bicicura's avatar

Build an e-commerce for production

Hello there!

I am curious about how the community would approach building an e-commerce for a small apparel store. I am about to create one, I have some years of experience with Laravel so I think it would be nice to do it with it. The stack I chose is Laravel, Inertia, React and Sql.

My question is, do you think any other tool is necessary to build a production ready project? For example, use a Shoppify integration for checkout and product inventory.

Also, as it is a small startup, they have few products so it wont need an advanced search feature. The most important topics that make me wonder are the tools for payment, shipping and notifications.

I think I could handle that features myself, integrate with Stripe as Payment and making my own implementatiton of an inventroy. Yet, I would like to hear if someone has experienced with any tool to handle this requirements or any tips to take in account for.

There is no right or wrong answer, if you have experience with this kind of projects, I would like to read about it! Thanks.

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3 replies
martinbean's avatar

My question is, do you think any other tool is necessary to build a production ready project? For example, use a Shoppify [sic] integration for checkout and product inventory.

@bicicura I wouldn’t even bother building a Laravel-based site. I’d just use Shopify. Shopify’s already built everything you’d need to start an apparel store. There’s no point spending weeks or months reinventing the wheel and doing it from scratch.

As a developer, you need to learn when it’s right to buy versus build. Paying Shopify £19/month for its Basic plan will still work out cheaper than me writing stuff like cataloguing and inventory from scratch. Even if I spent a single hour writing code a month, at my hourly rate I would have already “spent” more than if I had just paid for a Shopify subscription.

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bicicura's avatar

@martinbean I appreciate the sincerity. I will give Shopify a closer look, it seems to be a great option. Thanks!

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kristi's avatar

@martinbean that's a solid point. That's the way I see it too. Like you said why reinvent the wheel

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