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Ask HN: Tech stack recommendations for online ordering at a small grocery store?

2 points by kennycarruthers ↗ HN
If you had to quickly build a website to help a small, local grocery store accept orders online, what tech stack would you use?

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.

However, there's no structure in the emails, no insight into what products the store even sells, no online billing, nothing. It's just an unstructured email that gets printed upon receipt and handed to a "shopper". It works, but I feel like some small changes could really help the staff.

As a desktop app developer, it's been awhile since my days of Ruby on Rails, so I'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'm not aware of?

Consider the following:

* 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 "dozens of orders per day". * Being able to create user accounts would be nice, so people can re-order, but it'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.

Thank you.

(This is just volunteer work. I'd build then a desktop macOS app, but that's not going to help too many local residents.)

4 comments

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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.
[dead] chasselschwert
Something that came to mind was using Google Sheets, Google Drive, Netlify functions, and Eleventy to quickly put together a simple site. A list of products could be kept in a Google sheet. Columns I'm thinking of are sku, name, description, categories, unit type (qty/weight), price. When eleventy builds the site, leverage a JavaScript data file (https://www.11ty.dev/docs/data-js/) to fetch the items from the Google Sheet using a Netlify function as a go-between, and then render a page for each category (dairy, produce, cereal, etc.).

Use plain JS on the static site to allow customers to "Add to Cart". Possibly just keep a list of [item, quantity, price] in LocalStorage. When a customer checks out, render a form for contact info with the list of items. Submit the form to another Netlify function that writes basic order information to a row in an "Orders" Google Sheet (maybe keep a status there) and also output a plain text file to a Google Drive folder of the order information, including a "checklist" of items ordered, that can be printed out by someone to pick the items in the store.

This setup would mean that the page is static, so it would be fast for people on slower connections. Updating inventory would be easy because most people are familiar with spreadsheets and you won't have to mess with the overhead of a database server. If no one is comfortable with a spreadsheet, you could quickly build a page that provides a form for creating/updating rows in the Google Sheet. Using Netlify functions would mean that you don't have to manage any server infrastructure.

Hope this is helpful in some way.

[dead] chasselschwert
My curiosity got the best of me and I wondered if what I suggested earlier would be possible. It looks like it is, so I started a small project to try and get a working implementation built. The repo can be found at (https://github.com/curthasselschwert/mini-grocer). Code is very rough and PRs, comments, suggestions are welcome.