Shopify - do we get the code, database, how it works?

Thanks. This helps a lot.
I'm new at this company. They're learning the hard way that Woo isn't good. They hired an offshore company to do a small site with Woo. My manager is beyond being frustrated. Lesson learned. 

The problem is each solution has their pros and cons, so you need to find the one that has less con for your needs.

This is the reason why I always suggest to test different solution, I know it take take but usually you will find rapidly if this can be considered or not.

Yes, that's what I've been doing but this small company is all over the place. Going back and forth looking for the "best" solution. "Everything is on the table" is the motto now. Confusing the mess out of themselves. They're going to frustrate me out of this job:)

I have 2 more ecomm platforms that my manager mentioned.  I want to double check them before I respond to my manager. I'll either post them here in this thread or open new questions.

Thanks as always for your help. I'll post back today. I need to double check my manager's email again. 

I did make a lot of tests recently and here my comment for each.

Stay away from Opencart this is very buggy at the moment.

Woo is good except it has no easy multilanguage option, DB is a mess, and lot of maintenance but overall this work.

Magento can be a good strong solution but required more dev and may cost $.

Shopify is good, easy to set and no maintenance, price is ok, no access to code and no direct access to DB.

Thanks. Let me see what the other 2 platforms my manager mentioned. I'll post back. 

Stay away from Opencart this is very buggy at the moment.

I would like to see where you are getting that from? I have used it and didn't find that to be true

As far as Magento, I find more people end up cursing it once they dive in.  I tried it myself though it was the previous version.

You did , Scott. I reported my findings. But my manager is going round and round. Doubt they'll make a decision any time soon. I know it's not an easy decision but not making a decision is also a bad decision.  I'll post the 2 other platforms.

>> I mentioned it can sometimes be easier to do this on your own
They don't want to do it on their own because my manager did the Java code in 2008. Developing from scratch is not an option.

Scott -

In my first post, you said to make the decision their decision. You're totally right. I've been at this company for 3 months and the two senior developers have been there for 12 yrs.

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I have downloded nopCommerce (.Net) and Odoo (Python and it's complete ERP). I've asked both my manager and the other developer to do the same.

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One last question. SaaS is true for these as well -->  Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento paid), Net Suite, Salesforce ?

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I'll summarize one more time for them and let them research it more. They need to come an agreement. IT manager said "let's just pick something". It doesn't quite work like that given they said they've made bad technical decisions in the past.

Magento has 2 version Opensource (this can be hosted on your server) and Magento Commerce SaaS
You can schedule a demo for Magento Commerce and ask all your presale questions
https://magento.com/products/magento-open-source

>>Magento have 2 version Opensource (this can be hosted on your server) and Magento Commerce

We talked to a Magento rep. Their open source doesn't have some of the functionality the company wants.

--- This is the thing. After downloading nopCommerce (.Net) and Odoo (Python), I think the company should go with one of these. But they're making it more difficult than it is.

----My question above if you could answer it. I'll summarize and be done. I'll let them decide.
One last question. SaaS is true for these as well -->  Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento paid), Net Suite, Salesforce ?

Yes they are all SaaS

So what you can do is to have demo, I'll recommend  2 or 3 persons of your team to be present so you can ask all the questions during the live demo.
Take notes for all your questions.
Then after all the demo you can compare the pro and con of each solution based on your needs.

These SaaS solution can be more expensive and are more business oriented compared to Shopify.

>>These SaaS solution can be more expensive and are more business oriented compared to Shopify.

And they want the "best" and don't want to pay :) 

I would say the first step is to bullet point the workflow of how you expect to work. For example, for some, inventory management is meaningless and they don't use it and get bothered by having to add inventory just to sell something. To others, it is very important and you want full inventory control.  Others somewhere in the middle.

Marketing is also a factor.  Do you need to keep track of people that abandoned? Integrate with hubspot? 

One of the biggest factors is your own work flow and that gets glossed over when doing a demo with perfect data.  Do you have to conform to the products workflow to make your business run? or can you make the product work under your own current workflow?  That would fall under how easy it is to modify with your own core competencies.

Any of the options, I would pick my top 2 or 3 and run side by side demos for a week or two. Making sure to call/write into support. To me, support is one of the options we forget about until we need it and then feel a big let down when it turns out to be bad. Also play with making custom templates or custom shipping workflows.  

I don't think you can really make a decision without testing and chalk Woo up to a test that didn't go well.

Scott - I have done most of the thing you mention. I have my top two; nopCommerce and Odoo.

