I built an entire custom e-commerce platform - product catalog, cart, checkout, CRM, order tracking, fulfilment management and back office. The site is a print on demand store, using contract printers. In hindsight I wish I had gone with either an off the shelf package or taken the punt on Shopify (this was 2012).

My assumptions around how much integration our custom product customiser/editor needed with the rest of the e-commerce platform ware wrong. I thought I need a user system and "saved designs" for the customers, but that's somewhat rarely used, and could have been bolted onto a standard system.

Maintaining and updating it is extra work over what the core business is, there is now a lot of custom code to fix old assumptions and implement features that we didn't previously expect. All of which come as standard with Shopify.

We also believe that customers are increasingly used to seeing the Shopify checkout, it is a reassuringly familiar experience. I suspect it has a measurable effect on dropouts.

If I was to start again now I would 100% just use Shopify, no question. We are considering a large project to move to it. It would be quite satisfying to delete all that code. But it would probably bring new problems, and thing we are used to being able to customise that we will be unable to.

Do I regret doing it? No not really, hindsight is 20:20. A lot of lessons were learnt, but that enabled us to build a successful business.