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.
Why? You’ll kick yourself later when you dont have the features you need and you’ll be spending more time developing software than running your business.
WordPress is half the 'net
Sure. But I mean that isn’t unique to wordpress or woocommerce. I mean there are other CMS and e-commerce solutions. And this one isn’t even closer aligned to my requirements than any of the other big platforms. Or did is miss something and woccomerce has more feature baked into its free software core than all the other platforms?
I’ll have a closer look at it, but I’m currently still evaluating some of the other recommendations. I’ve kind of disregarded a solution like that at first, because in the past I’ve used CMSs for everything. But having a broad and general CMS with many features and then customizing it with several modules / add-on and customizations also gets complex and hard to maintain over time. Nowadays I kind of prefer solutions that are tailored to a use case instead of extending a CMS and I’ve replaced my wordpress installs with static sites. But I’m not set on it. If WooCommerce turns out to be good and usable without additional paid extensions, I might as well use that.