Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading a good number of the comments and while I understand it's not a sample without bias, I have to ask:

How did Shopify get to be the beast that it is?

Why doesn't someone else step up and into what looks like a massive opportunity, especially since Covid have push so many transactions online?

I have worked with Shopify customizing themes and adding custom functionality. It good when it great and you're within its sweetspot. But then it drops off like a cliff. The developer workflow? Shockingly dated.

I've worked with WooCommerce. Great tool. But it requires knowledge and resources.

I've taken the BigCommerce training. Felt like Shopify 3.x but I'm not sure they're positioning well for the long term.

I know there are others.

It seems to me that there's a sweetspot between Shopify and WooComm. User friends yet also developer friendly. Perhaps not easy to do. But that's not humans on Mars either, is it?

> How did Shopify get to be the beast that it is?

Its amazingly simple to get started. It will push the products into a shoppingCart array, do the arithmetic adding up the prices. Clearly not something you should pay for. It's one hell of a deal - for them.

I'm sure there is a special place in hell for self proclaimed developers who want to help shopify create a playstore/appstore like monopoly. I'm happy they are this terrible at everything nice.

But the getting started process is wonderful. Its all fantastic until the iron gate closes behind you and the room goes on fire.

At the end of the day, the customer is the one deciding what they will pay for based on what is available to them. Majority of apps are on Shopify. Customer has no knowledge of the dev tools and how hard they are to use.

Yes and no. The issue here is presenting as "dev friendly" and not being true to that. Wix, Webflow, Squrespace don't do that. They're not.

But Shopify wants to say one thing but do another. Why do devs subject themselves to a platform with well known limitations.

Note: I like Shopify. But only for cases that are within its sweet spot.

There are a lot of options in e-commerce, all of them with thousands of shops: WooCommerce, Magento, Jumpseller, Bigcommerce, Prestashop, Wix WooCommerce etc...

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