141–150 of 162 posts
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Would not recommend anything Wordpress-based. That thing is a security and maintenance nightmare.
Can you cite anything?
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Can you cite anything?
Ex PHP developer here. The codebase is an absolute nightmare and doesn’t conform to any best practices (it’s not even MVC but a weird mess of .php files, there is no HTTP routing, it’s all very legacy PHP).
I just developed a blog using laravel, and while I see the difference in complexity, I dont see how security/maintenance is affected.
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Ex PHP developer here. The codebase is an absolute nightmare and doesn’t conform to any best practices (it’s not even MVC but a weird mess of .php files, there is no HTTP routing, it’s all very legacy PHP).
OKay, but why does this matter for security and maintenance? I just developed a blog using laravel, and while I see the difference in complexity, I dont see how security/maintenance is affected.
For maintenance, well if something breaks (especially plugins, etc), it’s much easier to fix it when the code is clean (like a proper Laravel-based project) than the mess that WP is.
Finally performance isn’t that good again compared to a bespoke Laravel app or a more modern platform (for blogging, Ghost comes to mind).
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A Wordpress website isn’t an advantage, it’s a nightmare in terms of security and maintenance.
What about security? And what maintenance? Hitting update every few weeks?
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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 functionalit…
If $400 a year isn’t a trivial expense for an ecommerce store, you are probably wasting your time. You can go with woo, which is marginally free. But it takes a week to set up vs half a day with Shopify. So, wasting 35 $100 hours to save $400 is a bad decision. Then you have maintenance costs of a few hours a month. You could go with amazon. But to list your own product costs $39.99 a month, so $480 a year there too.…
I was referring to use case that's been frequent in my experience: a brick and mortar shop wants the online shop capability but does not expect many sales from it.
One case: a friend of mine is currently paying $45 a month for an ancient closed source PHP ecommerce solution and only bringing in $500 month in online sales (but regular foot traffic brings in much more).
He'd love to go to something less expensive, but Shopify wouldn't really change much.
I started setting up Prestahop for him, but realized even if I gifted him my time, the problem would be supporting it afterwards.
Another thing with Shopify, it is not like $29 a month brings you instant happiness. There is a whole Shopify ecosystem with paid plugins etc. So you will need to spend time and get comfortable with Shopify just like you'd need to with Magento, Prestashop, woocommerce etc.
Plus not owning your backend has its own set of problems.
Thus Shopify is not necessarily the best long term solution.
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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.
Half baked CMS you say... are you predicting the outcome of an effort under your development? Some people should stick to plug and play solutions because it's their only real option.
A friend of mine set up a Woo-commerce site for her boss who ran a shoe shop. The site went up quickly, using templates and "out of the box" things from Woo. Worst store ever. Horrible UX, slow... so slow, click... wait... click... wait. They didn't sell much at all on that site. It was crap. I would not expect better from any plug and play solution, but then again my standards are high for e-commerce stores.
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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"?
Some small businesses are looking to set up shop properly more than quickly. Anyway, these are all opinions, I'm just sharing mine.
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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. Ful…
Is there a team at Shopify tasked with "social persuasion" who monitor online discussion about e-commerce?
"Value thy time"... oh please, we can say the same about eating too. Don't bother cooking when you can buy a microwave frozen dinner.
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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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.