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Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

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Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#41

Post by honkycat »

econcon wrote: post #34
honkycat wrote: post #30

If you can't afford the shopify fees you don't actually have a business.

I also sell 3d printed models online so I've made like 20+ e-commerce websites so far. Most of them are niche website and get 5-10 sales each and some even get zero sales but some websites are seasonal in nature and in some season or event, they blow up in sales. I am trying to capture this windfall but Shopify is not good for this task. They charge per store so I am limited to just having one store which is not good…

OH! Ok that actually makes sense when you put it in context.

I would probably develop a framework and do free gatsbyjs/netlify static sites that link back to a centralized payment processor service

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#44

Post by butz »

looping__lui wrote: post #19

Honestly - don’t. Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc. For selling software, I…

Good advice. While it might seem a good idea to hire some freelancer to set up self hosted ecommerce solution as it is cheaper, but looking in a long term, your eshop will need maintenance. Especially annoying with Wordpress and Woocommerce, when using lots of third party plugins. After few months you obviously think up a new feature or two, but original freelancer won't be available and you'll have to find a new one. He will have a hard time cramming in new features and installing updates. The cycle continues and usually such eshop becomes a mess. Slow loading times, unsecure, hard to implement new features. And if custom integration for local payments or delivery provider breaks one day - you are in real trouble.

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#45

Post by commiebob »

steveharman wrote: post #43

Magento is still free isn't it? And by adding M2EPro your products & inventory can also list on Amazon and eBay's global sites at the same time that they're on your website. M2EPro is also free up to a certain (quite high) monthly sales volume

While magento 2 CE is indeed free, it's a horrific mess that I wouldn't recommend to anyone let alone someone who needs a store with only 20-100 orders/day.

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#46

Post by looping__lui »

plibither8 wrote: post #29
looping__lui wrote: post #19

Honestly - don’t. Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc. For selling software, I…

OT: why have you omitted the last two letters from each of the company names?

I put stars there because I didn’t want to directly advertise any. Those “vanished”...

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#47

Post by looping__lui »

looping__lui wrote: post #19

Honestly - don’t. Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc. For selling software, I…

Just adding to that (especially for software): not only was the development overhead minimal: I think setting up the shop, integrating the license key generation, determining all the pricing etc. took like 1 day including testing?! The savings on accounting were also significant. Had we been the direct seller, we would have driven the (tax) auditors fee ad absurdum. E.g., we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to, the tax audits would have taken ridiculously long and cost a lot, the paper trail (every sale an invoice that has to be kept on record...).

Instead: we only booked 2 revenues per month and that was it. We were not liable for the taxes, everything was taken care of.

I do think that purchasing these services makes small & large gigs easier than ever. Highly recommend.

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#48

Post by NicoJuicy »

I created belgianbrewed.com ( fully custom). It's a lot of work, even less obvious things like E-commerce filters.

Tax is hard depending on the country, eg. For Belgium/Europe it's pretty easy. = Tax calculated in the country of residence only.

There are plenty of alternatives beyond woocommerce/Magento. I use woocommerce for another one, but it requires some maintenance.

Just make sure you can easily extend it.

What programming language so you use?

Re: Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

#49

Post by maximus024 »

meesterdude wrote: post #17

Workarea is a rails engine you can host yourself, I do integration work for retailers but the core of it is OSS. Lots of plugins, and they're easy to create. https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea

License is a non starter:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work without an additional license agreement with WebLinc so long as you do not use the Licensed Work for a Commerce Service.

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