A Headless CMS For E-commerce
I have an idea for what to work on for my next projects, but I'm not quite sure how well it will pick up and perform. I hope I can gain some insight from the fine folk of Indiehackers.
My most recent project has been an e-commerce platform for reselling sneakers (still a relatively new concept where I'm from.) In the process, I discovered I was severely limited in options when I needed to start adding products to my web app.
From the little research, I've done, most platforms that support this are written in PHP, and while I'm not against it as such, I do like being familiar with technology I'm using (If I need to customize it or track down a bug, for instance). In the end, that left me with Saleo and Strapi.
Strapi isn't the best product in the world if you have heavily-nested relationships like I happened to, but it's really good. Not just for me, I suppose. For my purposes, Saleo is a much better fit but I spent a whole day trying to get it to work to no avail (it's written in Python, which I'm also not familiar with).
My reasoning, then, is that there have to be tons of people like me who want a simple CMS for posting (and possibly tracking) products on their CMS. They would then have the choice of using it headless(ly?) or using both the dashboard frontend and backend.
My question is:
- What other products exist that solve the same problem, which I'm quite possibly not aware of?
- How would I go about validating an idea such as this?
- Is the problem more complicated than I imagine? Am I missing anything?
You can browse a large number of headless cms here: https://headlesscms.org/
The best ones are hosted like Contentful. If you are looking for e-commerce specific headless service: https://www.moltin.com/ and https://snipcart.com/ are the popular ones among many others.
I would say you have to find a very specific niche where you can show clear advantages against hosted full-service ecom platforms like Shopify and open-source platforms like woocommerce or magento.
To be completely honest, the only thing stopping me from using either Woocommerce or Magento is the fact that I couldn't mess around with them if I wanted to. I suppose I'd have to define my target audience as people with more intricate knowledge on tech?
As for Motlin, I've heard of it before but the only problem is the pricing. Way too expensive for someone just starting out (like me). I'll check out Snipcart in a bit.
But I do get your point. Establishing such a product would need one hell of a value proposition.
Hey! Fellow indie hacker here working on a project that may fit your brief: Vendure is a headless e-commerce framework which lets you build your own custom front-end while taking care of the backend side of things. Still beta, but already used in production successfully.
We're building a CMS for content creators over at https://mavenseed.com using Rails. The customer doesn't care about the tech.