
Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative? - econcon
What do you recommend to physical product business which gets about 25-100 sales a day?<p>In case you are curious, what I sell it&#x27;s 3d printing fimament which I make in my garage:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;endless-filament&#x2F;make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922<p>I am a programmer but I do not like building something which already exists and e-commerce platform is boring for me also Shopify while is good but I need self hosted one for ideological reasons.
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looping__lui
Honestly - don’t.

Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: \- All the little tax
issues for various countries/states \- Security in processing payments,
avoiding fraud and protecting customer data \- Integrating payment processing
for credit card companies, Payp __et al. and NOT having to deal with constant
“account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.

For selling software, I user Fastspri __and not having to deal with all those
things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying
problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses
have to deal with...

In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated
upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical
interaction from our end with orders...

You can also put stuff on Amaz __and use their infrastructure

~~~
looping__lui
Just adding to that (especially for software): not only was the development
overhead minimal: I think setting up the shop, integrating the license key
generation, determining all the pricing etc. took like 1 day including
testing?! The savings on accounting were also significant. Had we been the
direct seller, we would have driven the (tax) auditors fee ad absurdum. E.g.,
we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to, the tax
audits would have taken ridiculously long and cost a lot, the paper trail
(every sale an invoice that has to be kept on record...).

Instead: we only booked 2 revenues per month and that was it. We were not
liable for the taxes, everything was taken care of.

I do think that purchasing these services makes small & large gigs easier than
ever. Highly recommend.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Are you referring to using Stripe or Shopify?

~~~
looping__lui
I personally used Fastspring. I cannot talk about Stripe or Shopify. They also
model your “shopping page” to fit in with everything else. So your customers
have a consistent experience.

------
dgiol
I would suggest Woocommerce. It has a huge community with almost any plugin or
theme you can think about. I am not sure it makes sense to do it in your case,
as you are likely to spend more time on the store, and less growing your
business.

Some managed hosting options at different price levels: Kinsta.com
WPXhosting.com SiteGround.com NameHero.com

Some themes, plugins, that can help you get up and running quickly:
Elementor.com kadencewp.com/product/kadence-woo-extras/
wpastra.com/woocommerce/ commercegurus.com/product/shoptimizer/

Some other useful links to get you started: woocommerce.com/product-
category/woocommerce-extensions/
youtube.com/channel/UCjDuxPEhNQ2qn_qAdjRG4YQ/videos

------
johnorourke
Whatever you do, don't end up spending 6 months building something and miss
out on 6 months of comission-free sales.

Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking
after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll
need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll
have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If
you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time
be better spent on increasing sales?

(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to
tinker with?)

There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product
run by a few developers.

[1] [https://freewebstore.com/](https://freewebstore.com/)

------
ecesena
Woocommerce. Can you elaborate more on "ideological reasons"?

I'm genuinely curious why you don't feel ok to pay less than $1/sale to
shopify to keep your store up & running but are ok paying much more on
fulfillment/shipping.

~~~
econcon
I've a multiple stores and some stores get 5 sales a month on $10 item and for
that I can't afford Shopify.

I am looking for something which I can host on my own as I've nearly free
servers (I receive digital ocean credit through affiliate sales on the guides
I wrote) so hosting is free for me and tinkering is free as there not much
work where I working so I can fix my website in that time.

Also I don't like to pay monthly for closed source product. That's my
ideological reason, it's low in priority but I always choose open whenever
possible

~~~
thdrdt
OpenCart and Prestashop are open PHP/MySQL shops with a lot of available
payment provider plugins.

------
mccolin
Spree e-commerce is a solid Rails engine that can be used a fully skinnable
site and offers a full API for any integrations, customizations, or other apps
you want to hook up down the line. It also has robust configurations for your
product line, fulfillment, and shipping setups. Have built enterprise-level
online stores on it, but it is geared for business the size you describe.

[https://spreecommerce.org/](https://spreecommerce.org/)

------
arkadiyt
I'm sure there are many but Solidus is one:
[https://solidus.io/](https://solidus.io/)

~~~
desdiv
To add to that, Spree Commerce:
[https://github.com/spree/spree](https://github.com/spree/spree)

~~~
omniscient_oce
Coincidentally, they both run on Ruby on Rails it seem.

