

Ask HN: What ecommerce platform do you use? - danecjensen

I've been setting up shopify today.  But it seems overly complicated.  I was wondering if there are better solutions out there.
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jgbt
Depends on your goals. If you want simple and are just starting off and
testing things out to see if what you're offering will sell, then Shopify.

The biggest problem I see with Shopify is customizing the checkout. The
checkout process is hugely important in optimizing the site for conversions,
and to lose control over that piece of the site is a difficult trade off.

I used Volusion for my store, but they've gone downhill. I would probably end
up with BigCommerce these days.

Magento is the best out there, but only if you've got the money and time to
spend. I wouldn't walk into a Magento store unless I had $50k to spend and was
very sure I'd bring in revenue of at least $500k a year.

If you're not there yet, go with a hosted cart so you can focus on the
marketing and get to market quickly.

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karolisd
So, Shopify doesn't allow you do change anything in the checkout?

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dangrossman
For relatively simple stores, Shopify's the best. I have yet to meet someone
that can't manage their own store through it after I set it up for them, and
the app store provides incredible value. The stuff you can plug into your
store is so much more polished and higher value than the "plugins" available
for most self-hosted carts. Want to run a remarketing campaign to bring back
window shoppers? There's an app for that. Want to e-mail people who abandoned
shopping carts with a coupon to finish their purchase? There's an app for
that. Want an e-mail telling you the traffic source of each sale when it
occurs? There's an app for that. Want to plug in your favorite analytics
companies without touching the theme code? There's an app for that.

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DigitalSea
If you're familiar with advanced PHP, Magento is a great choice however be
prepared for a lot of head-banging. I'm pretty comfortable with Magento and
it's one of the more advanced self-managed eCommerce platforms out there that
handles everything from stock control to integration with every payment
gateway imaginable. If automatic is more your thing Shopify is a great choice.

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mailslot
Magento is great... except if you plan to sell more than 50 items per minute
while sustaining a few dozen page views per second. It's near impossible to
scale beyond its upper cap. 10,000's of files / classes, 100's of tables and
300+ SQL queries for coupon processing.

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DigitalSea
I think that rings true for most self-hosted eCommerce applications though (or
any self-hosted application written in PHP), not just Magento. In the right
hands Magento can be tuned to handle hundreds and thousands of orders a second
if you want it too. If Wordpress can scale, Magento can scale too.

We used it to build a large online shoe store here at my employer and it seems
to handle the traffic quite well, AWS is a godsend.

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maguay
I've been using WooCommerce on WordPress recently to build an eCommerce shop,
and keep butting heads with it. It's incredibly hard to theme and tweak. Plus,
there's so much WordPress stuff that is redundant in it. It's rather much a
mess, and I wouldn't overly recommend it, even though I really wanted to love
it.

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fastspring
See FastSpring if you're looking to sell SaaS or downloadable software or
games. No upfront or monthly costs, limitless, rapid-response support, free
setup, and it's uniquely full service.

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sgold515
Slant has a good thread on the topic

<http://slant.co/topics/586>

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tamersalama
SquareSpace started offering an ecommerce option too. Haven't tried it out
though.

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danso
I built a site on shopify. It's actually quite easy but the trade off is cost
and some flexibility in how checkout is handled.

