I know I'm being a hater, but coding the store is really terrible advice. Learning to use a tool over reinventing the tool is a step backwards.
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 a monthly Shopify fee when there's much better options out there for devs to gain control, and build a faster more creative and original store.
Shopify.. Really? How unsatisfying and boring.
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.
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.
After all, these aren’t all three cases of discrete functional software with well defined patterns of use where minor customization is easy and writing from scratch takes thousands or millions of man hours.
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.
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. (You might be able to go with $39.99 then downgrade, haven’t tried it)
eBay and Etsy might work. Craigslist for sale postings are still free.
But at the end of the day, if the store isn’t bringing it at least $400-500 a month it should probably be shuttered and move on to the next idea.
There are definitely apps to do customizable combos and reserve but don’t pay.
Customizing Shopify (or big commerce or volusion) is almost always cheaper in total cost than custom work until you have a huge base.
I wrote software for 7 years. Now run 4 Shopify stores. I used to also run two woo stores. Shoping carts are complicated and boring. Shopify gets things right you wouldn’t know you need for three years. It’s the right place to start.
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.
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.
Are you a sales rep for Shopify? That $30 per month fee is bad.
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.
I never said build the whole CMS/store platform from scratch. I would use something like Perch which is a CMS with shop-addon that allows you to build the site and store normally, then integrate easily into a shop. It's possible to be up and running quickly using a basic shared hosted platform as the host - which is all you need at first.
The day that "scaling" is needed is the day you ask your web host to put your mySQL e-store site on a better shared hosting plan with more RAM and more CPU... wow, what a huge effort! Or go VPS or something. Easy.
Every used mySqL? It actually works quite well believe it or not. Cheap, easy, not a headache.
We can argue all day about the details, but in the end you are advocating a microwave dinner as the solution for a small business wanting to make an impact and good impression with new customers. I am advocating something a lot better.
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.
That's an ad hominem and still leaves my point of how huge the amount of underestimated work there is. The problem is the volume of work first, the quality of work (by both OP's self-admitted juniorness and by lack of time for a full-time project) second.
Also, your standards are high for ecommerce but you don't think a lot of effort is required to do as-good or better than a specific one you didn't like?
> It's for his friend's craft "business", not some client who needs a copy and paste effort ready by 9am tomorrow.
His friend probably doesn't want to wait a week everytime he thinks of a new basic requirement built into the vast majority of ready to go ecommerce CMSs.
Look, if you like Shopify... go for it. Me, I would avoid that thing like the plague. I value flexible parameters and increased possibilities over a stifled e-store that pops out the vending machine slot if you remember to feed it $30 a month.
Shopify is not for developers, and not for anyone who knows a developer or willing to pay for something better than a microwave dinner experience. That's not just my opinion, it's also how it actually is.
And writing apps yourself is not always ideal because they need to run on your own server (thus mitigating the benefit of using a hosted platform to avoid infrastructure maintenance), and any frontend modifications can only be done via JavaScript (you can't modify the outputted HTML itself, so it's a lot more difficult to make robust, performant and accessible customizations to functionality).
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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 product and needed total freedom to try out different ways of giving discounts and creating vouchers. If you just sell standard products then don't bother.
I will give credit to the creators of Django Oscar for building a highly customizable framework and if you know your way around Django, the overhead of using it shouldn't be too large.