I want to build a simple e-commerce website for my hobby. It needs to be very simple, so I want to build it myself. I know basic PHP and I think my PHP skills should be enough, but I don't like PHP very much, and I always wanted to try to program something in Go, so I'm at a crossroad.
So, my question is, is it generally worth the time and effort to try to build my site with Go, or not? I understand that PHP is the obvious choice for the task, but I'm intrigued by the challenge of learning something new, if it is worth it, of course.
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>e-commerce website
>It needs to be very simple
>I want to build it myself
you don't sound very confident in your skills and you are about to deal with money on your own. If it was a hobby website would tell you to Go for it hehe Go get it
Just find a template.
You'd still need to build it in HTML or PHP anyways right? I've seen sites done using Go, but that was just the web server with the actual page content being HTML.
You should not build it from scratch in any language
Use Shopify
Why
I'm thinking of doing the same thing, OP.
I was thinking of using Rust for the backend instead.
What if I want to process my own payments to evade big tech?
>What if I want to process my own payments
lol
lmao even
>What if I want to process my own payments
You would have to use crypto payments. Payment processing is a nightmare to deal with. That's why even mid sized startups end up using stripe to avoid the hassle.
>What if I want to process my own payments
It's not that simple my dude. Best you can probably hope for is to hook into a 3rd party merchant (like PayPal). Otherwise you're going to have to get Visa and Mastercard involved, and that's going to be a world of regulatory pain.
Just integrate Stripe or your regional payment processor to your website.
>It needs to be very simple
just use python, if you have basic needs the performance will not be a major issue
Etsy
Shopify
If you insist on your own website
Squarespace
Godaddy
Wix
It 'll be a pain in the ass, just use some simple woo commerce template and ready to go. I don't want to frick up on payment platforms.
It's easy to integrate a payment gateway to your Application morons. It's easy to make a SQL database with catalogs, Categorie, products, transaction logs, etc...
What part of building an ecommerce website do you find hard?
making sure you do it right all the time
money is one of those things you really don't want to get wrong
If you really are a software engineer who is used to work on backends there's no reason why you would get it wrong. It's like handling authentication. You're not building a fireship dude. There's a known set of conventions -a few dozen- which you abide by. So Yeah doing Google auth is easier but you could as well do it on your own if you're moderately competent.
sure but it's a lot of responsibility that most people don't want to take
financial details is up there with social security details as one of the few things that cannot be wrong unless you want to get sued
Financial details don't have to be stored in your database and if they are, a hashing+salting function that makes sure nothing is accessible in the DB is enough. Use a Key vault for your secret and that's how 99% of large ecommerce companies do it.
>social security
Why?
Bro. A database and integrating stripe is the LEAST of your concerns when making an ecommerce site LMAO
Then tell me about the hard parts. Invoice generation? Fault tolerant transaction logging? All this is not hard. You should just be aware of these concerns and record them in your specification prior to writing your codebase.
getting traffic to the site is the hardest part / marketing and sales.
engineering is easy in comparison.
I agree on that. But building the site yourself or using shopify won't change anything regarding your marketing.
you are wasting time and energy on engineering when thats the tiniest piece of the puzzle.
aka procrastination.
Not necessarily. Maybe you want to implement additional feature. Maybe you want to minimize and control your costs instead of paying thousands over thousands of Dollars in extensions. Maybe you want a better SEO and you want to use things like HTML markups. Maybe you want to profit and learn at the same time. Maybe your ecommerce site is actually a marketplace which requires rigorous engineering work.
Shopify usnt cheap.
Just follow the wordpress model. Make it free to install but paid for hosting. Theres lots of room for competition in the ecommerce space.
you need need to use shopify.
any open source ecommerce suite would work and then hook up to stripe api.
Shopify and WordPress are both expensive if you want to add more feature to your website or if you want things like automated mailing. Most woocommerce plugins are paid.
what kind of plugins do you need?
it all seems like procrastination to me.
stuff like 'users who bought X product also bought this' popups i suppose?
There isnt a good solution for multivendor sites now that i think about it. You know like if you want to make a shopping site where other people want to sell too.
thatd be php though.
There will never be any multi vendor site or social media built with a site builder because of obvious feature customization and scaling issues.
i dont understand what the customization problem is, but if youre just selling the plugin the scaling is a you problem.
Try rebuilding Vinted or Amazon in WordPress. There will be a lot of things you won't be capable of doing.
Oh well there you go. Multivendor cms made im golang excellent. itd be pretty hard though dont kid yourself. Also dont go full moron and make it gpl like drupal lol. People cant sell their plugins in drupal. The gpl killed it even though its more secure than wordpress.
To name a few, Mailchimp, Woocommerce PreOrder, Woocommerce Conditional shipping and payments. On Shopify it's much more. Coding an ecommerce site yourself isn't hard. It should take you about twice the time at most to get your site up and running if you use the right toolkit.
>easy to make a SQL database with catalogs, Categorie, products, transaction logs, etc...
its easy to get SQLI'd and give away your customers' CCNs through your product search
It's easy to write prepaired statements and even easier to use proper ORMs. Sqli is for the past century geamps.
Go is not the right stack for this kind of websites. I would either use Django or asp.net. They allow you to build things fast and you get a codebase that is easily maintainable and extensible. Go's verbosity and lack of packages will get in your way. Between Go and PHP i would choose PHP.
Checkout “Building Modern Applications with Go (Golang)” by Trevor Sawler on Udemy. He even goes over the SIGNIFICANT improvements going from PHP to Go
bump
I'm in the same boat op.
Trying to figure out how to send a file to the golang backend with an html submit button and golang send it back.
Should be alright. Like they say gluing apis together.
I wouldn't call an ecommerce site simple though.
what's the fastest opensource ecommerce?
Opencart?
You don't even need PHP you can embed a "pay with PayPal" link or use a Stripe widget with js. You can't do payment processing on your own unless you're a massive corporation. PHP for ecommerce is just like managing a shopping cart and generating product listings and search and stuff.
If were talking about plugins i am convinced that if you made a $15 lifetime support alternative to divi you could make boatloads of money.
you want to work for homoglobo corp then learn a basedlang. If you want to be a freelancer you learn php.
just go with wordpress or shopify
wordpress is shit
sone people just want to make a website instead of tofu with all that onions
you're not going to build an ecommerce app from scratch, everyone thinks they can, but its more work than you think. Order history, shipping, card payment, invoices, product catalog. It is impossible to build it yourself from scratch. its one of those very few things you can not build from ground up. This is why Magento is 2million line codebase, and spread throughtout 50,000 php files.
Maybe if you had to do everything from scratch but theres react dashboards and shit. The backend is straightforward in comparison to that.
Itd start out bareboned and then youd invite people and make it opensource ofcourse. Itd be a commitment.
Not OP but I want something go or python based tho
Python + Flask
Ecommerce is easy.
just use something like woocommerce or magento. you can configure those a lot. maybe make your own theme.