> Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent?

Don't do this. Your time is worth something. Just keep an eye as things develop as to how you're going to get the data out of your prototype into a bespoke system, eventually.

Source: I've helped ~5 people setup online shops this way, including quilting and artisanal yarn shops. Total time to setup was 2-3 hours per store with a screen share while on the phone with the person.

EDIT: OP: To your point about learning Python; find small consulting projects that are just beyond your skill level, and take those on. Iterate along that path. This is not the path to your Python Enlightenment. I understand it's difficult to learn a programming language when you don't have a real problem to solve, I face the same problem myself.

If you'd like to help her and learn python while doing it then there's a lot you could do around analytics, market (keyword) research and marketing.

As much as developers love to hate on done-for-you website builders like Shopify or Squarespace [2] they are a good first step to get to MVP.

[1] https://sucuri.net/guides/wordpress-security https://premmerce.com/complete-woocommerce-security-review-i... [2] https://www.whatsthehost.com/shopify-vs-squarespace/

Source: I've helped ~50 small business owners setup ecommerce shops in my career.

I actually bought the exact thing OP is trying to sell on Etsy using the method I just described. The seller had uploaded a lot of examples of different types of work they could create so I had an idea of what they could do before I purchased.

I dont think this entire setup costs 200 dollars.

It is truly terrible. I cannot recommend enough to anyone to keep as far away from it as possible.

I just developed a blog using laravel, and while I see the difference in complexity, I dont see how security/maintenance is affected.

For maintenance, well if something breaks (especially plugins, etc), it’s much easier to fix it when the code is clean (like a proper Laravel-based project) than the mess that WP is.

Finally performance isn’t that good again compared to a bespoke Laravel app or a more modern platform (for blogging, Ghost comes to mind).

I run a community of freelance programmers. I frequently get requests for simple, first store setup from nontechnical customers. I would be interested in finding someone who could supply that for a flat fee, which we would then mark up 100%. Obviously, we spend a large portion of our revenues on our marketing budget, driving nontechnical customers to submit inquiries, but we're responsible for all those expenses. You would be entirely welcome to work directly with the customer for ongoing work as long as you joined our community with a $25 monthly membership.

Shopify/Squarespace/Sellfy etc. are much cheaper and lower risk, at least to start with. From experience PCI compliance and tax rules are pains you do not want to deal with.

I’d only ever recommend custom coding if you have some extremely specific requirements. Even WooCommerce on Wordpress would be a better starting point.

If you want to tinker, you could build a store using a static site generator like Jekyll combined with a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage the inventory and something like Snipcart [0] for e-commerce functionality (I’m working on a site that does this).

[0] https://snipcart.com

It has taxes and configurable shipping costs by region. I was going to use Shopify or Squarespace until I found saleor. I definitely agree with using Etsy first though to gain traction before trying to get higher margins by rolling your own.

What other magic is out there?

You basically get all the benefits of Shopify's excellent, easy to use admin/backend area while building a custom frontend on top of it.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I've always wanted to create a simple store as a side project to learn some new tech, so I'm curious what the issues are with putting that side project live.

Depending on how your payment process works and how many transactions you make in a year there's a sliding scale of progressively more stringent guidelines. Using a gateway like Stripe which has a hosted payment form reduces the PCI risk but doesn't remove it entirely. And the PCI guidelines make GDPR look like a model of clarity and straightforwardness.

Last time I looked into it, there was a debate as to whether Stripe fell into PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) A or SAQ A-EP. A is pretty simple to meet, but A-EP is not. Even Stripe seemed to hedge on this. If anyone more knowledgeable than me can weigh in, I'd appreciate it!

As for tax, depending on what you're selling you have to add the correct tax for your customer's country. For example as I understand it, the EU VAT MOSS rules mean that when selling digital downloads you have to apply the correct sales tax for every country people are buying from. You not only have to build a system for changing the tax depending on the address, but also understand the tax situation of every country you want to do business in. (Again, if I'm wrong or making it too complicated, I'd like to know).

Thankfully there are platforms like Etsy or Gumroad for selling digital downloads that do all that stuff for you. The fees may be high compared to a DIY solution, but it's worth it for a small merchant.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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).

I wish to talk with you about a saas we are in beta for : quick and easy online voucher creation, all web based. https://universal-voucher.eu (CEO here) shoot an email to contact@u-v.io for demo and beta access

You need to choose the solution that is best for your friend's business over the long term, not what is most interesting as a dev.

