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Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

tinystore.app

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Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#41

Post by hapiben »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #25

Agree with some of the other commenters here – this seems really really smart, but only because I live and work deep in Shopify land. It was immediately obvious to me what this means, but there's plenty of Shopify merchants and partners who aren't even aware of the Lite plan, and if they know it's there, are unclear of the limitations. I can definitely think of people who this would be great for – it's almost like he…

Thanks for the feedback. There's a lot of good feedback here that will make my weekend busy.

My wife is a good example where she doesn't need a fancy storefront. She gets her customers from Instagram/Facebook. She only needs a super basic/low-end storefront for her customers to do their purchase.

there's plenty of Shopify merchants and partners who aren't even aware of the Lite plan, and if they know it's there, are unclear of the limitations. - 100% agree.

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#42

Post by 0x62 »

hapiben wrote: post #9

I made a simple web app for merchants/small businesses who use Shopify Lite Plan and want to have a simple/minimal storefront. I built this initially for my wife. She owns two online stores in Shopify. With her Lite plan, she only pays $9/month/store versus the Basic plan for $29/month/store. Since the Lite plan doesn't include an online store, TinyStore allows merchants to have one. The app is still new. I appreciat…

Surprised I haven't seen a comment about this yet - there doesn't seem to be a way to link to or share individual products?

I've tried clicking on products from a few places and it always seems to show in a modal (with no pushState, FF 89).

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#43

Post by perk »

pantulis wrote: post #39
jordanmoconnor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - saying something like "Having a storefront on Shopify would normally cost you an extra $20/month. TinyStore does this for $5/month." would sell pretty well I'd assume.

Exactly this, didn't know that Shopify had a headless mode that does not include the storefront, so the question was: why not using the default Shopify storefront?

Same here. Shopify's landing page for Lite says "Shopify gives you everything you need for just $9 USD per month" - so I couldn't figure out what this was for.

Lite not having a storefront should be front and center on OP's page.

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#45

Post by whylo »

kpwagner wrote: post #40
whylo wrote: post #31

I'd really encourage you to download a screen reader such as NVDA (or use VoiceOver if you're on a Mac), make use of the Lighthouse accessibility audit in Chrome dev tools, and try using your site with just a keyboard to test for accessibility. At the moment the biggest problem is you've used divs with click handlers rather than tags for your product links, which can't be focussed with the keyboard, so anybody using…

I'm not usually a nut for accessibility, but you make a good point. Using semantic HTML tags and a few other basic best practices (e.g. alt/title attributes, sufficient color contrast) goes a long way.

I'm more of a nut ;) but I think anyone selling a service like this, or building any kind of front-end framework, has even more of a responsibility than individual site owners to make their stuff accessible, because any issues are multiplied out across all of your customers, and ultimately affect any of their customers with accessibility needs.

Depending on the juristiction your customers operate in, any accessibility issues could also expose them to legal liability for non-compliance with various laws (eg ADA in the US, the Web Accessibility Directive in the EU for public sector bodies)

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#46

Post by throwarayes »

I’m going to be the contrarian here :)

I would just pay $29/month for Shopify basic plan. Is the $20 difference worth self hosting and tweaking a custom thing? You’ll quickly lose that $20 in time better spent running your business. I’d rather have reliable hosting...

Not to bash a cool side project. Just want to say it’s not a panacea.

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#47

Post by berkes »

whylo wrote: post #31

I'd really encourage you to download a screen reader such as NVDA (or use VoiceOver if you're on a Mac), make use of the Lighthouse accessibility audit in Chrome dev tools, and try using your site with just a keyboard to test for accessibility. At the moment the biggest problem is you've used divs with click handlers rather than tags for your product links, which can't be focussed with the keyboard, so anybody using…

And for people reading this and going "In my app, I don't care about that demography, b/c that niche is too small/effort too big etc": Search engine bots are almost exclusively "disabled" users of your site.

So, if you need to convince your managers or yourself to spend effort/money/time on accessability, SEO and traffic from search may be convincing if other reasons are not.

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#48

Post by twalling »

throwarayes wrote: post #46

I’m going to be the contrarian here :) I would just pay $29/month for Shopify basic plan. Is the $20 difference worth self hosting and tweaking a custom thing? You’ll quickly lose that $20 in time better spent running your business. I’d rather have reliable hosting... Not to bash a cool side project. Just want to say it’s not a panacea.

I was wondering this too. The price difference is actually $16 not $20. Shopify Lite ($9) + TinyStore ($5). It seems like a pretty narrow niche and easily killed should Shopify address the narrow gap there. I would also wonder if Shopify already has the data to be able to make the judgement call that this narrow price range doesn't have the demand.

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#49

Post by berkes »

throwarayes wrote: post #46

I’m going to be the contrarian here :) I would just pay $29/month for Shopify basic plan. Is the $20 difference worth self hosting and tweaking a custom thing? You’ll quickly lose that $20 in time better spent running your business. I’d rather have reliable hosting... Not to bash a cool side project. Just want to say it’s not a panacea.

I've ran and helped with very low volume shopify websites[0]. With such, reliability is less of an issue, yet the yearly $240 is the difference making the profitability.

I do see a niche for tinystore, but, like you, I also see that anyone making some real money off their store will gladly pay some extra's for more reliability and less fuss.

-- [0] the ones now often reaching to woocommerce or equivalents. A hobby-, bootstrapping, "try this idea, see if it sticks".

Re: Show HN: TinyStore - A minimal store for your Shopify Lite plan

#50

Post by mritchie712 »

blairbeckwith wrote: post #25

Agree with some of the other commenters here – this seems really really smart, but only because I live and work deep in Shopify land. It was immediately obvious to me what this means, but there's plenty of Shopify merchants and partners who aren't even aware of the Lite plan, and if they know it's there, are unclear of the limitations. I can definitely think of people who this would be great for – it's almost like he…

Why would someone use this + Shopify Lite instead of just upgrading to "Basic Shopify" for $29 per month? You'd save $15 (29 - 5 - 9) a month, but is there another reason?
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