Alternatives to Easy Digital Downloads

I used BigCommerce for several years to host a few of my online stores, including * SweatshirtStation.com * RobbinsAthletics.com * OnlineSafetyDepot.com

However, I switched all of them to a WordPress with WooCommerce setup after I found that BigCommerce became cost prohibitive, especially for companies that don't have huge margins.

BigCommerce DOES have everything you'd need for running a store and doing it efficiently, including: * Easy to Use Templates * Highly Customizable Designs * Solid Product Management Tools * A Large Third-Party App Marketplace * Built-in SEO Tools

However, as you scale your business, those features become increasingly expensive to use, and your BigCommerce bill can get into the thousands of dollars per month when your revenue starts growing into the $50k+ per month range.

As I compared the cost of using WooCommerce to BigCommerce when scaling up a business, I found that the cost was much less using WooCommerce.

WooCommerce v BigCommerce Feature Comparison As you can see from the list below comparing WooCommerce features with BigCommerce, BigCommerce wins most of the feature competitions. However, for ecommerce businesses that grow large enough that they can handle taking care of their IT infrastructure, it becomes much cheaper for them to use WooCommerce.

• Hosting & Security | WooCommerce: Self-hosted, requires security setup | BigCommerce: Fully hosted, built-in SSL & PCI compliance | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Ease of Use | WooCommerce: More technical, requires setup & maintenance | BigCommerce:Easier to use with built-in features | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Customization & Design | WooCommerce: Highly customizable with themes & plugins | BigCommerce:Customizable with drag-and-drop builder & themes | Advantage: WooCommerce

• SEO & Marketing | WooCommerce: Strong SEO tools, but depends on plugins | BigCommerce:Built-in SEO & marketing tools | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Multi-Channel Selling | WooCommerce: Requires additional plugins for multi-channel | BigCommerce:Built-in multi-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc.) | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Payment Options | WooCommerce: Supports many gateways but may require extra fees | BigCommerce:No transaction fees, supports 65+ gateways | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Product Management | WooCommerce: Flexible product options, dependent on extensions | BigCommerce:Comprehensive built-in product management | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Scalability | WooCommerce: Scalability depends on hosting & plugins | BigCommerce:Scales easily with enterprise-grade performance | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Abandoned Cart Recovery | WooCommerce: Requires a plugin (paid feature) | BigCommerce:Built-in abandoned cart recovery | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Analytics & Reporting | Basic reports; needs plugins for advanced analytics | BigCommerce:Advanced built-in reporting & analytics | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Third-Party Integrations | WooCommerce:Large plugin ecosystem, but needs management | BigCommerce:Built-in integrations with major platforms | Tie (Both have large marketplaces)

• B2B Features | WooCommerce:Limited built-in, needs third-party solutions | BigCommerce:Robust built-in B2B tools | Advantage: BigCommerce

• Cost Considerations | WooCommerce:Free core software but requires hosting, security, and plugins | BigCommerce:Monthly subscription but includes hosting & security | Advantage: WooCommerce (More control over costs)

We needed our e-commerce platform (built using WooCommerce) to be able to keep products in sync with our #pim (provided by #akeneo) which is built in Symfony . We hooked into the kernel.event_listener to send RabbitMQ messages to a WordPress API endpoint that triggers the updated product to rebuild with fresh data.

Hi folks

We want to move on from Shopify to a headless commerce system. We want to be able to manage multiple storefronts and integrate alternative order solutions like Whats App and social commerce etc. Same time we want to avoid full blown systems with a lot of unnecessary weight. My idea for the stack, so far:

• Spree Commerce (Shop System),
• Bloomreach (CMS),
• Vue Storefront (Frontend)

I will have to integrate billing solution (like Invoice Ninja), LexOffice for accounting, Optimoroute for the salesman problem, and some more. So flexibility and "easy expandability" is a core demand. Having said that I came across Medusa. It looks promising and seems to check all the boxes. Any thoughts? Basically, it's a decision between Ruby and JavaScript, is it? Can you name me pros and cons of one or both of the systems? What are the serious challenges that I will face going down either one of the roads? Is there another solution that you would highly recommend?

I've linked our shop, currently running with Shopify.

Thanks

Currently, I am using Shopify, and it's working fine somehow. I need to check the access and error logs I am able to do it. That's why thinking set up a WordPress instance on my server. I need a suggestion whether it is good or not. My current website is www.dealsalt.com, please advise.

Thanks DealSalt

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

• Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
• npm as package manager
• NestJS as Node.js framework
• TypeScript as programming language
• ExpressJS as web server
• Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
• Postman as a tool for API development
• TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
• JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

• Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
• Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
• A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
• Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

• Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
• npm as package manager
• NestJS as Node.js framework
• TypeScript as programming language
• ExpressJS as web server
• Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
• Postman as a tool for API development
• TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
• JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

• Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
• Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
• A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
• Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.

Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

A huge component of our product relies on gathering public data about locations of interest. Google Places API gives us that ability in the most efficient way. Since we are primarily going to be using as google data as a source of information for our MVP, we might as well start integrating the Google Places API in our system. We have worked with Google Maps in the past and we might take some inspiration from our previous projects onto this one.