I’m looking for a (preferrably) self-hostable, FLOSS web-shop application that is easy for end-users to use (WYSIWYG, no need for script languages necessary, etc). Any hints are much appreciated.
You can start by checking out the e-commerce list on awesome selfhosted. At a glance there are multiple which seem to be easy to set up, and require no code, so you should take a deeper look and decide based on your needs.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#e-commerce
If you find something there that suits your needs make sure to let us know why you chose it :)
oooh, i almost forgot about the sacred list! thanks for the reminder, looks like there’s quite a bunch out there!
this is more a preliminary search and the result will not be used directly - but i’ll try and come back with information on choice and the reasoning behind it
Wordpress + Woocomerce.
Definitely not Woocommerce. WordPress’s data structure is not properly suited for an e-commerce site, and it’s a resource hog.
WooCommerce powers 38% of the online stores out there…
WordPress’s data structure is not properly suited for an e-commerce site
To be fair WordPress’ data structure is not properly suited for anything, not even posts and pages, let alone block structures and whatever but the truth is that it works and delivers results. Same goes for WooCommerce, if you don’t want to be hostage of Shopify and your objective actually selling shit instead of spending all your time developing store software then WooCommerce is the way to go.
WooCommerce also has an extensive extension list, integrations with all the payment providers out there and it’s easy to get help / support be it free or paid.
and it’s a resource hog.
Did you ever they Magento or PrestaShop? Doesn’t seem like you did as those are store-first solutions and they’re all slower and more of a resource hog than WP can ever be.
Congrats. You made the argument that popular == good.
WooCommerce also has an extensive extension list, integrations with all the payment providers out there and it’s easy to get help / support be it free or payed
This is WordPress’ biggest selling point, but it is also its biggest downfall. The vast majority of those “extensions” (plugins) are horribly made and are security nightmares, then they often only get you 90% of what you need so they can sell you the last 10% for a subscription fee. How would you know how to determine which ones are good or not? You need to be experienced enough with WordPress.
Yes, it is easy to get support, particularly paid (not “payed” FYI) but again, since WordPress is so popular, it’s prime real-estate for shitty “”“WordPress Developers”“” (not actually developers) to essentially bait people into their scam of pretending they are actually developers and providing work that leaves you worse off.
How do I know all of this? Well I happen to work with WordPress professionally as the lead developer for an agency where I manage literally hundreds of WordPress sites and host all of them myself on servers I manage for them (not shared hosting reselling).
How do I know all of this? Well I happen to work with WordPress professionally as the lead developer for an agency where I manage literally hundreds of WordPress sites and host all of them myself on servers I manage for them (not shared hosting reselling).
I used to have the same role and before that I managed a shared hosting provider. At that job the majority of websites hosted there were WordPress and customers would pay us to develop or fix stuff sometimes.
The vast majority of those “extensions” (plugins) are horribly made and are security nightmares,
Yes, this is true and a problem, but at the same time the WordPress ecosystem, as you know, gets shit done.
I also had some experiences with PrestaShop/Magento and they are even worse than WordPress. You still have the performance issues, the 3rd party poorly developed themes and plugins and a convoluted API.
Are you installing this for someone else?
yes, this will not be used by myself directly
As someone who has done e-commerce development and supports FLOSS and self-hosting, this is something I would outsource.
It’s complex, and you can’t really handle payments yourself anyway. That requires certification.
And people really don’t like it when their e-commerce is down and may able to quantify lost business due to an outage or bug in dollars or sense. It doesn’t feel great to realize something on your end resulted in hundreds of dollars of lost business.
If the business is very small, places like Shopify have cheap starter tiers.
