> it just literally isn’t possible.

Another hyperbole and marketing jargon (ecommerce systems are one of the easiest and most competitive with too many providers like shopify).

You might not have tried options and frameworks available in market. Literally thousands of one-click install ecommerce systems ready to use is available for bare-metal, cloud, kubernetes, containers or even simple desktop machines. These systems comes with redundancy, high-availability, faster response time, integrated with payment provider, logistic provider of choice but also gives full control including source code (very different from walled gardens of shopify which indeed has access to customer data, payment, order information, inventory information of store owners without providing any source code).

In functionality, templates and flexibility much better than Shopify. May be just change the tinted glass of promoting shopify and you might see thousands of other options in the market.

What you are describing isn't rolling your own (i.e. writing your own code) - it's installing pre-built software which was OP's point.

And Shopify being the most common platform now, and quickest and easiest to get up and running, is probably why they used that as an example (i.e. you could have a decent looking matcha-tea store setup within an hour with all the payment methods you want).

Haha so we’re comparing paying $29 a month for Shopify to setting up your own high availability Kubernetes cluster now. Brilliant. This is why I love HN, never change.

But on the other hand, whenever I see a shop using Shopify, I feel the site being sluggish and the UX could be better. So it is not all about things being easy or not, but also about creating the best solution.

What that means depends on the business and the employees. If you got no developers, then maybe your only option is to use something that is ready and needs no development. If the shop is your main business and you got good developers, then you might want to do one better, even if it takes time and effort.

So I would not necessarily exclude the possibility, that creating your own might be best for you. You can still make use of third party APIs for things like credit card payment and so on. When you roll your own, you get to decide which parts you outsource and which parts you make yourself. This allows you to decide where you want to be flexible and where you limit yourself to what the limits of a third party software are.

I only evaluated Shopify for a project, so I have limited experience. But from what I know you don’t need to use their CMS. They have a very well documented API so you can integrate with them as a backend service that just handles the e-commerce side of things. If you go that route it is on you whether your store is slow or not.

Indeed! I've been looking into trying out a JAMStack-style website using the Shopify API [0]. Some starter templates:

Gatsby-Shopify: https://github.com/AlexanderProd/gatsby-shopify-starter

Gridsome-Shopify: https://gridsome.org/starters/platform/shopify/

I wish Shopify's pricing page was clearer on which plan I need to use the API.

[0]: https://shopify.dev/api/usage