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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?

#121

Post by thirdsun »

dfee wrote: post #23
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?

It's rarely mentioned, but if you like Snipcart, Shopify also offers a custom solution for storefronts and static websites: https://help.shopify.com/api/custom-storefronts/js-buy-sdk

You basically get all the benefits of Shopify's excellent, easy to use admin/backend area while building a custom frontend on top of it.

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

#124

Post by mattkevan »

germainelol wrote: post #118
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.

Sure. PCI compliance is a set of rules as to how credit card data is handled on your site.

Depending on how your payment process works and how many transactions you make in a year there's a sliding scale of progressively more stringent guidelines. Using a gateway like Stripe which has a hosted payment form reduces the PCI risk but doesn't remove it entirely. And the PCI guidelines make GDPR look like a model of clarity and straightforwardness.

Last time I looked into it, there was a debate as to whether Stripe fell into PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) A or SAQ A-EP. A is pretty simple to meet, but A-EP is not. Even Stripe seemed to hedge on this. If anyone more knowledgeable than me can weigh in, I'd appreciate it!

As for tax, depending on what you're selling you have to add the correct tax for your customer's country. For example as I understand it, the EU VAT MOSS rules mean that when selling digital downloads you have to apply the correct sales tax for every country people are buying from. You not only have to build a system for changing the tax depending on the address, but also understand the tax situation of every country you want to do business in. (Again, if I'm wrong or making it too complicated, I'd like to know).

Thankfully there are platforms like Etsy or Gumroad for selling digital downloads that do all that stuff for you. The fees may be high compared to a DIY solution, but it's worth it for a small merchant.

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

#125

Post by mkbkn »

I don't have much to say, I go with most of the commenters saying go with Shopify like platform. In that case, I would like you to check ecwid.com, it's similar to Shopify but also offers a lifetime-free starter account. So you can play with it until you hit the profits and then you may move on to Shopify if it doesn't feel right.

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

#126

Post by germainelol »

mattkevan wrote: post #124
germainelol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure. PCI compliance is a set of rules as to how credit card data is handled on your site. Depending on how your payment process works and how many transactions you make in a year there's a sliding scale of progressively more stringent guidelines. Using a gateway like Stripe which has a hosted payment form reduces the PCI risk but doesn't remove it entirely. And the PCI guidelines make GDPR look like a model of clari…

And there's me thinking selling online would be easy. I was planning to set something up with Stripe and Printful (drop shipping) to sell some custom tshirt designs I made as a learning experience.

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

#127

Post by sireat »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #27

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 prod…

Is there a decent alternative to Shopify that is self-hosted?

That $400 a year from Shopify is not a trivial expense for a hobby store.

I have friends with small brick and mortar stores and have a hard time suggesting an off-the-shelf ecommerce solution.

Shopify would be a bad choice for my friend's carpet store where very few customers will actually order the carpet online but where customizable website functionality(mix and match carpets, reserve but not pay for carpets, etc) is of paramount importance.

Sure you can customize Shopify, but if you are going down that rabbit hole then might as well own your backend as well.

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

#129

Post by akx »

exodust wrote: post #107
akx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So when someone says they "want total control", your response is "no you don't". Wow. Are you a sales rep for Shopify? That $30 per month fee is bad.

No, my response was that they _probably_ don't, if they'd evaluate that viewpoint further. Especially as a software dev/engineer, it's all too easy to think that you need absolute control.

And no, now that you ask, no I'm not. I _have_ been the lead developer for at least 3 e-commerce systems though, so I know it's not trivial.

Why do you think the fee is "bad"?

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

#130

Post by Can_Not »

exodust wrote: post #107
akx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So when someone says they "want total control", your response is "no you don't". Wow. Are you a sales rep for Shopify? That $30 per month fee is bad.

> That $30 per month fee is bad.

Sounds pretty cheap compared to donating $20,000 worth of weekends to your friend for a half baked ecommerce CMS. Maybe the business should exist first and prove total control is necessary before sinking a huge unpredictable labor-cost into it.

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