Alternatives to Spree

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

WordPress Magento PHP Java Swift JavaScript

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I am consulting for a company that wants to move its current CubeCart e-commerce site to another PHP based platform like PrestaShop or Magento. I was interested in alternatives that utilize Node.js as the primary platform. I currently don't know PHP, but I have done full stack dev with Java, Spring, Thymeleaf, etc.. I am just unsure that learning a set of technologies not commonly used makes sense. For example, in PrestaShop, I would need to work with JavaScript better and learn PHP, Twig, and Bootstrap. It seems more cumbersome than a Node JS system, where the language syntax stays the same for the full stack. I am looking for thoughts and advice on the relevance of PHP skillset into the future AND whether the Node based e-commerce open source options can compete with Magento or Prestashop.

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.

I'm looking to build an eCommerce website and seeking advice from professionals on the most reliable tech stack that I can use. Currently, the website is built on top of WordPress with WooCommerce, but the company has grown up, and evidently, the number of products have been increased. The site needs a fresh code because WordPress doesn't make it anymore.

The stack I'm most familiar with is PHP + Symfony + MySQL + Apache HTTP Server or NGINX. Headless eCommerce is the one I'm looking for, because of the huge complexity, it would be great to separate the backend from the frontend. Not sure about CMSs, because they had a huge amount of functionality that the application doesn't need. I've been looking also at PrestaShop, it seems ok, but not sure about customization and front-end integration. As a custom solution, I have found Sylius or Aimeos for the backend, but I'm not too sure about a frontend stack.

Could you please give some suggestions about the frontend stack and if the ones for the backend are ok?

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.