I’d like to play around a bit with an online shop. Nothing professional with proper requirements, just a hobby project. When googling for open source e-Commerce solutions, I can find the usual software. But I don’t like open core models, and all the projects seem to want to make some money with an add-on marketplace. And most of the times the basic product seems very limited and they want you to extend it with proprietary extensions to get it usable in real-world scenarios.

Is there a project that does things differently? I mean for invoices I can choose between several platforms that won’t push me to buy anything. I just can’t find an online shop solution like that. My requirements would be something along: Sells products and keeps track of remaining stock, maybe sells services like online courses and software/pdf downloads. Can generate invoices and ties into payment providers. Maybe generates shipping labels. Isn’t too bloated, a small, nice and clean hobby project will do. I’d like to avoid running a Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla underneath it if possible.

I get that companies have different requirements and commercial products are somewhat the obvious thing if you’re doing commerce. But there has to be something aligned with the virtues of the free software community. Something I’d like to use to sell Tux stickers and power my Etsy shop with.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•11 months ago

    What you’re asking for is a CMS, there is no online sales tool I know that does all those things in a single PHP/JS script. Woocommerce does pretty much everything you need and is open source.

    You can loop in Bitcoin lightning payments (also open source) and not be dependent on or pay fees to any third-party CC processor. Fees are often less than 1 cent per transaction and confirm instantly. You can run your own payment server (BTCPayServer) which is quite easy to setup or outsource that job to a third party. There are free woocommerce plugins for this. If you have your own lightning payment system, nobody can block payments to it or do chargebacks (assuming here your website remains live and/or you have some way to communicate checkout details to customers).

    Prefer credit cards? Paypal, stripe, etc all have free integrations with woocommerce. Well, the plugin is free, obviously you pay high fees and risk chargebacks and go through a not fun KYC process but it is what it is. They may decide they don’t want to do business with you for some reason, in which case you can’t use them.

    For shipping labels, woocommerce does provide free integration with major shipping providers. You can also use shippo or pirateship which are often cheaper.