Common sense is very uncommon :-).
E-commerce stores are not easy as business, but very easy to launch today because technology is the easiest part of it. The biggest difficulty is getting traffic, then conversion to order, then with superior products, logistics and customer service retain the customer. No one can setup logistics, product catalogs, superior customer service from day 0, it takes quite a time and feedback loop. So remember in the grand scheme of ecommerce store for merchant time taken to build or launch a system is minuscule compared to other hard physical world problems they need to solve around products and services they are offering.
Today literally thousands of options are available to launch an ecommerce store with single click with better quality, speed, flexibility and control than shopify.
Shopify is just one another provider with walled gardens. Shopify is popular not due to any innovation in technology or quality or speed, its popular because it spend literally billions of dollars of investor money in marketing. So they succeeded by throwing marketing money, not due to innovative technology.
They were one of the first with broad API integrations and not just a take or leave it storefront.
They have both REST and GraphQL integrations for the HN type crowd
They have an entire framework for heavily customized storefronts, Hydrogen[0]
They have Shop, their Amazon style discovery equivalent for smaller shops.
They have a good app marketplace for integrations
And a lot more.
Not really there were many solution much better in the market, below had some list with solutions offering much more then list above. It's just that Shopify had investor money to burn to have market dominance through marketing.
Indeed that's visible in their balance sheet that they grow by spending money not due to technological innovations.
Can you name a few, or several? I'd sincerely like to know, as Shopify is usually top of mind for me.
I built my own e-commerce site in Django a few years ago. I'll never do that again! I learned a lot, but building the site was about 5% of the work necessary to running the business.
I am currently looking for a good solution to do just that, but don't know where to start. Do you mind sharing a few good ones?
If you want to focus on selling and having a good backend platform, don't waste your time building your own stack and maintain it, the most important thing is to start selling and bring traffic to your website.
1. Spree [1] Store Demo [2]
2. Saleor [3] Store Demo [4]
3. Reaction [5]
4. Solidus [6]
5. Medusa [7]
6. Sylius [8]
7. Shuup [9]
8. Vendure [10] Demo Store [11]
9. Shopware [12]
10. Vue-Storefront [13] - works with many of the above backend.
11. nopCommerce [14]
12. Bagisto [15]
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Links:
[1] https://spreecommerce.org/spree-as-a-service/
[2] https://spree.vercel.store/
[4] https://saleor.vercel.store/
[5] https://mailchimp.com/developer/open-commerce/
[11] https://vendure.vercel.store/
[12] https://www.shopware.com/en/
[13] https://www.vuestorefront.io/cloud
[14] https://www.nopcommerce.com/en/enterprise-ecommerce-platform
1. Spree: headless ecommerce with REST/GraphQL APIs built using Rails/Ruby. Next.js and Vue starter sites
2. Saleor: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Django/Python. Next.js starter site
3. Reaction/Open Commerce: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Node.js/Javascript
4. Solidus: headless ecommerce with REST API built using Rails/Ruby
5. Medusa: headless ecommerce with REST API built using Node.js/Express/Javascript. Gatsby and Next.js starter sites
6. Sylius: ecommerce built using Symfony/PHP
7. Shuup: ecommerce built using Django/Python. Looks like open source version is dead
8. Vendure: headless ecommerce with GraphQL API built using Node.js/Typescript
Rolling an entire ecom store is already another job in of itself and reimplementing almost everything of the ecommerce stack doesn't make business sense.
A wise business minded merchant can focus on selling from day 0, not on day 720. All while trying to duck-tape their fraud and analytics stack whilst looking for a programmer to maintain their contraption.