Use Shopify, as it's the most scalable over the long run, without a dev needed to keep the lights on. But even something like Etsy will do.

Do not go with Django / Python, and I say this as a Django dev myself. The second you get a higher priority project, your friend will be in a real jam. Maintenance with Django / Python is prohibitively expensive with freelancers, and needs a high level of engineering skill to keep up with business requirements over time.

Particularly things like packages & dependency upgrades, can lead to tech debt with cascading maintenance costs and increase likelihood of outages. Enough is changing in ecommerce around 3rd party vendor dependencies, security standards and regulations, that an un-patched Django site can get burned pretty quickly.

The cost of migrating to another ecommerce platform from something proprietary can become extremely expensive as well, so do your friend a favor and choose a scalable saas platform that will last. Good luck.

  Writing good text
  Taking good pictures
  Handling sales and delivery
  Handling returns (yes people will return sometimes)

As someone who loves mucking about with technology, I got the balance very wrong with my first shop – spent so long getting it working and keeping it working I had no to time to tell anyone about it.

Spending time on anything technology related at the start is really a distraction from the important goal of understanding products, pricing, and customers. Any time spent on technology beyond that of doing the minimum required to make selling possible is a premature optimization.

Writing an ecommerce CMS because you are educated on what exists and want to innovate is a completely different matter.

    Catalog/pricing/inventory management
    Category/multiple product display/design
    Search
    Single product page display/design
    Shipping options
    Checkout, aside from payment (partial flow, or completely externally hosted?)
    Order management (how to get orders out of the system and into a warehouse to be packed)
    Promotions and discounts (will you have coupons?)
    Customer feedback/product reviews
    Contact me/us

Source: I work for an ecommerce consultant (I use/live in Salesforce Commerce Cloud/formerly Demandware)

1. Read through the django documentation and try to set up a single site.

2. Realize I was reading django 1.6, and my system had v 1.8 which broke a few things

3. Get on Upwork to hire someone to do it for me

4. Get frustrated with the quality of applicants, but have hope for one person who made the interview

5. Go back to Django and decide that Rails is the right way. Struggle with RVM.

6. Hire the person on upwork, and be disappointed with the first version. Ask why they decided to use wordpress and a custom PHP widget.

7. Go back to Django and get a basic blog up and running

8. Finally pay someone a decent amount on Upwork who sets up the store in no time.

Unfortunately, there is no known shortcut.

What about just jumping to step 8 immediately?

I maintain a WooCommerce site - it is a fucking nightmare. Oh, as for "saving money" by choosing Woo over Shopify, in the end you pay for plugins bringing you the same functionality already built into Shopify.

I looked at Shopify but it looked like a huge headache to customize - seems it would be a good option if you want more of a turn key experience though.

Woo is a siren song. It has a seductive appeal: free, complete control.

But then you spend 40 hours setting it up vs 5, and 10-20 hours a month maintaining it vs 0, and 20 hours getting your pages to load fast enough. And then updating plugins. And updating plugins. And updating plugins.

in the end, most stores are better on Shopify or Big or Volusion.

I agree, not a good idea to choose Woo for cost savings alone though if you can get by on the services provided by Shopify.

If you're looking to build an online store so you can get a deeper understanding of Python: go ahead.

If you're actually looking for the most efficient way of putting up something online and start selling, you're better of hitting WooCommerce, shopify, etsy or looking at other solutions on ProductHunt.

Best :)

She ignored me and contracted a local development company, ended up paying £1200 for a Wordpress/WooCommerce site that could have been set up for peanuts.

£1200 for a 'finished' e-commerce site, with training and hosting, sounds fine to me.

Plus then you get a wordpress/php website.

Im very happy now that I understand php and was able to make a custom theme.

Have you worked with WooCommerce in the past? It's scary.

And what maintenance? Hitting update every few weeks?

There are a lot of hidden costs behind the “free, just pay hosting” of woocommerce

Check out the tools page - https://www.starterstory.com/tools and you can see some of the more popular tools and who is using them.

edit: And anecdotally, I've interviewed a few companies doing $100k/mo and loving Shopify and WooCommerce. I think those are great places to start.

I don't use Shopify for many, many reasons[1]

If you want to setup a quick store in just under a week of development, I highly recommend using Jekyll + PayPal. Contrary to popular believe, PayPal actually converts better than rolling out your own integrated solution based on Stripe/etc.

