I integrated against a zombie SaaS

I'm having a rough monday.

I have been working on a next.js e-commerce app for selling some fishing lures that I make myself. I am a big fan of lake trout fishing in Vermont, but that is not relevant for this post.

I really, really wanted to avoid using wix, shopify, etc. I wanted to make my own e-commerce site, I think partially to prove to myself that I was capable. Definitely a component of shame / pride in trying to make a solution that showed my technical capabilities.

The website is looking great, I used a template to overcome my CSS shortcomings and it's honestly pretty close to being able to launch. Unfortunately the e-commerce integration I chose is... not. Multiple things about the integration prevent me from testing the checkout flow. I'm not going to launch an online store if checkout is broken.

I've made support forum posts last week, and nobody has responded. Yesterday I went back and added a more detailed post with screenshots, I also found other threads basically being like "hey is anybody home"? People actively discussing competitors and suggesting alternatives on a product forum, without someone who works for them weighing in or moderating that activity is a huge, huge red flag.

It seems like the company is either dead, or on life support. My theory is they have a few large clients keeping the lights on, but they cannot afford to provide any support. Maybe all the devs got fired. Who knows.

I'm absolutely gutted that I got SO CLOSE to things being ready to launch, and now I have to go back and re-do my store integration. I learned an important and painful lesson about doing due diligence on services I'm going to build a business model on top of.

This past weekend was a loss... I have a plan to move forward but I'm just having trouble licking my wounds and getting my shit together. I have to focus on my day job for the week now and it feels like a terrible failure even though I have made a lot of progress.