ecommerce app ?

[timconsidine]

Looking for recommendations for an app for ecommerce or "online store" for Cloudron.

I don't see one in the official store, unless knows of an add-on for Ghost ? Looking for one-off sales, not subscriptions.

Any custom self-packaged app recommendations ?

[jdaviescoates]

@timconsidine the majority of ecommerce sites are WooCommerce so I'd say WordPress (Developer) is your best bet.

[MooCloud_Matt]

@timconsidine
any jamstack solution with Strapi/Directus + Paypal or stripe, and a front end that you can ask to build to a freelancer instead of relying on a hard-to-maintain WooCommerce.

[girish]

+1 for WooCommerce as well.

[jdaviescoates]

@MooCloud_Matt said in ecommerce app ?:

hard-to-maintain WooCommerce.

Interesting, hard how?

[MooCloud_Matt]

@jdaviescoates
WordPress plugins are a mess, you need to update them weekly (for security), but that often introduce incompatibility or new bugs.
Mainly because plugins don't often document how they work and how they interact with the WP-Core.
We have noticed WooCommerce websites with a pretty standard install (wpcore, woocommerce, divi, wpml, some woocommerce premium plugins) getting completely unreliable after just 1 year of updates.
And due to lack of documentation, debugging is hell.

[erikscholz]

@timconsidine

Snipcart has an e-commerce integration for Ghost. I have no experience with it, though.

[humptydumpty]

@MooCloud_Matt I gotta say that WP is pretty safe and still the best option for most use cases unless you have an in-house developer. I’ve been running a woocommerce site for over a decade now and have dealt with volusion, bigcommerce, and shopify. Woocommerce is still my go-to platform. I haven’t been hacked or had any major plug-in conflicts that aren’t cache (looking at you wp rocket) related. However, I use only the top rated plugins on envato and limit the number of plugins to the bare essential. I avoid the wp plugin store like the plague. The same applies to themes as they would be your first and most likely culprit in conflict issues. I feel wp has improved tremendously in the recent years in terms of security and having plugins auto update themselves. My tip to Tim is to install wordfence before anything else.

[privsec]

@humptydumpty

Why wordfence compared to AIO security or ithemes?

Is there a better caching plugin then wprocket?

[humptydumpty]

@privsec I'm not saying WP-Rocket is bad. I have had it for years and it's worth the price tag but it didn't work properly with any of my current themes that I have purchased from Envato, especially when I threw in BunnyCDN into the mix. I would go with what your theme developer recommends as each theme is optimized for a specific caching plugin.

As for security plugins, I've only used Sucuri and Wordfence. I forgot why I switched from Sucuri but I settled on WF years ago and it hasn't failed me yet. It can be resource hungry if you don't adjust the settings but that's easy to do and it's set and forget.

Edit (to expand on caching plugins): I use a different caching plugin for each of my sites and it's based on what the theme dev recommended. I also tested the page speed on pingdom and gtmetrix and settled on the fastest of the bunch and that didn't cause any conflicts. A word of caution though, testing page speeds and trying to optimize WP is a rabbit hole you don't want to mess with (unless you're coding your own theme/plugins).

[jdaviescoates]

@privsec said in ecommerce app ?:

Why wordfence compared to AIO security or ithemes?

It's better

[d19dotca]

My recommendation: WordPress + WooCommerce plugin (this is effectively the most supported and most common solution with a plethora of online tutorials and resources to rely on too) -- OR -- WordPress + SureCart plugin (the newer player on the block which aims to be a much simpler WooCommerce with even more better features)

[timconsidine]

@d19dotca Hadn't heard of SureCart so will check that out.

[timconsidine]

Thanks everyone for your input.
My state of mind currently :

I had wanted to use OpenCart but I can't get it packaged for Cloudron (and can't update the previous custom package on git.cloudron.io). Also a native installation seems broken for now.

I usually shy away from Wordpress. Seen too many impossible to maintain installations. But WP + Wordfence + WooCommerce (or SureCart) might be workable. I just have to get over my "PTSD" about WP.

Snipcart looks interesting but it is one more component (and fees) which seems unnecessary just to get buyers to Stripe, which is my preferred payments platform. (Paypal almost stole £5k from me so they're banned )

It's not new but I have discovered that Stripe have payment links which give a URL which I'm hoping can be put on a button in Ghost or other simple CMS. They don't provide cart functionality, but they're neat as a one-click purchase mechanism.

Stripe does have a checkout module, but I haven't worked out if it can be used with something like Grav (or Ghost).

[DanTheMan]

I had Prestashop installed as a lamp app in Cloudron. It ran for half a year without any problems, but I didn't do anything with it so I removed it recently.

[timconsidine]

@DanTheMan yes I looked at Prestashop a while back but was not keen on their plugin structure.

[RazielKanos]

I managed more over 200 WP + WooCommerce shops in my active time in roughly 20 years in the business. I really don't get where that "hard to handle" myth for WordPress comes from... try working with SAP - THATS hell on earth xD

For a purrrfect cache solution, Check out SwiftPerformance

[humptydumpty]

@d19dotca Surecart got me interested so I watched some of their feature videos on their YT channel. A lot of the good features are behind a paywall and for basic variations (color, size, etc.) you need to be on the Pro plan ($199/yr; that's with a 50% coupon). I feel their pricing doesn't fit their audience though. A "simple" shop owner shouldn't have to pay that much for what is considered a basic ecommerce feature. The 100 product limit on the free plan is understandable for example. I feel that in Tim's case, a WP + Stripe checkout pages is a much better route. Especially since he intends on using Stripe so he can use Stripe's dashboard to manage his finances and orders. But if Stripe checkout is the option he takes, then WP might not be needed and other platforms might do the job, even a static site generator which would eliminate the need for caching, security plugins, etc. (general WP headaches ).

[timconsidine]

@humptydumpty god analysis, thank you.

[d19dotca]

@humptydumpty totally agree. Wasn’t my first choice but I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. I’d still stick with WP & WooCommerce.

[MooCloud_Matt]

@RazielKanos
The main question is scale; even 200 wp is a small group, especially if you don't let your customer install what they want from the store, and the store that you have don't have custom code in it, that needs to be tested, or are regionals store that doesn't need to scale.

And in any case, wp is not modern, it tries to stay up to date, but it is a monolithic software, which means you have disadvantages.

• Lower security because the frontend has access to the DB, which allows more exploitation.
• Front-End and backend are together; this doesn't allow you to scale quickly/easily.
• Plugin compatibility with different versions of PHP.
• WordPress is terrible in rollback, you need to use a backup.
• Working on multiple branches is not possible, in some cases not even staging is possible.

Maybe in some cases, the advantages (easy to find a compatible provider, plugin ecosystem, easy to find documentation, visual builder) make it a good option for you, but you can't say that is not a hard solution to maintain compared to a JAMstack solution.

But if you ask me what you should start with, if you want to build an e-shop, I would go on JAMstack almost in all cases, vue and svelte are super easy to learn and you can do a lot with almost 0 understanding of JS or TS, copy and pasting from the documentation.