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

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

#21

Post by pasta »

Most people don't understand that a webshop is like a normal shop: hard and lots of work:

  Writing good text
  Taking good pictures
  Handling sales and delivery
  Handling returns (yes people will return sometimes)
So I agree with most people here: don't roll your own shop but invest time in running your shop.

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

#23

Post by dfee »

mattkevan wrote: post #11

Agree with the other posts here. Don’t write your own store. 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…

Wow. I’ve been down a rabbit hole with cart building and DB design and never realized that Snipcart existed.

What other magic is out there?

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

#24

Post by amelius »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Shopify or Etsy to MVP until there's traction. Don't prematurely optimize by thinking you need to use Django or write the shop yourself in the beginning. > Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent? Don't do this. Your time is worth something. Just keep an eye as things develop as to how you're going to get the data out of your prototype into a bespoke system, eventu…

Good suggestion, but he said budget is very low, so is there a free solution out there?

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

#25

Post by mkirklions »

amelius wrote: post #24
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Shopify or Etsy to MVP until there's traction. Don't prematurely optimize by thinking you need to use Django or write the shop yourself in the beginning. > Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent? Don't do this. Your time is worth something. Just keep an eye as things develop as to how you're going to get the data out of your prototype into a bespoke system, eventu…

Good suggestion, but he said budget is very low, so is there a free solution out there?

I use wordpress + woocommerce(amazon pay)

I dont think this entire setup costs 200 dollars.

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

#26

Post by mkirklions »

a_imho wrote: post #19

WordPress with WooCommerce. In the end there are only a handful of subtle differences between off the shelf solutions.

This does the job for me.

Plus then you get a wordpress/php website.

Im very happy now that I understand php and was able to make a custom theme.

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

#27

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

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.

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

#28

Post by mattkevan »

pasta wrote: post #21

Most people don't understand that a webshop is like a normal shop: hard and lots of work: Writing good text Taking good pictures Handling sales and delivery Handling returns (yes people will return sometimes) So I agree with most people here: don't roll your own shop but invest time in running your shop.

Also marketing. Running a successful online shop is 70% marketing, 30% everything else. Mucking about with technology should be a fraction of that.

As someone who loves mucking about with technology, I got the balance very wrong with my first shop – spent so long getting it working and keeping it working I had no to time to tell anyone about it.

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

#29

Post by projectramo »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #18
projectramo wrote: post #17

This is how I would do it, step by step: 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. Struggl…

Unfortunately, there is no known shortcut What about just jumping to step 8 immediately?

I tried that, and it turned out I was actually at step 3.

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

#30

Post by mkirklions »

dopamean wrote: post #3

It's 2018. There's almost zero reason to build an online store yourself if all that is being sold is stitching work. This sounds like a perfect use case for Shopify/Etsy/Big Cartel or any of the many sites that do this already.

I dont use these sites, do you get user emails for follow up promotion?
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