HACKER Q&A
📣 throwboatyface

Is there an e-commerce platform that doesn't suck?


I run a small, niche retail business that has thousands of products. Especially products with multiple variants, some of which are regular stock and some of which are special order. I'm currently using Square for POS which is alright, but their online offering is terrible:

- Products can only be "in stock" or "out of stock". Out of stock products cannot be ordered. There's no option to place an order with a longer expected lead time.

- The web UI for managing inventory has weird eventual consistency bugs that cause it to lose data. I'll upload 50 pictures of different variants of products and the change will be rejected because of a concurrency issue.

- The actual website layout is extremely limited. I know Shopify has a templating language which can be used to completely rewrite the front-end. Square recently announced "scrolling text is here" as if that was a thing I wanted.

- Individual product pages don't seem to be indexed by Google. I can do a site:mysite.com search and they don't appear.

- No support for Google Shopping in Canada.

Does anyone have experience with something like BigCommerce or something besides Shopify + Square? How featureful are they and easy to host?


  👤 oceankid Accepted Answer ✓
We've got an online shop with 5M daily requests. We figured out it was better to build the tech in-house to control the entire UX– custom shop, checkout flow, exchanges, labels, inventory speed and rotation.

Next step was moving all the fulfillment, purchasing and BOM parts over to a proper ERP system, like Odoo. Apart from one developer time, it costs us under $100 to run (the CDN costs the most).

Now we're pulling everything together under one UX. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it was fun to build and it's been a game-changer for us.


👤 thedangler
Hello, Can give my service a try at sytescope.com. You get a free trial and I can keep renewing it until you decide.

I'm the owner.


👤 nickelcitymario
> Individual product pages don't seem to be indexed by Google. I can do a site:mysite.com search and they don't appear.

This may not be due to Square. Try searching on Bing or Duck Duck Go. Google is going through a weird transition right now and a lot of sites aren't being indexed. My own site, insurgent.ca, has been live for months and nothing I do in the search console seems to be able to get it indexed. Meanwhile, every other search engine seems to have no problem indexing my site at all.


👤 hestefisk
I use woocommerce. It’s ok. Not great but hackable.

👤 nip
Have you heard of / looked into “prestashop”[1]?

I used it a couple of years ago for an acquaintance with a fairly big inventory (in the thousands as well) and I was pleasantly surprised by how feature-full, flexible and easy to use (for the store manager) it was.

[1] https://prestashop.com/


👤 vmoore
Two solutions for Wordpress I have used:

https://wphive.com/plugins/shopp/

https://woocommerce.com/


👤 telesilla
Any reason not to use Magento CE? If you get a good dev who knows it well it will pay for itself in features you cannot get elsewhere.

👤 tough
MedusaJS is a nice modular choice

👤 ahstilde
why not just use Shopify, and Shopify as PoS?