Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?

Shopify/Squarespace/Sellfy etc. are much cheaper and lower risk, at least to start with. From experience PCI compliance and tax rules are pains you do not want to deal with.

I’d only ever recommend custom coding if you have some extremely specific requirements. Even WooCommerce on Wordpress would be a better starting point.

If you want to tinker, you could build a store using a static site generator like Jekyll combined with a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage the inventory and something like Snipcart [0] for e-commerce functionality (I’m working on a site that does this).

[0] https://snipcart.com

Check out the tools page - https://www.starterstory.com/tools and you can see some of the more popular tools and who is using them.

edit: And anecdotally, I've interviewed a few companies doing $100k/mo and loving Shopify and WooCommerce. I think those are great places to start.

1. Read through the django documentation and try to set up a single site.

2. Realize I was reading django 1.6, and my system had v 1.8 which broke a few things

3. Get on Upwork to hire someone to do it for me

4. Get frustrated with the quality of applicants, but have hope for one person who made the interview

5. Go back to Django and decide that Rails is the right way. Struggle with RVM.

6. Hire the person on upwork, and be disappointed with the first version. Ask why they decided to use wordpress and a custom PHP widget.

7. Go back to Django and get a basic blog up and running

8. Finally pay someone a decent amount on Upwork who sets up the store in no time.

Unfortunately, there is no known shortcut.