Show HN: Commerce – Drop in e-commerce for any website

17 points by kaishiro ↗ HN
Hey HN. I'm Matt White, co-founder of Commerce, along with Nathan Martin (centipixel) and Daniel Newman (over-engineered). Commerce is a drop-in e-commerce platform for any website from a single line of JavaScript. You can find us here: https://static.tools/commerce

With this single include, you get a shopping cart, account registration and login (Email, Google, Facebook, etc), live shipping quotes, invoicing, and the ability to sell complex product variants (composite/configurable products, delta pricing, fractional pricing, wholesale pricing, etc). Much of this is configurable via an administrative interface we've built up alongside the product.

From individual clients we've onboarded onto the system, we've already processed over 2 million dollars in transactions - a drop in the bucket compared to most of the other players in the market, but we're proud of it!

Before Commerce, the three of us consulted full-time as a team with a focus on static/Jamstack sites. We have over 30 years of agency and consulting experience between us (we're all mid-30s). Commerce was born out of a need to supply an e-commerce solution to a client, while still maintaining a static build. It was so successful, we decided to split off the product as it's own business, and Commerce was born.

As a company, we applied (late) to YC's W19 batch and didn't make the cut - and are currently working through Startup School as we work towards a full public launch. We're hoping to follow-up with a Launch HN in the coming weeks, but in the meantime this is our first time exposing the product to anyone who isn't a direct client of ours, so we're happy to take questions. And if it's a product you're interested in, we'd love it if you hopped over to https://static.tools/commerce and signed up for our launch announcements.

Thanks!

Site: https://static.tools

Demo: https://demo.static.tools

Docs: https://docs.static.tools

9 comments

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What would the benefits be for this compared to Magento or Shopify?
Hey sarora27, Magento is certainly more of a monolith - so if you're building a Magento site you're very much building a Magento site. Shopify is similar in some respects, although their headless offering has certainly opened the doors up a bit.

The real benefit at the moment is that you can get Commerce running with the site you already have - you don't need to replatform in order to start selling things. Additionally, the cart is entirely real time - so a user can go from their laptop to their phone without needing to refresh the page to see any changes to the cart. Finally, the core of the cart is vanilla JS - so there is no inherent need to use React/Vue/(enter JS framework here) - although you certainly can by hooking directly into the API if that's where your tooling is at.

It's also ready to rock for static websites - no backend required - that was the initial drive for the product itself and it's grown from there.

This makes alot of sense. I think you're on to something. (Disclaimer: I worked for Magento and on a team responsible for turning the Magento monolith into a suite of microservices).

Are you targeting any key segments, use case, or GMV merchant-wise?

Happy to share what I know if it would be relevant. Feel free to DM!

Awesome, appreciate it. I'm @kaishir0 over on Twitter and the rest of my comms are in my HN profile. Would love to chat sometime.
I tried building commerce systems in a few Vue/Nuxt js sites and figured out that building the backend part of that is in a very bad shape right now.

You either have to custom code everything or use woocommerce or Magento APIs.

Getting woocommerce or wordpress system to work as API is very difficult and poorly implemented with multiple plugins to manage register, cart, orders, payments etc.

Implementing a full blown Magento install for this is just overkill.

I looked into couple of hosted SaaS in this space and they were too new with limited functionality.

Glad this space is picking up. All the best.

Thanks subhashchy. Our opinion is that there are a lot of products that get you "half way", but that still leaves the last few miles to trudge through to have a complete solution. Let me know if there's anything that you think Commerce doesn't provide that would still be missing on your end - we want to make sure we're not just bikeshedding things to death without any outside input.
Looks interesting. What technology stack is this based on?
Hey victor106 - we beat around a bunch of things earlier on, but ultimately decided we wanted to produce a product that was platform agnostic. The core of the product is all vanilla JS, and the backend is entirely cloud-based - primarily via GCP.
sounds interesting. I use e-commerce platform for my websites too. Not so long ago I found WooCommerce plugins for online store on https://woobewoo.com/ . These plugins can help easily find products and increase sales. Plus I can attract more visitors with promo codes.