To the rest of the posters... __READ__ what he is writing.. He want total control and a low budget. Have any of you even tried Shopify ? It's low control and it's expensive as hell.
Ok, so i'm actually running a pretty large store on Django Oscar. But i would say that it really depends on what you are building
The only reason i choose Django oscar over something like shopify is that we sell a highly customizable product and needed total freedom to try out different ways of giving discounts and creating vouchers. If you just sell standard products then don't bother.
I will give credit to the creators of Django Oscar for building a highly customizable framework and if you know your way around Django, the overhead of using it shouldn't be too large.
Have you ever tried Shopify? It's nearly full control and cheap as shit. I've started stores and sold products in the same day many times, they have 1000s of apps, and even 2 week trial that enables you to test any product before even paying a cent. Unless you can't live with credit card fees, or you're selling drugs, you should almost 100% always use Shopify. Not to mention they can be scaled to the moon cheaply too. Call shopify when you hit a decent milestone and just tell them to waive you're monthly fee. Not that it'll even matter at that point.
I know I'm being a hater, but coding the store is really terrible advice. Learning to use a tool over reinventing the tool is a step backwards.
Coding the store is NOT terrible advice when you're talking to a developer who wants "full control and independent".
It's very disappointing to see all the comments here saying "use shopify". That's what your mum would do. Are you a developer or not?
It's like saying "just use facebook, you don't need a website", or "Just eat at MacDonalds, it's much cheaper and easier".
There's no way I would recommend being tied to a monthly Shopify fee when there's much better options out there for devs to gain control, and build a faster more creative and original store.
Part of being a good developer is knowing the value of your time. The opportunity cost of coding your own online store will be much, much higher than using an off the shelf platform like Shopify.
If it's a passion project where OP wants to learn more about programming, then go for it. Commerce is a wide domain where one can learn a lot. But if this is a business, then value thy time.
Full disclosure: I work at Shopify. These views are my own, not my employer's.
And there it is. I knew Shopify employees were in this thread, it just had that vibe about it. Make no mistake, your views are indeed your employer's views when the point you're pushing is "use our product, it's your only hope".
Is there a team at Shopify tasked with "social persuasion" who monitor online discussion about e-commerce?
"Value thy time"... oh please, we can say the same about eating too. Don't bother cooking when you can buy a microwave frozen dinner.
Absolutely developers should write their own shopping cart vs use Shopify. While they’re at it, they should probably design a custom OS and a custom webserver too.
After all, these aren’t all three cases of discrete functional software with well defined patterns of use where minor customization is easy and writing from scratch takes thousands or millions of man hours.
Is there a decent alternative to Shopify that is self-hosted?
That $400 a year from Shopify is not a trivial expense for a hobby store.
I have friends with small brick and mortar stores and have a hard time suggesting an off-the-shelf ecommerce solution.
Shopify would be a bad choice for my friend's carpet store where very few customers will actually order the carpet online but where customizable website functionality(mix and match carpets, reserve but not pay for carpets, etc) is of paramount importance.
Sure you can customize Shopify, but if you are going down that rabbit hole then might as well own your backend as well.
If $400 a year isn’t a trivial expense for an ecommerce store, you are probably wasting your time.
You can go with woo, which is marginally free. But it takes a week to set up vs half a day with Shopify. So, wasting 35 $100 hours to save $400 is a bad decision. Then you have maintenance costs of a few hours a month.
You could go with amazon. But to list your own product costs $39.99 a month, so $480 a year there too. (You might be able to go with $39.99 then downgrade, haven’t tried it)
eBay and Etsy might work. Craigslist for sale postings are still free.
But at the end of the day, if the store isn’t bringing it at least $400-500 a month it should probably be shuttered and move on to the next idea.
There are definitely apps to do customizable combos and reserve but don’t pay.
Customizing Shopify (or big commerce or volusion) is almost always cheaper in total cost than custom work until you have a huge base.
I wrote software for 7 years. Now run 4 Shopify stores. I used to also run two woo stores. Shoping carts are complicated and boring. Shopify gets things right you wouldn’t know you need for three years. It’s the right place to start.
I do agree that for pure ecommerce store MVP Shopify is the primary option.
I was referring to use case that's been frequent in my experience: a brick and mortar shop wants the online shop capability but does not expect many sales from it.
One case: a friend of mine is currently paying $45 a month for an ancient closed source PHP ecommerce solution and only bringing in $500 month in online sales (but regular foot traffic brings in much more).
He'd love to go to something less expensive, but Shopify wouldn't really change much.
I started setting up Prestahop for him, but realized even if I gifted him my time, the problem would be supporting it afterwards.
Another thing with Shopify, it is not like $29 a month brings you instant happiness. There is a whole Shopify ecosystem with paid plugins etc. So you will need to spend time and get comfortable with Shopify just like you'd need to with Magento, Prestashop, woocommerce etc.
Plus not owning your backend has its own set of problems.
Thus Shopify is not necessarily the best long term solution.
The OP probably actually doesn't want total control, they just think they do for whichever reason.
As for the price, $29/mo + 2.9% for Shopify Basic isn't bad. It's basically covered (one should hope) by a couple sales per month, especially for bespoke stitching products.
No, my response was that they _probably_ don't, if they'd evaluate that viewpoint further. Especially as a software dev/engineer, it's all too easy to think that you need absolute control.
