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Ask HN: Is anyone interested in Node.js based alternative to Magento?

15 points by vishalchandra ↗ HN
Magento is based on PHP which makes it need more infrastructure to serve more users. People also use Wordpress, Joomla for setting up ecommerce sites. Are there developers or customers who might be interested in having access to open source Node.js ecommerce solution along the lines of Magento, but also updated in terms of functionality for today's world where buyers lurk on apps like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

27 comments

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wallenje1
Of course, this would be extremely revolutionary. Is there one in the works. On a technical level, are yo a single developer because the code needed isnt a joke. The most underdeveloped php ecommerce frameworks are opencart and prestashop, and even they are pretty well polished.
vishalchandra
Team of four (all very comfortable in Node.js, delivered several products in the past) + a customer. We will manage to build something. Need to figure out how much sense it makes to make that extra effort to be customizable, extendable, etc. That approach won't work if other Node.js devs are not interested in taking up the code and extending and customizing it in future.
mhoad
I'd love to see something like this but as already mentioned, building out a serious e-commerce platform from scratch is a lot of work.
canterburry
I think you are asking the wrong crowd and possibly the wrong quesion.

The prime consumers of any eCommerce platform are business users, those who work with inventory, sales, returns etc. If they prefer one package to another, they aren't even going to consider what language it was written in. They plain don't care and they will tell the coder guy which one they want.

tehwebguy
Agreed, I don't want to sound like a hater but I think that the product is so much more than just a piece of software.

There are also thousands of extensions for Magento.

What about looking at the gap in between a PayPal button and something like Magento?

vonnik
I think he's asking the right crowd, because the only people who care about whether a platform is in PHP or node.js are other devs. And it's also the right question, because there may be devs who would be better served by a node.js tool than by Magento, which is a bloated and outdated piece of software.
canterburry
What I am trying to say is that the dev person's preference is one of the least important criteria when a business evaluates an e-commerce package.
vishalchandra
Yes, business owners have learnt that Shopify is nice and if you need your own solution then Magento is a good way to go forward. We are focused on putting together a community of only 100 Node.js dev teams who have or believe that they will have ecommerce customers open to using Node.js (and only worried about functionality) and are willing to work together to deliver better quality, easier to manage large scalable ecommerce sites. We are the first such dev team, looking for 99 others.
nasmorn
Magento has it's problems but resource usage under scale probably isn't on most peoples mind. Usually your ecommerce traffic is worth many magnitudes more than the computation cost. Reasonable response times for a single request would be nice though
vonnik
trycelery.com is an e-commerce platform based on Node.js.
halisaurus
2% + CC processing fees? That's expensive. Also, this is a pre-order platform. Not really a 1-to-1 with Magento
vonnik
Yes, and Magento is many many thousands of dollars in engineering costs. Celery is two lines of code you paste into a website. Or it's an API. Which is the platform, and it takes live orders. It just so happens that many of its clients started post-Kickstarter with pre-orders.
blowenstein93
It looks like it specializes in pre-orders, but they also support real-time charging.
booop
Over here, you will find people interested in a node.js alternative to anything.
nailer
A Ghost eCommerce plugin would be useful.
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o_____________o
Yes, Magento is obscene in resource use. I've seen multiple clients sink under the burden of optimizing their stores.
_random_
Node.js seems to be fading away. Perhaps something like Golang would be a better alternative?
MalcolmDiggs
Yes definitely interested. If you get the ball rolling please do share the Github.
gannisk
Worthy try,but given the Node developer community is small, it would take good amount of time to hit mainstream traction,case in example : Spreecommerce built on RoR
xorax
Yes I am too. But I think nodejs still misses some things to be a great language, at most the synchronous way. Some people try to make it by implementing the same syntax as in C# (async/await) or by finding others ways (like coffee script try with defer). But finaly we still have with so much spaghetti... And for example, just try to think about how many levels of callback you will need to have to write only the Config model of Magento : it's insame. So, at this time, I don't think that the language is good enought without a transcompilator like coffeescript (even I don't like the idea) or a strong runtime lib (which one?). And from that will depends the success.