Ask HN: Is there an e-commerce platform that doesn't suck?

[throwboatyface]

I run a small, niche retail business that has thousands of products. Especially products with multiple variants, some of which are regular stock and some of which are special order. I'm currently using Square for POS which is alright, but their online offering is terrible:

- Products can only be "in stock" or "out of stock". Out of stock products cannot be ordered. There's no option to place an order with a longer expected lead time.

- The web UI for managing inventory has weird eventual consistency bugs that cause it to lose data. I'll upload 50 pictures of different variants of products and the change will be rejected because of a concurrency issue.

- The actual website layout is extremely limited. I know Shopify has a templating language which can be used to completely rewrite the front-end. Square recently announced "scrolling text is here" as if that was a thing I wanted.

- Individual product pages don't seem to be indexed by Google. I can do a site:mysite.com search and they don't appear.

- No support for Google Shopping in Canada.

Does anyone have experience with something like BigCommerce or something besides Shopify + Square? How featureful are they and easy to host?

[oceankid]

We've got an online shop with 5M daily requests. We figured out it was better to build the tech in-house to control the entire UX– custom shop, checkout flow, exchanges, labels, inventory speed and rotation.

Next step was moving all the fulfillment, purchasing and BOM parts over to a proper ERP system, like Odoo. Apart from one developer time, it costs us under $100 to run (the CDN costs the most).

Now we're pulling everything together under one UX. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it was fun to build and it's been a game-changer for us.

[xgalen → oceankid]

This is quite interesting. We are following a similar path in my company. Moved from a proprietary CMS to a headless one (strapi) to extend it as desires and control the UI/UX completely and also moving to Odoo as an ERP. Any advices on this? What do you mean by pulling everything together under one UX? Thanks in advance!

[wharfjumper → oceankid]

Do you (or anyone) have feedback about Odoo? I've read quite a bit of bad feedback online.

[toomuchtodo → oceankid]

Blog post please!

[thedangler]

Hello, Can give my service a try at sytescope.com. You get a free trial and I can keep renewing it until you decide.

I'm the owner.

[AH4oFVbPT4f8 → thedangler]

This looks very nice, thanks for sharing. I will be sharing this internally this week.

[nickelcitymario]

> Individual product pages don't seem to be indexed by Google. I can do a site:mysite.com search and they don't appear.

This may not be due to Square. Try searching on Bing or Duck Duck Go. Google is going through a weird transition right now and a lot of sites aren't being indexed. My own site, insurgent.ca, has been live for months and nothing I do in the search console seems to be able to get it indexed. Meanwhile, every other search engine seems to have no problem indexing my site at all.

[jonas-w → nickelcitymario]

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195600

[hestefisk]

I use woocommerce. It’s ok. Not great but hackable.

[nip]

Have you heard of / looked into “prestashop”[1]?

I used it a couple of years ago for an acquaintance with a fairly big inventory (in the thousands as well) and I was pleasantly surprised by how feature-full, flexible and easy to use (for the store manager) it was.

[1] https://prestashop.com/

[vmoore]

Two solutions for Wordpress I have used:

https://wphive.com/plugins/shopp/

https://woocommerce.com/

[telesilla]

Any reason not to use Magento CE? If you get a good dev who knows it well it will pay for itself in features you cannot get elsewhere.

[tough]

MedusaJS is a nice modular choice

[ahstilde]

why not just use Shopify, and Shopify as PoS?

[throwboatyface → ahstilde]

My understanding is Shopify can be quite good for ecommerce but the PoS sucks. And they are very up front that there is no support to interoperate with other platforms. I would love to continue using my Square hardware for in-person

[TheNewsIsHere → throwboatyface]

I have spent a lot of time as a professional user/customer/dev/admin on Shopify, and while I might phrase your point differently, I think it’s fundamentally an honest take.

Shopify has always been very upfront that they’re an e-commerce platform company. They’re not interested in being everything to everyone. If you want to do something “really custom”, you have to engage with (typically other paid) ecosystem services and providers, or write your own code against their APIs.

It can definitely be frustrating.

I really like WooCommerce (disclaimer: I have a professional and financial interest in the WordPress ecosystem generally, but no real interests in or relationship with Automattic. A lot of my business is in this ecosystem).

Others have found great success with Magento and PrestaShop.

BigCommerce seems to have a bit of a fanatical following but I’ve only ever been a end “consumer customer” of their merchants.

Edit: typos and a minor clarification in my disclosure.