And no, now that you ask, no I'm not. I _have_ been the lead developer for at least 3 e-commerce systems though, so I know it's not trivial.
Because... it's a craft e-store, never going to have a lot of revenue; $30 per month is $30 less for buying food; also Shopify take a cut of each sale, so it's a regular double whammy and that sucks. And the owner will be a creative person, and they are usually fussy/particular/perfectionists regarding visual presentation of their artwork/brand/style/look and feel. I know, I've built online stores for artists. The attention to detail requests didn't stop. Fortunately I had total control over the store right up until payment gateway, so it was fine.
Some small businesses are looking to set up shop properly more than quickly. Anyway, these are all opinions, I'm just sharing mine.
Well what would you do instead? Assuming that OP will build the site for free, the shop owner still needs to pay for hosting (assume $5 droplet at Digital Ocean), domain name (assume ~$10 from Namecheap), and a payment processor (assuming Paypal, (2.9% + 0.30) / transaction). Considering all of this is abstracted away and handled for you for $30, doesn't sound that bad. We haven't even touched on headaches from future maintenance, bugs, features, scaling, etc.
You've included "domain name" in the list of things Shopify does for $30, and you'd be wrong about that. It's an extra expense. And not only that, but the $30 plan doesn't provide "professional reports" which most businesses would want. Exporting invoice data as CSV, or to accounting software, backup of database etc. These are things I would advise a business needs.
I never said build the whole CMS/store platform from scratch. I would use something like Perch which is a CMS with shop-addon that allows you to build the site and store normally, then integrate easily into a shop. It's possible to be up and running quickly using a basic shared hosted platform as the host - which is all you need at first.
The day that "scaling" is needed is the day you ask your web host to put your mySQL e-store site on a better shared hosting plan with more RAM and more CPU... wow, what a huge effort! Or go VPS or something. Easy.
Every used mySqL? It actually works quite well believe it or not. Cheap, easy, not a headache.
We can argue all day about the details, but in the end you are advocating a microwave dinner as the solution for a small business wanting to make an impact and good impression with new customers. I am advocating something a lot better.
Both you are right and not right - it all depends. "Total control" is subjective term here. One may find total control with Shopify or Amazon, but another may have an urge to implement in-house DDoS protection or have own power supply.
Sounds pretty cheap compared to donating $20,000 worth of weekends to your friend for a half baked ecommerce CMS. Maybe the business should exist first and prove total control is necessary before sinking a huge unpredictable labor-cost into it.
That's exaggerating things and distorting the intention. It's for his friend's craft "business", not some client who needs a copy and paste effort ready by 9am tomorrow.
Half baked CMS you say... are you predicting the outcome of an effort under your development? Some people should stick to plug and play solutions because it's their only real option.
A friend of mine set up a Woo-commerce site for her boss who ran a shoe shop. The site went up quickly, using templates and "out of the box" things from Woo. Worst store ever. Horrible UX, slow... so slow, click... wait... click... wait. They didn't sell much at all on that site. It was crap. I would not expect better from any plug and play solution, but then again my standards are high for e-commerce stores.
> are you predicting the outcome of an effort under your development?
That's an ad hominem and still leaves my point of how huge the amount of underestimated work there is. The problem is the volume of work first, the quality of work (by both OP's self-admitted juniorness and by lack of time for a full-time project) second.
Also, your standards are high for ecommerce but you don't think a lot of effort is required to do as-good or better than a specific one you didn't like?
> It's for his friend's craft "business", not some client who needs a copy and paste effort ready by 9am tomorrow.
His friend probably doesn't want to wait a week everytime he thinks of a new basic requirement built into the vast majority of ready to go ecommerce CMSs.
"basic requirement" huh, like exporting customer orders to a format ready to import into accounting software, aka "advanced report writing". Sorry, only available in the $299 per month shopify plan.
Look, if you like Shopify... go for it. Me, I would avoid that thing like the plague. I value flexible parameters and increased possibilities over a stifled e-store that pops out the vending machine slot if you remember to feed it $30 a month.
Shopify is not for developers, and not for anyone who knows a developer or willing to pay for something better than a microwave dinner experience. That's not just my opinion, it's also how it actually is.
If he wanted full control like he says he'd just setup an apache server on a linux system and build his own store front. He clearly wants some help somewhere between no control and full control and Shopify can get him 80% of the way there.
How does Shopify not give enough control? Anyone can write Shopify apps to extend extra features with their API or pay someone to create an app (less than paying someone for a full ecommerce site)
Not all aspects of Shopify can be customized -- especially with the checkout workflow (eg you can only set a logo for the checkout page, but not style it). Also the non-ecommerce pages are woefully lacking in content management functionality (anything more complex than a blog is impossible without using a third-party app to store custom content in meta fields).
And writing apps yourself is not always ideal because they need to run on your own server (thus mitigating the benefit of using a hosted platform to avoid infrastructure maintenance), and any frontend modifications can only be done via JavaScript (you can't modify the outputted HTML itself, so it's a lot more difficult to make robust, performant and accessible customizations to functionality).
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Ok, so i'm actually running a pretty large store on Django Oscar. But i would say that it really depends on what you are building
The only reason i choose Django oscar over something like shopify is that we sell a highly customizable product and needed total freedom to try out different ways of giving discounts and creating vouchers. If you just sell standard products then don't bother.
I will give credit to the creators of Django Oscar for building a highly customizable framework and if you know your way around Django, the overhead of using it shouldn't be too large.