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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?

#111

Post by exodust »

Perch Runway is good, it's a one time initial cost then nothing further. It's a full CMS website solution where the shop is one of the add-ons (shop.perchcms.com). It's all about full control, you make your site exactly how you like, and host it wherever you want. Look it up and read over the features to see if suits your needs. I built a store with Perch and it was extremely snappy and worked well.

It won't take a day to build, it will take longer, like anything worthwhile.

Don't use Shopify or boring solutions like that if you want full control. Get stuck in and make an original, responsive store!

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

#113

Post by matte_black »

bo1024 wrote: post #102
matte_black wrote: post #63

How about a minimal static page with an email address or phone number at the bottom for placing orders? Sounds very custom and high end. Total control over the customer relationship. Even GDPR compliant.

From my armchair, this solution sounds great. The only drawback is that discoverability is difficult -- sites like etsy probably bring you some marketing for free just by showing up in searches.

Yes, but even if you have a product on Etsy you will still have to advertise to make it successful.

The difference with a static page is you can have a very optimized experience that loads fast for users all around the world.

And with a myriad of options for people to contact you, you can engage in real conversation that will have a much higher chance of making a sale. Indeed, by slowing down the checkout process and weeding out impulse buyers, you can paradoxically break into higher quality sales for high value or custom crafted items.

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

#114

Post by kenrose »

exodust wrote: post #106
codyzazulak1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> Are you a developer or not?

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.

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

#117

Post by x3sphere »

wizzzzzy wrote: post #76
richjdsmith wrote: post #53

Please for the love of all that is good in this world, don't use Woocommerce. I maintain a WooCommerce site - it is a fucking nightmare. Oh, as for "saving money" by choosing Woo over Shopify, in the end you pay for plugins bringing you the same functionality already built into Shopify.

Out of curiosity, what is it you've found such a nightmare? I've worked on numerous woocommerce sites and have generally found the experience fine.

same. Maybe it was awful in the past, but I've had no issues with Woocommerce in the past 2 years or so. I suppose it can get messy if you are working with some poorly coded plugins, but the base WC, works pretty well.

I looked at Shopify but it looked like a huge headache to customize - seems it would be a good option if you want more of a turn key experience though.

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

#118

Post by germainelol »

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…

> 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.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I've always wanted to create a simple store as a side project to learn some new tech, so I'm curious what the issues are with putting that side project live.

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

#119

Post by Can_Not »

aerovistae wrote: post #82
mythrowaway1124 wrote: post #10

Unless your product is an online store, don't code an online store.

I don't really understand this sentiment which seems to be widely shared here. Stripe handles all the PCI stuff. What's wrong with coding up a basic store?

OP's friend needs a store quickly, and probably wants a stable, feature-rich, ready to use store. OP most likely does not want to get blind-sided discovering that the plethora of currently existing solutions have upwards of well over $1 million dollars of labor-hours (features, QA, documentation) put into them. Magento might even have over $1 billion in labor-hours. Rolling your own out of simple ignorance regarding what exists is already rather dumb, but the surprise finding out that making anything worth using is a full-time job will be soul crushing, depressing, and may even damage OP's relationship.

Writing an ecommerce CMS because you are educated on what exists and want to innovate is a completely different matter.

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

#120

Post by neya »

I wrote my own over the last two years[1] and it has served me really well. I've designed it in a way that can support multiple sites from a single node, so, it's really a very pleasurable experience now. I enjoy working on it, fixing bugs and thinking about the strategic direction for this project.

I don't use Shopify for many, many reasons[1]

If you want to setup a quick store in just under a week of development, I highly recommend using Jekyll + PayPal. Contrary to popular believe, PayPal actually converts better than rolling out your own integrated solution based on Stripe/etc.

I run a couple of dropshipping stores based on my stack, so please feel free to ask me anything :)

[1] https://medium.com/build-ideas/my-journey-of-writing-an-e-co...

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