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A comment on Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?. Parent comment

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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