Shopify self hosted e-commerce alternative?

Honestly - don’t.

Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.

For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...

In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...

You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure

I would suggest Woocommerce. It has a huge community with almost any plugin or theme you can think about. I am not sure it makes sense to do it in your case, as you are likely to spend more time on the store, and less growing your business.

Some managed hosting options at different price levels: Kinsta.com WPXhosting.com SiteGround.com NameHero.com

Some themes, plugins, that can help you get up and running quickly: Elementor.com kadencewp.com/product/kadence-woo-extras/ wpastra.com/woocommerce/ commercegurus.com/product/shoptimizer/

Some other useful links to get you started: woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/ youtube.com/channel/UCjDuxPEhNQ2qn_qAdjRG4YQ/videos

Whatever you do, don't end up spending 6 months building something and miss out on 6 months of comission-free sales.

Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time be better spent on increasing sales?

(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to tinker with?)

There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product run by a few developers.

[1] https://freewebstore.com/

Woocommerce. Can you elaborate more on "ideological reasons"?

I'm genuinely curious why you don't feel ok to pay less than $1/sale to shopify to keep your store up & running but are ok paying much more on fulfillment/shipping.

Spree e-commerce is a solid Rails engine that can be used a fully skinnable site and offers a full API for any integrations, customizations, or other apps you want to hook up down the line. It also has robust configurations for your product line, fulfillment, and shipping setups. Have built enterprise-level online stores on it, but it is geared for business the size you describe.

https://spreecommerce.org/

I'm sure there are many but Solidus is one: https://solidus.io/

If you’re familiar with python and django, then saleor might be a good option: https://saleor.io/

I'm surprised no one mentionned Prestashop here. Aside WooCommerce this is a really solid solution since years now, that can scale and have real plugin official marketplace with verified contributors. WooCommerce has way more hassle ...

I dislike the monthly fee for Shopify apps so I go with WooCommerce most the time. I like designing in Elementor, but the Storefront theme is free and decent out of the box.

If it's for a site I want to get up fast I'll go with Shopify.

Woocommerce is built on top of Wordpress and is open source.

I want a simple GUI to manage the store & output a static site & manage hosting with terraform files/CDN for any cloud vendor. Lambdas for billing & SQLite/Redis for storage.

Several people mentioned Magento already. For your project, I'd stongly add suggest you should ignore that. While Magento has loads of features build it, it also misses some, I'd consider important. You can not create a custom invoice template out of the box for example.

If you are a somewhat experienced developer, Sylius might give you a good experience and code quality. We build a shop on an earlier version, and it runs solid - not a single downtime in years.

What's the problem your trying to solve?

Paypal button on a static site?

Dont like Paypal, you can use crypto (it's the only thing one can actually self host as in receiving payments)

In case you're into Python, try Odoo community edition. There are integrations for PayPal, Stripe, UPS and whatnot. As an ERP system, an Odoo Webshop is integrated with Sales management, warehouse management etc. For me that's a big benefit.

Magento is still free isn't it? And by adding M2EPro your products & inventory can also list on Amazon and eBay's global sites at the same time that they're on your website.

M2EPro is also free up to a certain (quite high) monthly sales volume

Don't self-host. Just get Shopify and be done with it. You should be focused on running your business not fussing around with the tech. Any time you spend doing that is time you aren't spending on selling.

Give a look st Sylius. https://sylius.com/

It written in PHP and has clean and modern codebase what is great if you need some custom development

So what would be the the most simple and cheap non-self-hosted shop and site architecture for small businesses that would enable sales globally?

Are there any tutorials/blog posts on this topic?

Woocommerce on it's own VPS running CentMinMod: http://centminmod.com/ I help manage an Ecommerce site which gets 10,000 vistors a month, and our $20 per month Linode instance + Centminmod handles that level of traffic easily. As for Wordpress themes I'm a big fan of GeneratePress. https://generatepress.com/

Just use woocommerce. As long as you keep the number of installed WordPress plugins minimal and keep them up to date every couple weeks, you're golden. The biggest issue with WordPress ecosystem is the varying qualities of 3rd party plugins which give it endless security issue, but as long as you keep those minimal, a woocommerce store is very solid choice as woocommerce is a first part plugin with solid attention from automattic.

I'll vouch again for WooCommerce. I've built multiple sites with it for clients and it's ideal for a small business with tech-savvy operators.

Hey econcon, I built One Item Store, which solves your exact problem: https://oneitem.store

You can just set up a really simple page, accept payments, and manage orders.

I built a simple example site for your filament: https://oneitem.store/3dfilament

Let me know if you want any more info :)

I created belgianbrewed.com ( fully custom). It's a lot of work, even less obvious things like E-commerce filters.

Tax is hard depending on the country, eg. For Belgium/Europe it's pretty easy. = Tax calculated in the country of residence only.

There are plenty of alternatives beyond woocommerce/Magento. I use woocommerce for another one, but it requires some maintenance.

Just make sure you can easily extend it.

What programming language so you use?

If you're comfortable with PHP, Shopware & Sylius (both built on Symfony). For Python, look at Saleor. If you don't want to live in a world of pain ( see looping__lui), use a SaaS solution like Snipcart or BigCommerce (which has very competitive rates vs. Shopify). Use the time to learn how to market your product, run ads, create content and grow your business.

Workarea is a rails engine you can host yourself, I do integration work for retailers but the core of it is OSS. Lots of plugins, and they're easy to create.

https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea

Check out Shopaholic for October CMS: https://octobercms.com/plugin/lovata-shopaholic (Disclaimer: I'm the lead maintainer for October CMS but I have no affiliation with Shopaholic).

I'll put Snipcart (https://snipcart.com/) in the ring. It's nice because it has only the server logic part in the cloud but it's very easy for a programmer to set up and do themselves.

Reading through these replies makes feel like the only person who doesn't sell something and made me curious about what people here are selling.

Slightly off topic I know, but anyone care to share what product or service they use these services for?

Recently had some experience with nopCommerce and it's been neat to work with.

Prestashop, WooCommerce, Snipcart, Magento, are all decent self-hosted solutions.

Open Cart is a near solution

https://commercejs.com/ looks like nice platform.

They have a plan with 0 upfront cost, you only pay % of transaction.

Can try snipcart.com

You can build a very basic static frontend (HTML/JS) and they will host all the backend stuff and process the payments. 2% fee + payment gateway.

If you can't afford the shopify fees you don't actually have a business.

Magento is a popular alternative

Netlify + Stripe.

Drupal Commerce.

Openbazaar