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Ask HN: Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

70 points by econcon ↗ HN
What do you recommend to physical product business which gets about 25-100 sales a day?

In case you are curious, what I sell it's 3d printing fimament which I make in my garage: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922

I am a programmer but I do not like building something which already exists and e-commerce platform is boring for me also Shopify while is good but I need self hosted one for ideological reasons.

69 comments

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arkadiyt
I'm sure there are many but Solidus is one: https://solidus.io/
yowlingcat
Does anyone have experience working with Solidus and/or Spree at scale? I know that Solidus is a fork of Spree, and from what it seems, Shopify is based off of a heavily modified fork of Spree. Couple of questions:

- How easy is Spree/Solidus to customize?

- Why did Solidus fork from Spree? How does this factor into whether I'd pick one or the other?

- Are Spree and Solidus compatible with each other package ecosystem wise?

- Which one has the most traction as of right now? While Solidus seems to be a relatively recent fork, Spree still appears to have more activity. Why is this the case?

quellhorst
Woocommerce is built on top of Wordpress and is open source.
w-ll
What's the problem your trying to solve?

Paypal button on a static site?

Dont like Paypal, you can use crypto (it's the only thing one can actually self host as in receiving payments)

ecesena
Woocommerce. Can you elaborate more on "ideological reasons"?

I'm genuinely curious why you don't feel ok to pay less than $1/sale to shopify to keep your store up & running but are ok paying much more on fulfillment/shipping.

econcon
I've a multiple stores and some stores get 5 sales a month on $10 item and for that I can't afford Shopify.

I am looking for something which I can host on my own as I've nearly free servers (I receive digital ocean credit through affiliate sales on the guides I wrote) so hosting is free for me and tinkering is free as there not much work where I working so I can fix my website in that time.

Also I don't like to pay monthly for closed source product. That's my ideological reason, it's low in priority but I always choose open whenever possible

thdrdt
OpenCart and Prestashop are open PHP/MySQL shops with a lot of available payment provider plugins.
tamiral
i love wordpress+woocommerce instead of shopify because it's an easier system to manage security + hosting + speed + code if you know what you are doing. You don't really need paid plugins, just some PHP along the way and some free plugins will get you a long way. Esp paying < $100 for a shared cpanel or 1 of the better hosts $100-200/yr is still cheaper than Shopify's 30-70 USD a month.
companyhen
I dislike the monthly fee for Shopify apps so I go with WooCommerce most the time. I like designing in Elementor, but the Storefront theme is free and decent out of the box.

If it's for a site I want to get up fast I'll go with Shopify.

econcon
Yes some of my websites sell 5 items a month and Shopify gets expensive for that too
mccolin
Spree e-commerce is a solid Rails engine that can be used a fully skinnable site and offers a full API for any integrations, customizations, or other apps you want to hook up down the line. It also has robust configurations for your product line, fulfillment, and shipping setups. Have built enterprise-level online stores on it, but it is geared for business the size you describe.

https://spreecommerce.org/

abrbhat
Magento is a popular alternative
johnorourke
Whatever you do, don't end up spending 6 months building something and miss out on 6 months of comission-free sales.

Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time be better spent on increasing sales?

(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to tinker with?)

There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product run by a few developers.

[1] https://freewebstore.com/

hayksaakian
I'll vouch again for WooCommerce. I've built multiple sites with it for clients and it's ideal for a small business with tech-savvy operators.
meesterdude
Workarea is a rails engine you can host yourself, I do integration work for retailers but the core of it is OSS. Lots of plugins, and they're easy to create.

https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea

maximus024
License is a non starter:

> You may make production use of the Licensed Work without an additional license agreement with WebLinc so long as you do not use the Licensed Work for a Commerce Service.

meesterdude
> Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate.

doesn't that convert the license to "Version 2.0 or later of the GNU General Public License"?

PaywallBuster
Can try snipcart.com

You can build a very basic static frontend (HTML/JS) and they will host all the backend stuff and process the payments. 2% fee + payment gateway.

looping__lui
Honestly - don’t.

Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.

For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...

In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...

You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure

gt2
Just to note that several issues you cite are handled can be handled by the payment processor like Stripe.
plibither8
OT: why have you omitted the last two letters from each of the company names?
looping__lui
I put stars there because I didn’t want to directly advertise any. Those “vanished”...
CodeWriter23
> Those “vanished”...