I run a couple of dropshipping stores based on my stack, so please feel free to ask me anything :)

[1] https://medium.com/build-ideas/my-journey-of-writing-an-e-co...

As someone else here said, when running your own store, you want to get as close to spending 100% of your time and energy on marketing and closer to 0% of your time on tinkering with technology.

Etsy is nice, because you have some eyeballs built in.

Truth of the matter is if you're spending time building the store, you won't be spending enough time building the products or marketing them.

source: I help large(and small) companies strategize and manage roughly $25m/year of eCommerce sales.

Haven't had the opportunity to use it personally but it seems like a good place to start.

  [0] https://moltin.com/

As far as I'm aware, they still offer a free tier of 30k API operations per month, which apparently approximates 10k page views - which is very kind of them. However, I had to email them to get pricing information, and was informed their pricing _starts_ at $1k/month (I was actually quoted $12k/year) for 250k operations (i.e. ~80k page views). Ouch.

To make matters worse, they use to charge $49/month for 300k operations [1]. I was informed that this was very out of date information, as apparently they've got a new logo and everything since then. But still, I feel bad for anyone who got vendor-locked to them.

All in all, probably not a bad product, but definitely one to avoid for scenarios like OP's.

[1] https://www.g2crowd.com/products/moltin/pricing

It won't take a day to build, it will take longer, like anything worthwhile.

Don't use Shopify or boring solutions like that if you want full control. Get stuck in and make an original, responsive store!

I've also used Wordpress + WooCommerce so if you can find a theme you like, it's a great way to get something up in < 4 hours so you can hack away on Saleor for the next few weekends.

Not only that, but there's an excellent article front page regarding selling online here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17239128

If yes, then why build? If no, can you customise the service? If not, then build and make use of available code (libraries, apis, framework)

doing it by yourself will be a great learning experience but costly one.

Wish you and your friend all the best with your online store.

mezzanine.jupo.org

https://github.com/stephenmcd/cartridge

Just kidding. Don't use this unless you truly hate yourself.

I can buy a lot of hosting on different platforms for a thousand bucks.

- Develop agnostically. This means don't build with any stack of tools in mind. I have a prepros-sass-pug-typescript template here [link redacted] specifically for generating an ecommerce frontend multipage mockup. Every ecommerce site is going to be built in HTML/CSS/JS regardless of what backend languages or frameworks you decide (PHP, python, etc). All you really need is a home page, category grid, product grid, product page, and checkout page. Throw in dummy data here, and then use whatever backend system and/or framework afterwards.

- Doing any backend development is just reinventing the wheel. Ecommerce is tried and tested already. Things like how to handle an abandoned shopping cart, security, etc. You shouldn't be doing these things honestly. Let someone else do this, or use a library if you have too. You'll need to evaluate backend / ecommerce framework depending on your requirements though.

- Frontend, data, and your product / marketing are the most important things for an ecommerce site. Your customer is not going to care about your backend. Chances are you might migrate your ecommerce backend down the road anyhow.

In summary, if you want to start from scratch, and want full control/portability, consider building your own frontend mockup for each unique page type (category landing, product landing, etc). Expedite this process by using a CSS framework like Bootstrap. Learn how to organize CSS code with Sass. Worry about backend later. You should have an idea of what content / data is going to appear on the frontend, and where it all ties in.

If you need to dial back even further for a truly agnostic approach, consider UX design only. This will also shorten the gap in explaining to your developer, should you outsource to one, what the final site should look like and do.

If none of the above matters, just use shopify or and throw your pictures + content and a template, call it a day.

Backend I personally have seen many successful custom enterprise level stores using Laravel+PHP+MySQL+Some-Javascript-libraries (image LazyLoading)+PHP-libraries(shopping cart functions). You can analyze what tools a store is using through wappylzer. Some tools for doing a simplistic hosted backend include 3dcart and snipcart if you want to forego backend all together.

Finally, what ecommerce framework you use also depends on what your selling. If your selling high markup goods, such as T-shirts and stitching work, 2.9% cut from shopify is going to be irrelevant. If you sell industrial equipment, 2.9% is like half your profit margins.

The difference with a static page is you can have a very optimized experience that loads fast for users all around the world.

And with a myriad of options for people to contact you, you can engage in real conversation that will have a much higher chance of making a sale. Indeed, by slowing down the checkout process and weeding out impulse buyers, you can paradoxically break into higher quality sales for high value or custom crafted items.