How do you compare to: http://www.commercetools.com/en/pricing/ (I'm not affiliated with them.)
They are expensive ... but why should I choose you?
Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#32How do you compare to: http://www.commercetools.com/en/pricing/ (I'm not affiliated with them.) They are expensive ... but why should I choose you?
Commercetools is a good platform and one of our closest competitors. The key differences are that our pricing scales a lot better, we don’t lock you into a single gateway or charge transaction fees. We also don’t arbitrarily limit the number of products you can store, or the bandwidth you can use.
We’re also more flexible, we have an EAV system (Flows) that allows you to modify and store custom data sets in a structured way. This allows you to use Moltin as a much bigger part of your product than just what we currently offer.
They do have a few more features right now but we’re pushing hard on the development front to reach feature parity with the major platforms.
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#332 questions: How does this compare to existing eCommerce back-ends like SnipCart, Ecwid, Foxycart? And: I presume your service requires javascript to function (as all of the similar services do)... any chance of providing a non-javascript fallback such as a generic-looking checkout page hosted on your own servers (like when you use a paypal button to send users to their site to complete the final step of the transact…
Have you tried a proxy approach with node.js? I have done this twice already when using baas solutions.
We've had a few people doing that, and we'll be forking our JavaScript SDK to natively support Node in the next week or two.
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#34so why should a developer use this vs building their own? if open source back end tools exist why not self host those?
looks like a great product, curious to know what stack you are running, are each backend hosted on amazon?
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#35so why should a developer use this vs building their own? if open source back end tools exist why not self host those? looks like a great product, curious to know what stack you are running, are each backend hosted on amazon?
Hey, another co-founder here.
There is no reason why you couldn’t do that! we’ve even open-sourced a bunch of our components to help people do it - https://github.com/moltin
The reason we created Moltin was to speed up this process, bring it up to modern standards, and give developers the creative freedom to use the tools they’re comfortable with. By not going down the self-hosting route you also no longer have to manage the installation, keep the codebase secure or worry about scaling.
Our main stack utilises nginx, php, postgres, redis and a few other things in-between, we’re built on top of AWS purely for the flexibility it gives us.
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#36so why should a developer use this vs building their own? if open source back end tools exist why not self host those? looks like a great product, curious to know what stack you are running, are each backend hosted on amazon?
Hey, another co-founder here. There is no reason why you couldn’t do that! we’ve even open-sourced a bunch of our components to help people do it - https://github.com/moltin The reason we created Moltin was to speed up this process, bring it up to modern standards, and give developers the creative freedom to use the tools they’re comfortable with. By not going down the self-hosting route you also no longer have to ma…
so basically the benefit here is saved time and reduced operating costs by outsourcing the ecommerce infrastructure.
How did you decide that ecommerce would benefit the most by outsourcing the infrastructure?
I'm definitely interested in using this to see if I can host a shop since I most certainly end up creating a lot of it from scratch. From a developer point of view, it looks like an SDK/API for building ecommerce websites.
How would you differentiate yourself from shopify like solutions? Are you targeting the developer market vs non-technical users?
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#37Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, another co-founder here. There is no reason why you couldn’t do that! we’ve even open-sourced a bunch of our components to help people do it - https://github.com/moltin The reason we created Moltin was to speed up this process, bring it up to modern standards, and give developers the creative freedom to use the tools they’re comfortable with. By not going down the self-hosting route you also no longer have to ma…
so basically the benefit here is saved time and reduced operating costs by outsourcing the ecommerce infrastructure. How did you decide that ecommerce would benefit the most by outsourcing the infrastructure? I'm definitely interested in using this to see if I can host a shop since I most certainly end up creating a lot of it from scratch. From a developer point of view, it looks like an SDK/API for building ecommerc…
Correct. As a developer you know the amount of time you can put into building your own solution to a problem. That approach is fun and a great way to learn, but at some point the benefits can often outweigh the actual costs.
We all spent years building eCommerce websites on a range of platforms and grew more disenfranchised with them over time, we knew there had to be a better way. We started to discuss the concept of building JS only stores. We loved what Stripe were doing for payments and wanted to bring it to the rest of eCommerce, so we ended up settling on our API approach.
Exactly, We're building for developers, Shopify (typically) supports quick stores for non-technical users, but as developers it greatly limits the flexibility we have.
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#39What benefit does Moltin offer over CMS backed ecommerce service such as Drupal commerce and Woocommerce? Your website seem to emphasize rapid application development yet this is not too different from the CMS backed alternatives.
Re: Show HN: Moltin – eCommerce Back End as a Service
#40What benefit does Moltin offer over CMS backed ecommerce service such as Drupal commerce and Woocommerce? Your website seem to emphasize rapid application development yet this is not too different from the CMS backed alternatives.
If you want a basic site quickly, then going with a platform like WooCommerce and an off-the-shelf theme may work well for you. Once you start customising themes and adding advanced functionality, complicated folder structures and functional programming styles can cause no end of problems for many developers.
API based means you’re not locked into a specific CMS or blog platform, you’re not even locked into a specific language or device. All we care about is data transfer and logic, leaving you free to do anything with the frontend.
If you want to know more about what our platform provides apart from rapid development, we’ve touched on them in our other comments.