Shopify or Spree commerce for 1st e-comm app platform?
My first e-commerce business for a long time. I'm an amateur ruby dev and could put together a Rails Spree app as the e-commerce engine, whilst hiring a freelancer to do the css & html, and investing my own time building & configuring the app. I would then be 'in control' and free of platform fees.
Alternatively I could just build a site via Shopify. It would be quicker I guess. I still need some custom designed pages so I'd still have similar outsourced front end costs. I would also have platform fees each month, less control and less app customisation options (though not sure I'll need any anyway).
Perhaps the Shopify marketplace of easy plug in e-comm tools is a significant advantage also, and these features may be unavailable via Spree? I'm not sure about this consideration.
Can anyone shed more light on the pro's and con's here and help me more confidently make a decision between these two?
Thanks
If you are looking for something simple and fast, you an check VetrinaLive
Use a platform so you can validate your business idea. If your business idea takes off, you can always consider replatforming to your own tech in the future.
If you build your own site, I think you risk spending your energy on site building rather than business building. Which one is your objective?
Thanks @ecommercenow, yes from an overall project success pov I think you must be right. Though I feel slightly disappointed that this is the case so I guess a bit of me is seeking validation that it's ok to go off on some semi procrastinatory ruby/rails refresh journey by building a spree app!!
I would definitely be interested to hear experiences and opinions of the Shopify app marketplace ecosystem versus Spree's integrations, I'm guessing the latter is more limited, but is it a real handicap for an ecomm store of the smaller and simpler type.
I am also interested in Spree as they mention in their web site that there is a multi-vendor feature. But they have recently moved from monolithic approach to decoupled. Currently there is two storefronts (NextJs and VueStorefront) that they recommend to use for new projects. But when I check them they are not fully implemented. For example Next storefront for Spree does not have checkout feature yet, VueStorefront for Spree does not have Stripe integration at the moment. So it seems there would be things to implement yourself if you would not want to make the teams to implement them.