Likely swallowed by the Markdown parser in HN, backend.

butz
Good advice. While it might seem a good idea to hire some freelancer to set up self hosted ecommerce solution as it is cheaper, but looking in a long term, your eshop will need maintenance. Especially annoying with Wordpress and Woocommerce, when using lots of third party plugins. After few months you obviously think up a new feature or two, but original freelancer won't be available and you'll have to find a new one. He will have a hard time cramming in new features and installing updates. The cycle continues and usually such eshop becomes a mess. Slow loading times, unsecure, hard to implement new features. And if custom integration for local payments or delivery provider breaks one day - you are in real trouble.
looping__lui
Just adding to that (especially for software): not only was the development overhead minimal: I think setting up the shop, integrating the license key generation, determining all the pricing etc. took like 1 day including testing?! The savings on accounting were also significant. Had we been the direct seller, we would have driven the (tax) auditors fee ad absurdum. E.g., we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to, the tax audits would have taken ridiculously long and cost a lot, the paper trail (every sale an invoice that has to be kept on record...).

Instead: we only booked 2 revenues per month and that was it. We were not liable for the taxes, everything was taken care of.

I do think that purchasing these services makes small & large gigs easier than ever. Highly recommend.

Fire-Dragon-DoL
Are you referring to using Stripe or Shopify?
looping__lui
I personally used Fastspring. I cannot talk about Stripe or Shopify. They also model your “shopping page” to fit in with everything else. So your customers have a consistent experience.
postpawl
If you’re familiar with python and django, then saleor might be a good option: https://saleor.io/
amit9gupta
I second that. Have used saleor for couple of Ecommerce stores. Has enough features to launch a store out of the box while lacking all the features that if incorporated would make the platform extremely complicated. You can take the community edition and extend it to meet your requirements.
crgwbr
Another good option here is Django Oscar. Probably a bit more complicated than Saleor, but it’s very powerful and customizable.
villgax
I want a simple GUI to manage the store & output a static site & manage hosting with terraform files/CDN for any cloud vendor. Lambdas for billing & SQLite/Redis for storage.
Mooty
I'm surprised no one mentionned Prestashop here. Aside WooCommerce this is a really solid solution since years now, that can scale and have real plugin official marketplace with verified contributors. WooCommerce has way more hassle ...
heyalexej
If you're comfortable with PHP, Shopware & Sylius (both built on Symfony). For Python, look at Saleor. If you don't want to live in a world of pain ( see looping__lui), use a SaaS solution like Snipcart or BigCommerce (which has very competitive rates vs. Shopify). Use the time to learn how to market your product, run ads, create content and grow your business.
madc
Sylius should be seen more as a framework. And while it is full featured, it also is maintenance.
wprapido
Prestashop, WooCommerce, Snipcart, Magento, are all decent self-hosted solutions.
JamesBarney
Recently had some experience with nopCommerce and it's been neat to work with.
honkycat
If you can't afford the shopify fees you don't actually have a business.
zhoujianfu
Just pointing out he said for ideological reasons.
econcon
I also sell 3d printed models online so I've made like 20+ e-commerce websites so far. Most of them are niche website and get 5-10 sales each and some even get zero sales but some websites are seasonal in nature and in some season or event, they blow up in sales.

I am trying to capture this windfall but Shopify is not good for this task.

They charge per store so I am limited to just having one store which is not good for niche work - exploration and discovery.

honkycat
OH! Ok that actually makes sense when you put it in context.

I would probably develop a framework and do free gatsbyjs/netlify static sites that link back to a centralized payment processor service

yowlingcat
Yeah, I think this is the move. Do you think you should also centralize inventory as well? IE having 1 shopify store with inventory of all of your items vs having 1 stripe account.
honkycat
I would centralize inventory and filter on the client side with queries
allanmacgregor
I been thinkering with the idea of service first ecommerce platform; that doesn't lock people down as much Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce do.

For an use case like yours, the 20+ websites are more akin to microsites focused on a subset of products but still mapped to one single catalog and ecommerce store.

Even with ShopifyPlus multi store support each store has its own catalog, and completely seperate for integrations, transactions, etc.

econcon
This is actually very popular usecase among dropshipping too, being locked to one store reduces conversion rates.

We can make subaccount in stripe, so it's easy to specific different subaccount for different product.

While WooCommerce is there but still we need to setup wordpress blog and multiple other things.

xwowsersx
Reading through these replies makes feel like the only person who doesn't sell something and made me curious about what people here are selling.

Slightly off topic I know, but anyone care to share what product or service they use these services for?

fsloth
So what would be the the most simple and cheap non-self-hosted shop and site architecture for small businesses that would enable sales globally?

Are there any tutorials/blog posts on this topic?

madc
Several people mentioned Magento already. For your project, I'd stongly add suggest you should ignore that. While Magento has loads of features build it, it also misses some, I'd consider important. You can not create a custom invoice template out of the box for example.

If you are a somewhat experienced developer, Sylius might give you a good experience and code quality. We build a shop on an earlier version, and it runs solid - not a single downtime in years.

madc
And talking about downtime, see that you get a solid webhost. A clients shop had ~1h downtime a day (!) that nobody could explain. Same setup on a new host runs for a couple of weeks now without issues.