What are your favorite e-commerce alternatives to Shopify?
Shopify is an industry-standard, but it’s got its own downfalls that might not suite everyone. Have you guys found anything you’re particularly happy with?
I’d written a plugin for WooCommerce as part of working on a B2B service. It was several years ago now, but from what I remember it seemed quite easy to write plugins for because it just used WordPress’s hooks system.
WordPress isn’t the fastest codebase around, so you’ll probably need to spend more on hosting to get it running well enough, but compared to other PHP e-commerce offerings like Magento it’ll fly.
I’m a developer, and WooCommerce, in my opinion, is pretty great. Just like Wordpress, if you look at it more like a development framework, is pretty flexible on what it can do. If you’re not a developer and don’t want to touch code, just buy the plugins you need and go from there. Pretty nice compromise tool between flexibility and ease, although if you have a really tiny budget, the plugins can add up.
How does it compare to the developer experience of Shopify? I hated Shopify. Unforgivable that there wasn’t even a way to have a dev environment, but this was a few years ago.
I’m also a developer. My job has me work with WordPress almost exclusively. I run hundreds of WordPress sites and the hosting servers that run them.
WordPress is not good, nor is woocommerce. They are, however, convenient to the layperson. That’s basically all they have going for them.
WP and Woo are major resource hogs. The data structure is atrocious. There is no ORM and everything is shoved into two tables: posts and postmeta. All your pages, blog posts, products, orders, form submissions, everything is a ‘post’.
99% of all plugins are horribly written garbage that are major security vulnerabilities and updates to patch those security holes frequently break everything.
WP sites require frequent maintenance to keep them updated to avoid those security issues and since you never know when an update is going to break the whole site you have to do so carefully and make sure you have lots of backups.
Automattic, the company that makes WooCommerce, is scummy as fuck. Just recently they released an update that added a new cookie which triggered firewalls, and made this new feature on by default. They also are selling all WP.com and Tumblr data to be used for AI. Not to mention the fact they intentionally confuse people into thinking WordPress.com is the same thing as WordPress.org, and since the CEO also controls WP.org they can get away with breaking all the rules of the 501c3 nonprofit’s own rules in doing so.
I also came here to say Woocommerce, I helped a small retail store set up their shop. I will say if someone doesn’t have ongoing support I could see hiccups appearing eventually if you have any kind of customization. There’s just a lot of plugins and things you can tweak. But that ability to customize means you can do something just the way you want it, vs bending a system like Shopify to try to fit edge cases.
I don’t have a favorite one and I love decentralized tech so I forked Lemmy to try and repurpose it for that. Honestly, I would have done it in Haskell or Purescript had the Lemmy devs not gotten as far as they have been with Rust.
It probably can’t have 1:1 feature parity with Shopify (actual commerce being handled on pub/sub would be a nightmare) but I at least intend to broadcast inventory changes using (a variant of) the pub/sub protocol. Instances will theoretically be run by vendors (or alliances of vendors).
I’m at the VERY early stages. I’m currently trying to build Lemmy using nix to declaratively glue together the patchwork they use to build it. I figure having it continuously roll with the original would be helpful for this rapidly evolving pub/sub world.
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