Gonna check out these two they seem cool.

~~~
danielheath
Solidus is a fork

------
postpawl
If you’re familiar with python and django, then saleor might be a good option:
[https://saleor.io/](https://saleor.io/)

~~~
amit9gupta
I second that. Have used saleor for couple of Ecommerce stores. Has enough
features to launch a store out of the box while lacking all the features that
if incorporated would make the platform extremely complicated. You can take
the community edition and extend it to meet your requirements.

------
Mooty
I'm surprised no one mentionned Prestashop here. Aside WooCommerce this is a
really solid solution since years now, that can scale and have real plugin
official marketplace with verified contributors. WooCommerce has way more
hassle ...

------
companyhen
I dislike the monthly fee for Shopify apps so I go with WooCommerce most the
time. I like designing in Elementor, but the Storefront theme is free and
decent out of the box.

If it's for a site I want to get up fast I'll go with Shopify.

~~~
econcon
Yes some of my websites sell 5 items a month and Shopify gets expensive for
that too

------
quellhorst
Woocommerce is built on top of Wordpress and is open source.

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villgax
I want a simple GUI to manage the store & output a static site & manage
hosting with terraform files/CDN for any cloud vendor. Lambdas for billing &
SQLite/Redis for storage.

------
madc
Several people mentioned Magento already. For your project, I'd stongly add
suggest you should ignore that. While Magento has loads of features build it,
it also misses some, I'd consider important. You can not create a custom
invoice template out of the box for example.

If you are a somewhat experienced developer, Sylius might give you a good
experience and code quality. We build a shop on an earlier version, and it
runs solid - not a single downtime in years.

~~~
madc
And talking about downtime, see that you get a solid webhost. A clients shop
had ~1h downtime a day (!) that nobody could explain. Same setup on a new host
runs for a couple of weeks now without issues.

------
w-ll
What's the problem your trying to solve?

Paypal button on a static site?

Dont like Paypal, you can use crypto (it's the only thing one can actually
self host as in receiving payments)

------
pabe
In case you're into Python, try Odoo community edition. There are integrations
for PayPal, Stripe, UPS and whatnot. As an ERP system, an Odoo Webshop is
integrated with Sales management, warehouse management etc. For me that's a
big benefit.

------
steveharman
Magento is still free isn't it? And by adding M2EPro your products & inventory
can also list on Amazon and eBay's global sites at the same time that they're
on your website.

M2EPro is also free up to a certain (quite high) monthly sales volume

~~~
commiebob
While magento 2 CE is indeed free, it's a horrific mess that I wouldn't
recommend to anyone let alone someone who needs a store with only 20-100
orders/day.

------
askafriend
Don't self-host. Just get Shopify and be done with it. You should be focused
on running your business not fussing around with the tech. Any time you spend
doing that is time you aren't spending on selling.

------
stepiiik
Give a look st Sylius. [https://sylius.com/](https://sylius.com/)

It written in PHP and has clean and modern codebase what is great if you need
some custom development

------
fsloth
So what would be the the most simple and cheap _non-self-hosted_ shop and site
architecture for small businesses that would enable sales globally?

Are there any tutorials/blog posts on this topic?

------
mosiuerbarso
Woocommerce on it's own VPS running CentMinMod:
[http://centminmod.com/](http://centminmod.com/) I help manage an Ecommerce
site which gets 10,000 vistors a month, and our $20 per month Linode instance
+ Centminmod handles that level of traffic easily. As for Wordpress themes I'm
a big fan of GeneratePress.
[https://generatepress.com/](https://generatepress.com/)

------
neurostimulant
Just use woocommerce. As long as you keep the number of installed WordPress
plugins minimal and keep them up to date every couple weeks, you're golden.
The biggest issue with WordPress ecosystem is the varying qualities of 3rd
party plugins which give it endless security issue, but as long as you keep
those minimal, a woocommerce store is very solid choice as woocommerce is a
first part plugin with solid attention from automattic.

------
hayksaakian
I'll vouch again for WooCommerce. I've built multiple sites with it for
clients and it's ideal for a small business with tech-savvy operators.

------
stokesyio
Hey econcon, I built One Item Store, which solves your exact problem:
[https://oneitem.store](https://oneitem.store)

You can just set up a really simple page, accept payments, and manage orders.

I built a simple example site for your filament:
[https://oneitem.store/3dfilament](https://oneitem.store/3dfilament)

Let me know if you want any more info :)

------
NicoJuicy
I created belgianbrewed.com ( fully custom). It's a lot of work, even less
obvious things like E-commerce filters.

Tax is hard depending on the country, eg. For Belgium/Europe it's pretty easy.
= Tax calculated in the country of residence only.

There are plenty of alternatives beyond woocommerce/Magento. I use woocommerce
for another one, but it requires some maintenance.

Just make sure you can easily extend it.

What programming language so you use?

------
heyalexej
If you're comfortable with PHP, Shopware & Sylius (both built on Symfony). For
Python, look at Saleor. If you don't want to live in a world of pain ( see
looping__lui), use a SaaS solution like Snipcart or BigCommerce (which has
very competitive rates vs. Shopify). Use the time to learn how to market your
product, run ads, create content and grow your business.

