Lazyweb, what are our preferred not-shopify storefront platforms and what do we like about them?
@mhoye I tossed together my own thing. Very barebones, but it only incurs costs when I'm selling and the code is small enough to fit in my head when changes are needed. I do not recommend it.
@ekaitz_zarraga @mhoye Happy to talk about that. Most of the user facing site is static content regenerated as needed by Jekyll. Shopping cart, checkout, and the order fulfillment stuff for staff is done with tiny C++ programs (written more like C but bringing in some of the safer standard library stuff to hopefully avoid most of the footguns, PHP would honestly be a better choice here, I just hadn't used that in ages) sharing some common utility code. PostgreSQL, Stripe, and Shippo also used.
@ekaitz_zarraga @mhoye Before working on this, I had a conversation with another shop owner in the same industry at a trade event and he was very excited about his new ecommerce site, but then revealed that he'd gotten 0 orders through it (he still had old fashioned mail order customers), so my priorities were: 1. Doesn't cost if there aren't sales. 2. Can be built quickly with tech I already know and am comfortable with. 3. Easily integrates with my existing site.
@ekaitz_zarraga No worries. Best of luck to you if you give this a go and if you have any follow up questions I'm always happy to chat about that.
@neal I was in a hurry when I read this and I didn't reply, but thank you for sharing your experience and goals, they are pretty much the same I have.
I might try to give this a go myself. I really like your website. It looks simple and effective.
Thank you. This is very useful for me.