Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018?

I use wordpress + woocommerce(amazon pay)

I dont think this entire setup costs 200 dollars.

Shopify comes with a free trial. After that the monthly is very low.

bigcartel (free for a few products, just fees) and if they start doing any amount of decent business, they can switch to shopify.

Etsy is 20 cents per listing plus the CC transaction fee. I've seen a lot of shop owners get around this by offering incredibly customizable products. They have a text box for "Customer Comments" where you describe what you want.

I actually bought the exact thing OP is trying to sell on Etsy using the method I just described. The seller had uploaded a lot of examples of different types of work they could create so I had an idea of what they could do before I purchased.

Can you recommend any resources for doing market research or analytics for small online shops?

Also wanted to drop a note that I've been building https://www.trunkinventory.com the past 6 months to help sync inventory between Etsy & Shopify stores (Amazon and eBay coming soon!). It's currently in early-access with lots of businesses using it successfully. Just trying to make it easier to manage all your sales channels from one place!

Definitely with Shopify. I have bought stuff from companies built on Shopify many times and I get all the normal promotional stuff you'd expect.

Exactly. PayPal is the same way: if you outsource your payment processing to one of these, then you don't have to worry about the PCI stuff. If you're intent on having a "uniform checkout experience", then it's much more difficult of course, but if you don't mind redirecting customers to PayPal to do the payment, then making your own basic store can save you a ton of money in fees.

how do you do inventory management? variants? promotions? etc etc etc

OP's friend needs a store quickly, and probably wants a stable, feature-rich, ready to use store. OP most likely does not want to get blind-sided discovering that the plethora of currently existing solutions have upwards of well over $1 million dollars of labor-hours (features, QA, documentation) put into them. Magento might even have over $1 billion in labor-hours. Rolling your own out of simple ignorance regarding what exists is already rather dumb, but the surprise finding out that making anything worth using is a full-time job will be soul crushing, depressing, and may even damage OP's relationship.

Writing an ecommerce CMS because you are educated on what exists and want to innovate is a completely different matter.

You also need to take care of:

    Catalog/pricing/inventory management
    Category/multiple product display/design
    Search
    Single product page display/design
    Shipping options
    Checkout, aside from payment (partial flow, or completely externally hosted?)
    Order management (how to get orders out of the system and into a warehouse to be packed)
    Promotions and discounts (will you have coupons?)
    Customer feedback/product reviews
    Contact me/us

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Source: I work for an ecommerce consultant (I use/live in Salesforce Commerce Cloud/formerly Demandware)

+1 Snipcart looks neat. Actually I was just showing it to a teammate.

It's rarely mentioned, but if you like Snipcart, Shopify also offers a custom solution for storefronts and static websites: https://help.shopify.com/api/custom-storefronts/js-buy-sdk

You basically get all the benefits of Shopify's excellent, easy to use admin/backend area while building a custom frontend on top of it.

Sure. PCI compliance is a set of rules as to how credit card data is handled on your site.

Depending on how your payment process works and how many transactions you make in a year there's a sliding scale of progressively more stringent guidelines. Using a gateway like Stripe which has a hosted payment form reduces the PCI risk but doesn't remove it entirely. And the PCI guidelines make GDPR look like a model of clarity and straightforwardness.

Last time I looked into it, there was a debate as to whether Stripe fell into PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) A or SAQ A-EP. A is pretty simple to meet, but A-EP is not. Even Stripe seemed to hedge on this. If anyone more knowledgeable than me can weigh in, I'd appreciate it!

As for tax, depending on what you're selling you have to add the correct tax for your customer's country. For example as I understand it, the EU VAT MOSS rules mean that when selling digital downloads you have to apply the correct sales tax for every country people are buying from. You not only have to build a system for changing the tax depending on the address, but also understand the tax situation of every country you want to do business in. (Again, if I'm wrong or making it too complicated, I'd like to know).

Thankfully there are platforms like Etsy or Gumroad for selling digital downloads that do all that stuff for you. The fees may be high compared to a DIY solution, but it's worth it for a small merchant.

I tried that, and it turned out I was actually at step 3.

A Wordpress website isn’t an advantage, it’s a nightmare in terms of security and maintenance.

I would suggest that you want to get that marketing number as close to 100% as possible.

Spending time on anything technology related at the start is really a distraction from the important goal of understanding products, pricing, and customers. Any time spent on technology beyond that of doing the minimum required to make selling possible is a premature optimization.

So when someone says they "want total control", your response is "no you don't". Wow.

Are you a sales rep for Shopify? That $30 per month fee is bad.

Not all aspects of Shopify can be customized -- especially with the checkout workflow (eg you can only set a logo for the checkout page, but not style it). Also the non-ecommerce pages are woefully lacking in content management functionality (anything more complex than a blog is impossible without using a third-party app to store custom content in meta fields).

And writing apps yourself is not always ideal because they need to run on your own server (thus mitigating the benefit of using a hosted platform to avoid infrastructure maintenance), and any frontend modifications can only be done via JavaScript (you can't modify the outputted HTML itself, so it's a lot more difficult to make robust, performant and accessible customizations to functionality).

Coding the store is NOT terrible advice when you're talking to a developer who wants "full control and independent".

It's very disappointing to see all the comments here saying "use shopify". That's what your mum would do. Are you a developer or not?

It's like saying "just use facebook, you don't need a website", or "Just eat at MacDonalds, it's much cheaper and easier".

There's no way I would recommend being tied to a monthly Shopify fee when there's much better options out there for devs to gain control, and build a faster more creative and original store.

Shopify.. Really? How unsatisfying and boring.

If $400 a year isn’t a trivial expense for an ecommerce store, you are probably wasting your time.

You can go with woo, which is marginally free. But it takes a week to set up vs half a day with Shopify. So, wasting 35 $100 hours to save $400 is a bad decision. Then you have maintenance costs of a few hours a month.

You could go with amazon. But to list your own product costs $39.99 a month, so $480 a year there too. (You might be able to go with $39.99 then downgrade, haven’t tried it)

eBay and Etsy might work. Craigslist for sale postings are still free.

But at the end of the day, if the store isn’t bringing it at least $400-500 a month it should probably be shuttered and move on to the next idea.

There are definitely apps to do customizable combos and reserve but don’t pay.

Customizing Shopify (or big commerce or volusion) is almost always cheaper in total cost than custom work until you have a huge base.

I wrote software for 7 years. Now run 4 Shopify stores. I used to also run two woo stores. Shoping carts are complicated and boring. Shopify gets things right you wouldn’t know you need for three years. It’s the right place to start.

Care to expand upon that?

'She don't know what she don't know'. I bet she thought/thinks she was getting a bargain.

Control over data cuts two ways. If you control it, you also have to secure it.

same. Maybe it was awful in the past, but I've had no issues with Woocommerce in the past 2 years or so. I suppose it can get messy if you are working with some poorly coded plugins, but the base WC, works pretty well.

I looked at Shopify but it looked like a huge headache to customize - seems it would be a good option if you want more of a turn key experience though.