Hi all. I have an exciting prospect come my way.

The client is seeking a very content-based website, which relies on SEO... So WordPress is my choice for that. Also I've got the knowledge to build custom WP themes for a variety of needs.

However, in future they're going to need a reliable e-commerce platform, and Shopify is great for that.

As I'm experienced with WordPress themes and the dev environment, I can quite happily develop a WP site that fits their needs right now, and add WooCommerce later.

For me to be as skilled at Shopify themes as I am with WordPress themes, I feel would take me far too long. (Also means it will take longer for me to get paid.)

So long story short...

In the short term, a WordPress website would be perfect for them right now.

In the long term, WooCommerce would be great, but will require time/money to keep updated and secure.

In the long term, Shopify would be great for e-commerce, and may cost them less in terms of monthly maintenance. It's newer and less likely to be hacked. BUT will take me longer to develop to fit their needs.

I personally think Shopify is a much better product. You can create your templates from scratch using a modern PHP templating engine, and there's little to no design restriction, so you can carry the look of your Wordpress site through to Shopify. You can even setup a local environment to build on, which is unusual for a hosted platform. WooCommerce is a real mess to be honest. The code is buggy, it's hard to style because you pretty much have to use the terrible CSS and JS it comes with, and anything apart from really basic functionality will start to require paid add-ons.

 

Another option is Craft Commerce, which is a really nice platform, and the most flexible out there. You won't need Wordpress if you go with this because it's an add-on for Craft CMS.

We tried out WooCommerce at my last place, it worked OK(ish) in the beginning but it really does not scale well and like Jack says is a real mess - even more so than WordPress itself. I wouldn't recommend it. Learn a proper e-commerce platform like Magento if you're sticking to PHP rather than trying to shoehorn WordPress into something it was never designed to do.


(Not saying Magento is nice but is a lot better than WooCommerce) If it were me I'd look to build a Node/Express API that interfaces with a payment gateway. Probably loads of good packages on NPM to assist with this, but it's never something I've looked into. The big benefit with this is you can make it do anything you want. It will likely take longer to setup however.

Edited June 13, 20179 yr by rbrtsmith

Why restrict yourself to just those two, there are hundreds of ecommerce platforms around.

Use anything other than Woo Commerce. It lures you in with the idea of being an open and free platform, but you can barely do anything without paid add-ons. I'm not against the idea of paying for a platform, at all, but it's ridiculous that you have to bolt stuff on to get anything done. For example, you can't even have custom fields on a checkout page without an add-on, and you can't have nested categories without an add-on, both are standard in other systems.

 

It also depends on what the client will be selling. If it's digital downloads, or products that don't require a basket, there are plenty of other solutions.

Use anything other than Woo Commerce. It lures you in with the idea of being an open and free platform, but you can barely do anything without paid add-ons. I'm not against the idea of paying for a platform, at all, but it's ridiculous that you have to bolt stuff on to get anything done.

 

All the more reason to research and pay for a decent solution from the outset!

Use anything other than Woo Commerce. It lures you in with the idea of being an open and free platform, but you can barely do anything without paid add-ons.

 

Just so you know, I've decided to go with Shopify for this project.