It seems like a good way to learn Python, but after you've learned enough you will lose interest in maintaining your friend's web store for practically no money.
Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
31–40 of 162 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#32OpenCart 100%
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#33To 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 prod…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#34Most 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.
I would suggest that you want to get that marketing number as close to 100% as possible.
Spending time on anything technology related at the start is really a distraction from the important goal of understanding products, pricing, and customers. Any time spent on technology beyond that of doing the minimum required to make selling possible is a premature optimization.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#35Shopify 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?
Shopify comes with a free trial. After that the monthly is very low.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#36Shopify. And if they start selling a lot and ship things themselves, have them look into shipping software as well (where you can buy and print postage/labels and get shipping rates for packages online)
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#37Agree 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…
Don't write off saleor though. It's basically fully featured OOTB, all you really have to do is integrate payments and your own AWS setup if you don't wanna use Heroku. Probably easier than using Squarespace and def cheaper. I haven't looked into Shopify or Sellfy though.
It has taxes and configurable shipping costs by region. I was going to use Shopify or Squarespace until I found saleor. I definitely agree with using Etsy first though to gain traction before trying to get higher margins by rolling your own.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#38I've used Saleor before and while it was great, I was pretty familiar with Django at the time and worry it could be overwhelming as a way to learn.
I've also used Wordpress + WooCommerce so if you can find a theme you like, it's a great way to get something up in < 4 hours so you can hack away on Saleor for the next few weekends.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#39Don’t write your own store, since GDPR and EU VAT it's absurdly complicated to be compliant.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?
#40Shopify 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…
100% this. I'd actually encourage your friend to start with an Etsy store and consider adding a shopify based store later if she gets some traction.
If you'd like to help her and learn python while doing it then there's a lot you could do around analytics, market (keyword) research and marketing.