Shopify is an industry-standard, but it’s got its own downfalls that might not suite everyone. Have you guys found anything you’re particularly happy with?
Shopify is an industry-standard, but it’s got its own downfalls that might not suite everyone. Have you guys found anything you’re particularly happy with?
I’m a developer, and WooCommerce, in my opinion, is pretty great. Just like Wordpress, if you look at it more like a development framework, is pretty flexible on what it can do. If you’re not a developer and don’t want to touch code, just buy the plugins you need and go from there. Pretty nice compromise tool between flexibility and ease, although if you have a really tiny budget, the plugins can add up.
I’m also a developer. My job has me work with WordPress almost exclusively. I run hundreds of WordPress sites and the hosting servers that run them.
WordPress is not good, nor is woocommerce. They are, however, convenient to the layperson. That’s basically all they have going for them.
WP and Woo are major resource hogs. The data structure is atrocious. There is no ORM and everything is shoved into two tables: posts and postmeta. All your pages, blog posts, products, orders, form submissions, everything is a ‘post’.
99% of all plugins are horribly written garbage that are major security vulnerabilities and updates to patch those security holes frequently break everything.
WP sites require frequent maintenance to keep them updated to avoid those security issues and since you never know when an update is going to break the whole site you have to do so carefully and make sure you have lots of backups.
Automattic, the company that makes WooCommerce, is scummy as fuck. Just recently they released an update that added a new cookie which triggered firewalls, and made this new feature on by default. They also are selling all WP.com and Tumblr data to be used for AI. Not to mention the fact they intentionally confuse people into thinking WordPress.com is the same thing as WordPress.org, and since the CEO also controls WP.org they can get away with breaking all the rules of the 501c3 nonprofit’s own rules in doing so.
I can go on…
How does it compare to the developer experience of Shopify? I hated Shopify. Unforgivable that there wasn’t even a way to have a dev environment, but this was a few years ago.