business.

Just pointing out he said for ideological reasons.

I also sell 3d printed models online so I've made like 20+ e-commerce websites so far. Most of them are niche website and get 5-10 sales each and some even get zero sales but some websites are seasonal in nature and in some season or event, they blow up in sales.

I am trying to capture this windfall but Shopify is not good for this task.

They charge per store so I am limited to just having one store which is not good for niche work - exploration and discovery.

OH! Ok that actually makes sense when you put it in context.

I would probably develop a framework and do free gatsbyjs/netlify static sites that link back to a centralized payment processor service

Yeah, I think this is the move. Do you think you should also centralize inventory as well? IE having 1 shopify store with inventory of all of your items vs having 1 stripe account.

I would centralize inventory and filter on the client side with queries

I been thinkering with the idea of service first ecommerce platform; that doesn't lock people down as much Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce do.

For an use case like yours, the 20+ websites are more akin to microsites focused on a subset of products but still mapped to one single catalog and ecommerce store.

Even with ShopifyPlus multi store support each store has its own catalog, and completely seperate for integrations, transactions, etc.

This is actually very popular usecase among dropshipping too, being locked to one store reduces conversion rates.

We can make subaccount in stripe, so it's easy to specific different subaccount for different product.

While WooCommerce is there but still we need to setup wordpress blog and multiple other things.

Magento is a popular alternative

Netlify + Stripe.

Drupal Commerce.

Openbazaar

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