
Ask HN: Why open source free E-commerce ecosystem sucks? - econcon
There is WooCommerce but it doesn&#x27;t even have free shipment tracking plugin. Nearly all additional functionality (I am sure it&#x27;s helping WooCommerce owners) are subscription based with yearly subscription.<p>Why there aren&#x27;t good free Opensource e-commerce systems which aren&#x27;t very complicated or have too much legacy and are free and easy to add functionality through other Opensource free
plugins?<p>It seems this space is least developed of all software spaces.
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peeterx
I have an ecommerce store and just recently I finished setting up a custom
chatbot to ease the communication between my customers and my agents.

What I was not expecting was how annoying setting up a custom AI chatbot could
be. There are so many tools out there but they all seem to miss a feature that
you REALLY need. Most times they all force you to pay to have that “Powered
by….” imprint removed and AI doesn’t work.

How about a done-for-you solution? These Chatifai guys set up a simple custom
chatbot for just 19$/m in 72 hours after placing your order!
[https://chatifai.datawisepro.com](https://chatifai.datawisepro.com)

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byoung2
Those features cost money to develop, so charging a fee helps fund
development. In theory if you are selling, you have revenue to pay for those
subscription-based services. The best part about open source is that you can
build it yourself if existing offerings are lacking.

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econcon
For starting forums for example Discourse is great with plenty of free
plugins.

But nothing like that exists in E-commerce atleast I've not used anything
which atleast solved some basic e-commerce problems with free plugins.

Yet there are tons of e-commerce websites.

It seems many of them are using plugins by some private agencies which sell
maintenance service.

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noble_pleb
Have you tried the PHP OpenCart? It may not be perfect but there seems to be a
good plugin ecosystem around the project and you can also hire a programmer on
upwork, etc. for some quick customization.

