E-commerce p!ss*s me off!

General Web Design
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I thought it worth opening a topic in a community with lots of talented developers to discuss this.

I am a businessman first and foremost, but to me, a big part of that nowadays is being highly technologically adept. I started using rapidweaver around 2 years ago to build sites for my businesses, and its been an indispensable tool. That said, as my businesses have grown, i have sometimes felt boxed in by it, so around 8 months ago i decided that i wanted to learn HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. I would by no means call myself a developer, but i’ve gotten very adept at HTML and CSS and will hopefully be able to say the same for JS and PHP before too long.

I currently have an ecommerce webiste for my main business that was made in rapidweaver using the excellent ecwid stacks made by @Ricardo. Ecwid themselves on the other hand i’ve been less impressed with. Ecwid no longer fits with the scale of the businesses online operation as its not meant to be an advanced platform.

Having thought that my web design and programming knowledge and skills had reached a good enough level, I decided to have a play with some of the open source ecommerce platforms. I thought that would be the best way to go as it gives me complete control over the entire UI/UX and functionality. This is the point at which i get p!ss*d off! I understand i’m still very much a beginner and i’m sure someone here can point the undoubtably obvious points i’m missing, but these platforms are irritatingly un user friendly. I’ve tried Magento, Shopware, Opencart and Litecart and I can’t for the life of me comprehend the method for front end design on any of the platforms. I spent most of my time with Shopware, trying to understand the API so i can have a headless commerce set up in a standard HTML, CSS and JS website. As far as i can work out all the front end design here is done with a JS framework and you can’t just make api calls from a shopping cart svg embedded in HTML for example.

This would be fine except my webiste isn’t solely for selling goods. It has dosens of pages and only 1 is for the sale of goods. My issue with all of these platforms is they are excellent for creating an online shop, but the most frustrating things in the world if you need a website around said shop.

Is there anyone in the RW community who is aware of an ecommerce platform that does what i need it to, or could point out where im going wrong with the offerings i’ve tried above?

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I do not have any e-commerce website building experience, so my comment may well be completely off-mark.

I do have an experience with Vibralogix’s Sitelok and I know Adrian has a companion e-commerce platform called Vibracart Pro. Have you tried this product? Knowing the excellence of Sitelok, I think Vibracart Pro might be worth checking out.

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You’ve not said much about what you actually need from the ecommerce platform, but in terms of having something scalable around which you can build a full site, I’d have thought Wordpress and Woocommerce an option contender?

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It was more of a rant about the current market of ecommerce solutions, but i really appreciate the suggestions. What i’m specifically looking for is an open source ecommerce platform with a robust API that allows me to integrate my own customised versions of the ecommerce system into a standard HTML, CSS and JS website. Shopware seems to be the option, but their documentation is awful and they just tell you to use their PWA for front end development.

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Don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for, and I haven’t used it, but this could be interesting

It’s headless and seems to integrate with various other open source ecommerce tools

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Hello Guy,

First of all thanks for the endorsement of EcwidPro Stacks.

I think that I understand your frustration, and it’s probably the reason why I created EcwidPro.
Most of the e-commerce platforms fall short when you try to integrate them into the design of a website. And that is the reason why I developed EcwidPro. I was myself frustrated with that.

Although I have already been working on a set of stacks for other Open Source e-commerce stacks mentioned on this post (more on that sometime soon). I for the moment opted the go with Ecwid, even though it’s a paid service. That’s because most of the open source scripts have also some limitations as far as styling, but also in the area for taxation. Many (if not most) of them, you have to enter all the tax tables by hand and the website owner is responsible for remitting those taxes to the appropriate tax authority of each country or state. Each having different deadlines, different remittance methods… a small nightmare if your website does international e-commerce.

In any case, if there is anything I can help with EcwidPro or Ecwid itself, it’s API, custom stuff, please feel free to DM me.

Cheers,

Ricardo

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