Racket for e-commerce (2019)
defn.io
defn.io
Bogdan is active in the Racket community and his Koyo framework is really well built. Any cursory search on the community resources would easily find this.
Whatever reason they had to close their tea shop is unrelated to Racket AFAIK.
Even so now that the website in the article isn't online anymore, when just using Shopify and others would have been a better solution.
The only time to do this is probably if you're learning or curious on how to build a toy store, but that's about it really.
Shopify is just a glorified shopping cart like million others, so its no better than writing your own using frameworks available, which makes it trivial and even easier than shopify.
If going by your logic its futile to even try to build own e-commerce store. Just use established platforms which offer marketplace. Since marketplace solves one of the biggest hurdle for an ecommerce which is visitors traffic which you can convert. Also with added advantage that visitor can combine things from multiple stores into a single cart, payment and logistics infrastructure.
What that means depends on the business and the employees. If you got no developers, then maybe your only option is to use something that is ready and needs no development. If the shop is your main business and you got good developers, then you might want to do one better, even if it takes time and effort.
So I would not necessarily exclude the possibility, that creating your own might be best for you. You can still make use of third party APIs for things like credit card payment and so on. When you roll your own, you get to decide which parts you outsource and which parts you make yourself. This allows you to decide where you want to be flexible and where you limit yourself to what the limits of a third party software are.
Gatsby-Shopify: https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter
Gridsome-Shopify: https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/
I wish Shopify's pricing page was clearer on which plan I need to use the API.
Another hyperbole and marketing jargon (ecommerce systems are one of the easiest and most competitive with too many providers like shopify).
You might not have tried options and frameworks available in market. Literally thousands of one-click install ecommerce systems ready to use is available for bare-metal, cloud, kubernetes, containers or even simple desktop machines. These systems comes with redundancy, high-availability, faster response time, integrated with payment provider, logistic provider of choice but also gives full control including source code (very different from walled gardens of shopify which indeed has access to customer data, payment, order information, inventory information of store owners without providing any source code).
In functionality, templates and flexibility much better than Shopify. May be just change the tinted glass of promoting shopify and you might see thousands of other options in the market.
And Shopify being the most common platform now, and quickest and easiest to get up and running, is probably why they used that as an example (i.e. you could have a decent looking matcha-tea store setup within an hour with all the payment methods you want).
Rolling an entire ecom store is already another job in of itself and reimplementing almost everything of the ecommerce stack doesn't make business sense.
A wise business minded merchant can focus on selling from day 0, not on day 720. All while trying to duck-tape their fraud and analytics stack whilst looking for a programmer to maintain their contraption.
Common sense is very uncommon :-).
E-commerce stores are not easy as business, but very easy to launch today because technology is the easiest part of it. The biggest difficulty is getting traffic, then conversion to order, then with superior products, logistics and customer service retain the customer. No one can setup logistics, product catalogs, superior customer service from day 0, it takes quite a time and feedback loop. So remember in the grand scheme of ecommerce store for merchant time taken to build or launch a system is minuscule compared to other hard physical world problems they need to solve around products and services they are offering.
Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify.
Shopify is just one another provider with walled gardens. Shopify is popular not due to any innovation in technology or quality or speed, its popular because it spend literally billions of dollars of investor money in marketing. So they succeeded by throwing marketing money, not due to innovative technology.
I am currently looking for a good solution to do just that, but don't know where to start. Do you mind sharing a few good ones?
If you want to focus on selling and having a good backend platform, don't waste your time building your own stack and maintain it, the most important thing is to start selling and bring traffic to your website.
1. Spree [1] Store Demo [2]
2. Saleor [3] Store Demo [4]
3. Reaction [5]
4. Solidus [6]
5. Medusa [7]
6. Sylius [8]
7. Shuup [9]
8. Vendure [10] Demo Store [11]
9. Shopware [12]
10. Vue-Storefront [13] - works with many of the above backend.
11. nopCommerce [14]
12. Bagisto [15]
------
Links:
[1] https://spreecommerce.org/spree-as-a-service/
[2] https://spree.vercel.store/
[4] https://saleor.vercel.store/
[5] https://mailchimp.com/developer/open-commerce/
[11] https://vendure.vercel.store/
[12] https://www.shopware.com/en/
[13] https://www.vuestorefront.io/cloud
[14] https://www.nopcommerce.com/en/enterprise-ecommerce-platform
1. Spree: headless ecommerce with REST/GraphQL APIs built using Rails/Ruby. Next.js and Vue starter sites
2. Saleor: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Django/Python. Next.js starter site
3. Reaction/Open Commerce: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Node.js/Javascript
4. Solidus: headless ecommerce with REST API built using Rails/Ruby
5. Medusa: headless ecommerce with REST API built using Node.js/Express/Javascript. Gatsby and Next.js starter sites
6. Sylius: ecommerce built using Symfony/PHP
7. Shuup: ecommerce built using Django/Python. Looks like open source version is dead
8. Vendure: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Node.js/Typescript
Can you name a few, or several? I'd sincerely like to know, as Shopify is usually top of mind for me.
I built my own e-commerce site in Django a few years ago. I'll never do that again! I learned a lot, but building the site was about 5% of the work necessary to running the business.
They were one of the first with broad API integrations and not just a take or leave it storefront.
They have both REST and GraphQL integrations for the HN type crowd
They have an entire framework for heavily customized storefronts, Hydrogen[0]
They have Shop, their Amazon style discovery equivalent for smaller shops.
They have a good app marketplace for integrations
And a lot more.
Not really there were many solution much better in the market, below had some list with solutions offering much more then list above. It's just that Shopify had investor money to burn to have market dominance through marketing.
Indeed that's visible in their balance sheet that they grow by spending money not due to technological innovations.
Platforms add overhead, risk and lock-in: they'll _always_ affect your margins, you have no control over which direction their business moves in, and moving between providers is non-trivial.
We've been using our own home-rolled ecommerce solution for multi-currency international retail and it's ROI has been huge.
If you care about margins, defaulting to a SaaS provider for everything is not always the right answer
There are probably good e-commerce platforms, but shopify is so slow and so shit that it actively turns me off everywhere I find it. It's immediately noticeable due to the slowdown, which ends up frustrating me so much I only tolerate it if I absolutely must have whatever it is they sell (and cannot get it literally anywhere else). I doubt I'm alone in this.
Racket for E-Commerce - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20792486 - Aug 2019 (8 comments)
ping: matchacha.ro: No address associated with hostname
Racket comunity will never admit it to you, but the more they praise their "sweet & perfect & superiror" language, the less web applications are written in it!