~~~
madc
Sylius should be seen more as a framework. And while it is full featured, it
also is maintenance.

------
meesterdude
Workarea is a rails engine you can host yourself, I do integration work for
retailers but the core of it is OSS. Lots of plugins, and they're easy to
create.

[https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea](https://github.com/workarea-
commerce/workarea)

~~~
maximus024
License is a non starter:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work without an additional
> license agreement with WebLinc so long as you do not use the Licensed Work
> for a Commerce Service.

~~~
meesterdude
> Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first
> publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work
> under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you
> rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the
> paragraph above terminate.

doesn't that convert the license to "Version 2.0 or later of the GNU General
Public License"?

------
theluketowers
Check out Shopaholic for October CMS: [https://octobercms.com/plugin/lovata-
shopaholic](https://octobercms.com/plugin/lovata-shopaholic) (Disclaimer: I'm
the lead maintainer for October CMS but I have no affiliation with
Shopaholic).

------
DoctorOW
I'll put Snipcart ([https://snipcart.com/](https://snipcart.com/)) in the
ring. It's nice because it has only the server logic part in the cloud but
it's very easy for a programmer to set up and do themselves.

------
xwowsersx
Reading through these replies makes feel like the only person who doesn't sell
something and made me curious about what people here are selling.

Slightly off topic I know, but anyone care to share what product or service
they use these services for?

------
JamesBarney
Recently had some experience with nopCommerce and it's been neat to work with.

------
wprapido
Prestashop, WooCommerce, Snipcart, Magento, are all decent self-hosted
solutions.

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mister_hn
Open Cart is a near solution

------
pkalinowski
[https://commercejs.com/](https://commercejs.com/) looks like nice platform.

They have a plan with 0 upfront cost, you only pay % of transaction.

------
PaywallBuster
Can try snipcart.com

You can build a very basic static frontend (HTML/JS) and they will host all
the backend stuff and process the payments. 2% fee + payment gateway.

------
honkycat
If you can't afford the shopify fees you don't actually have a business.

~~~
econcon
I also sell 3d printed models online so I've made like 20+ e-commerce websites
so far. Most of them are niche website and get 5-10 sales each and some even
get zero sales but some websites are seasonal in nature and in some season or
event, they blow up in sales.

I am trying to capture this windfall but Shopify is not good for this task.

They charge per store so I am limited to just having one store which is not
good for niche work - exploration and discovery.

~~~
allanmacgregor
I been thinkering with the idea of service first ecommerce platform; that
doesn't lock people down as much Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce do.

For an use case like yours, the 20+ websites are more akin to microsites
focused on a subset of products but still mapped to one single catalog and
ecommerce store.

Even with ShopifyPlus multi store support each store has its own catalog, and
completely seperate for integrations, transactions, etc.

~~~
econcon
This is actually very popular usecase among dropshipping too, being locked to
one store reduces conversion rates.

We can make subaccount in stripe, so it's easy to specific different
subaccount for different product.

While WooCommerce is there but still we need to setup wordpress blog and
multiple other things.

------
abrbhat
Magento is a popular alternative

------
bitxbit
Netlify + Stripe.

------
streger
Drupal Commerce.

------
loraa
Openbazaar

