
Ask HN: Tech stack recommendations for online ordering at a small grocery store? - kennycarruthers
If you had to quickly build a website to help a small, local grocery store accept orders online, what tech stack would you use?<p>For safety, the store is closed to walk-in customers and is the only grocery store on the island. All local residents have been asked to email their shopping list to the store so that staff can pick the items and hand them to customers outside.<p>However, there&#x27;s no structure in the emails, no insight into what products the store even sells, no online billing, nothing. It&#x27;s just an unstructured email that gets printed upon receipt and handed to a &quot;shopper&quot;. It works, but I feel like some small changes could really help the staff.<p>As a desktop app developer, it&#x27;s been awhile since my days of Ruby on Rails, so I&#x27;m curious what tech stack recommendations the HN community can offer to build something super lightweight to help a store like this. Something as simple as Google Forms + Google Spreadsheets would be a great start, but are there other services I&#x27;m not aware of?<p>Consider the following:<p>* Should be web based, not a native app.
* Should run on free services. 
* Should not involve managing any servers or instances. 
* Usage would be around &quot;dozens of orders per day&quot;.
* Being able to create user accounts would be nice, so people can re-order, but it&#x27;s not essential.
* Payment info is probably not needed at this time. (Lots of customers still use store accounts.) 
* Ideally extensible to be able to add product photos down the road. (But not connected to any invenstory system.)
* A significant number of customers are seniors.<p>Thank you.<p><i>(This is just volunteer work. I&#x27;d build then a desktop macOS app, but that&#x27;s not going to help too many local residents.)</i>
======
dkhenry
A Spreadsheet that uses data validation to provide a drop down list of options
is super useful for entering orders. Google forms can do something similar and
really thats all you need right now

------
maxk42
Honestly, Shopify is probably your best bet, although they charge the seller
about 2.9% of sales IIRC.

