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

Re:Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online st... by exodust on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:40AM (#17248015)

Because... it's a craft e-store, never going to have a lot of revenue; $30 per month is $30 less for buying food; also Shopify take a cut of each sale, so it's a regular double whammy and that sucks. And the owner will be a creative person, and they are usually fussy/particular/perfectionists regarding visual presentation of their artwork/brand/style/look and feel. I know, I've built online stores for artists. The attention to detail requests didn't stop. Fortunately I had total control over the store right up until payment gateway, so it was fine.

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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Re:Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online st... by yazan94 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:52PM (#17259591)

Well what would you do instead? Assuming that OP will build the site for free, the shop owner still needs to pay for hosting (assume $5 droplet at Digital Ocean), domain name (assume ~$10 from Namecheap), and a payment processor (assuming Paypal, (2.9% + 0.30) / transaction). Considering all of this is abstracted away and handled for you for $30, doesn't sound that bad. We haven't even touched on headaches from future maintenance, bugs, features, scaling, etc.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online st... by exodust on Friday June 08, 2018 @12:07AM (#17262498)

You've included "domain name" in the list of things Shopify does for $30, and you'd be wrong about that. It's an extra expense. And not only that, but the $30 plan doesn't provide "professional reports" which most businesses would want. Exporting invoice data as CSV, or to accounting software, backup of database etc. These are things I would advise a business needs.

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.

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