In case a company use magento [1], Saleor [2], Sylius [3], Shuup [4], Solidus [5], Spree [6] combined with vue-storefront [7], storefront UI [8] and openflutttercommerce app [9] the amount of efforts to build a highly resilient and functional system is cheaper with complete control over customer, supply chain, pricing, product, marketing, sales and promotion data. Also the efforts will be similar to using shopify, bigcommerce with more cost-savings. Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community.
Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. So I do not see why a mid-size business will choose shopify or bigcommerce. They are good for mom-pop shops and simple commerce, but for unique shopping experience they fall short and better to build customized one with complete control.
[1] https://github.com/magento/magento2
[2] https://github.com/mirumee/saleor
[3] https://github.com/Sylius/Sylius
[4] https://github.com/shuup/shuup
[5] https://github.com/solidusio/solidus
[6] https://github.com/spree/spree
[7] https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront
For you, maybe.
Odds are for every person with the knowhow to do this, there are 100+ who don't even know what "open source" is, let alone have the skills and understanding to even attempt what you describe.
Even among those who know what it is and might consider doing it, some portion rather spend their time selling their products (aka making money) rather than doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future.
Also as the source is under the company using the system, they maintain a full control over their own destiny instead of depending on the whims of Shopify and BigCommerce.
Disagree on this completely; I've studied this space before and using something like Spree and Saleor seems like a world of trouble unless you are willing to commit significant, permanent, and highly specialized development resources to it.
Also, the ecosystems for many of the solutions you describe are quite fragmented and niche; I looked into Spree / Solidus / Saleor devs in my country and couldn't find one, whereas I could find thousands for other more popular (PHP-based) solutions. In my case this would mean that if you wanted to hire local Python / Rails devs, you would have to train every single one of them in the use of the framework.
Finally, I don't think these solutions are as fully featured as some of their competitors. In my comparison I saw that Spree had a plugin for bundled products but the code repo looked desolate, full of issues and left to rot for years, whereas many others had much better support baked in.
Due to all of the above, many medium-sized companies with typical use cases are going to be better served by a more out-of-the-box solution, rather than taking charge of a Rails or Python codebase that's going to grow wild with custom code.
As for Shopify, it's definitely not for mom and pops anymore - they are serving massive customers throught their Plus offering, and their move to an open and comprehensive API (with both REST and GraphQL) allows anyone to build highly customized headless apps around it.
I run an agency that's highly specialised in Shopify, so obviously I have a dog in the fight, but as someone who's recently helped migrate a business with ~$6b/year in revenue to Shopify I think it's time to retire that particular misconception.
aka "doing a bunch of things that might get them ready to make money at some point in the future" - which is what I originally said.
Thanks, I'll pass. Give me a revenue today and time to iterate over what one I might make 6 months from now any day.
Cashflow wins most debates.
Conversely, by becoming a subscriber, you gain all the downstream development funded by every other customer. There are strength in numbers benefits to investing in a tool that has momentum and growth.
Most commerce companies don't want or need complete control. They want a unique look and feel (which Shopify/BigCommerce gives) but beyond they they want reliability and ease of integration with things like stock control.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200212005238/en/Sho...
2019-12-30:
Total Revenue: 1.578173 billion dollars
Operating Income : -141.147 million dollars
Net Income: -124.842 million dollars (i.e. loss of 125 million dollars)
To this month (TTM):
Total Revenue: 1.727692 billion dollars
Operating Income: -178.590 million dollars
Net Income: -132.120 million dollars (i.e. loss of 132 million dollars)
The link I had in my comment was to their 2019-12-30 financial release to the SEC. It has the same 2019 information you have: Net income (loss): (124,842)
But that includes their selling and marketing expenses of over $400M, and their cash and cash equivalents at hand went from $1.97B (2018) to $2.46B (2019).
They are making lots of money and they have good accountants. Astonishing..
I highly doubt that. Which ones do you have in mind?
It's an awesome TypeScript/NestJS/Vue modular e-commerce FOSS.
and Michael is a great stweard too, can't recommend it enough: https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure/
[1] https://ok.commercetools.com/hubfs/Images/Website/EN/Webinar...
They do note later in their document that their competitors include Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
I almost scrolled by and didn't care except for your comment, which surprised me quite a bit. The number of Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento sites I've had to do some amount of work on over the years more or less tracks with BuiltWith's stats. I've never worked on a BigCommerce site.
