Ask HN: Options to build a little online store | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Options to build a little online store

9 pointsmvolfik8 comments

Hey there! I'm about to set up a small eshop (expected around 50 orders/month) for a relative (an artist). I've contemplated what's available, and I'm not very happy with what I found.

- There's Woocommerce, which I've installed and tried doing basic setup, and it's too deeply bloated in the Wordpress ecosystem. My first impression from Prestashop was that it's going to be quite a similar PHP mess

- I don't want to get vendor locked-in with things like Shopify. They also don't seem to offer much design customizability (I'm a web dev and there's quite a unique design concept for the site from the artist)

- Searching GitHub for ecommerce, Solidus[1] looked quite promising, however, it also slightly overshoots the border of 'too complex' for me, and their docs on integrating a custom payments provider (a strict requirement - not US based) aren't really great

[1]: https://github.com/solidusio/solidus

So my question is: are there any borderline-pet projects I've missed?

I've been doing web dev for over 2 years now, so I'm also thinking about building my own almost-serverless solution. Is that plausible in reasonable time (wouldn't want to give this more than 2 weeks), or are there too many holes to fall into even though the sensitive part of payments is handled by a simple integration?

One more bit of info, together with building this, their whole web is going to be transferred to a new CMS, likely the Netlify headless CMS (IMO a very cool concept - no backend, frontend uses GitHub http API to directly commit any saved changes). Therefore ideally I'd love to integrate the products inventory into this CMS, which saves data into markdown + front matter, and then can be built into HTML or any JSON to be fetched by frontend - that's why I said almost-serverless.

"...building my own almost-serverless solution ... Netlify headless CMS ... GitHub http API ... markdown + front matter ..."

You don't want your relative to be locked into a hosted solution like Shopify yet you want to create a totally custom solution that probably only you will be familiar with?

No. Do everyone a solid and stick with Shopify. Learn how to create a theme for Shopify and you're set. Or learn how to actually develop for Wordpress+Woocommerce if you want to host it yourself. Both options take care of tons of stuff in the background so you don't have too. Do you really want to spend the next months implementing the most basic ecom functionality?

Have you actually tried Shopify? I have developed multiple custom theme and apps for my Shopify store clients, you can customize the theme to whatever you want using HTML/CSS/JS. And in case of vendor lock in, you can always export out the theme file before switching to another ecommerce store provider, then edit the theme file slightly to match other provider.

If you just want an API to accept order and checkout and want to create the whole UI by yourself, you can consider using Shopify Lite for $9 / Month.

The bloatness is there for a reason, you will start to regret your decision to go lean after you realize you need to add product variants, custom discount scheme, or even handling chargeback / return /refund down the road.

I made a living by helping merchant who stumbled the roadblocks mentioned above to switch to Shopify.

Hi, I've spent the past 3 years full time building an open source e-commerce framework (https://vendure.io)

From my experience, I can most certainly recommend against rolling your own unless you have a few hundred spare hours

Based on your expected volume I think something like Shopify makes sense and probably does most of what you need, if you can manage to get a frontend working to your requirenents. However, if you want to try out some new tech (graphql, some interesting FE framework of your choice) then you might want to take a look at Vendure. It can be set up in 5 minutes with a single command.

We used Celery (https://www.trycelery.com) before moving to Shopify.

As for Shopify, I'm not sure what's the lock-in, I can export all data (On Amazon, by comparison, you can't access your customers.)

Also, themes are in liquid, you can upload any html you'd like (bonus: if you end up doing a cool theme, you can resell it.)

Working for a relative means there is no or little payment involved? Choose the most generic hosted solution. If reasonably successful, which might be any profit like 2 sales per month, it will need to run for years. As a developer you don't want to receive emails about the system being down, acting weird, special feature requests, warning messages about outdated modules. Long-term that will consume your time. It's fine to invest time for the initial research, setup, design, but ideally it will run automated from then on.

Saw this posted not too long ago: https://oneitem.store

After posting this, I found https://chrisdiana.dev/simplestore/. This is pretty much the level of what I'm aiming to build - session in local storage, two clicks checkout. Doesn't look very complex. I just wanted to be careful about Dunning-Kruger effect - already ran into that once quite hardly

ecwid

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