I will summarize one more time for them. I want to respond to my manager's email. I'm going round and round, repeating myself. It's time for them to come up with their own top 2 or 3. 

The bottom line for Shopify, is you have an API for everything https://shopify.dev/, https://shopify.dev/apps/getting-started

Anything you want to customize or integrate with can be done. If that means you need to sync your actual inventory with available to sell online, you can run a scheduled task against your own code to do that.  It saves you from reinventing the entire shopping experience and only focus on customizing what you need.  Again, you really do have to spend some time to test it out under your own use conditions. 

They need to know that opensource solution will require a lot of maintenance and they will need to pay an employee or company to do that at least once a month, plus managing the backup and so on.

Same thing if you need to buy plugins (let say 100$ / per plugins per year) it need to be also calculated.

Hosting price.

Sometimes the SaaS solution may have better rate for paiement gateway and shipping so there are a lot to be considered.

So that all depend on the needs, the budget ect.

. It's time for them to come up with their own top 2 or 3.  

Good luck!

>>  It saves you from reinventing the entire shopping experience and only focus on customizing what you need.

Help me understand this. How do we customize when we don't have access to the code? how can we customize, for example, the checkout page?

>>So that all depend on the needs..
Their needs keep changing :)

--- I might post my response to my manager here for you guys to review. 

All SaaS will allow to customize the look and feel, and some custom code.

See here how it is done for Shopify throught their code editor
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/extend/theme-code

Javascript and other code using their SDK
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/custom-storefronts
https://shopify.dev/custom-storefronts/tools/js-buy

The limitation will occurred if they don't have API for what you need.
Or depending how flexible they are and which customization you need.

Keep in mind that API call can be charged $, so this need to be asked during the demo.
What are the extra charge (not include in the package).

You are not maintaining core code, and that is mostly an advantage.

For the View/html, you are editing templates, https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/extend/theme-code. They are showing their own template engine called Liquid https://shopify.dev/api/liquid  All of these templates work similarly. You are just consuming data, and parsing it to generate dynamic html.  





 You have database and import options via your UI https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/inventory/inventory-csv OR API https://shopify.dev/api/admin-rest/2021-10/resources/product#top

If you have the need to control everything, you are just better off hosting your own. I feel most anything you can make work. You probably could have made Wordpress/Woo work too. But when you have to 100% rely on somebody else, especially over seas and you are not a php team, it can give the appearance of saving money in the short term, but it is hard in the long term.

The API has SDK's for the most common languages including .NET https://shopify.dev/apps/tools/api-libraries including .NET https://github.com/nozzlegear/ShopifySharp. Salesforce would be a good option. They have more integrated functions for marketing, sales funnel

Salesforce works the same way, and of course and API's for every aspect https://developer.commercecloud.com/s/storefront-applications

I don't know much about NetSuite and really, my only experience with Megento was pre-Adobe.

Thank you both.

>>But when you have to 100% rely on somebody else, especially over seas and you are not a php team, it can give the appearance of saving money in the short term, but it is hard in the long term.

they're realizing this now.

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I think they either don't want to make a decision or can't make it. At least my manager and the other guy have started evaluating nopCommerce.

---
I'll summarize and send it to them. Thinking I shouldn't even bother at this point and just let them work thru it all themselves.

Do you have a comprehensive list of features with you?

If yes, Can you rank the features based on:
1. Priority
2. Must Have / Good to have
3. Need in : Long Term / Short Term

and share the list here?

Yeah,  I can post the top ones my manager and the other guy are looking for but I think they won't make a decision anytime soon. It's a difficult decision and they're not sure on what to do

I decided not to go back and forth with him. I'll summarize this Shopify information and out it in the document he has. As Scott said in my first thread, the decision has to come from them. 

Hi,

I did migration application often, not only for ecommerce but for other application type.
This process is long because the boss want to make sure he take the best solution as it will probabaly use at least for the next 5 years and this involve $.

The main problem after selecting any solution is that they will compare old application with the new one.
Even if the old application was old, slow, ugly and buggy they will say I cannot do this anymore blablabla...
People usually don't like changes...
And very often they will prefer to keep old application for a while until they have no choice (security  or technology reason)

So this is why the features are very important to check prior taking any decision.

And this often why a company prefer in house custom application. (I know your boss does not consider this option).
Check with him why he took this decision long time ago and this will probably tell you which features to check.

Any application will required customisation.
So yes, this will cost money and take time to transfert the data, set the store, adjust the template, add new product, doing tests ect. And if you need to set an ERP this can be very long ...

This will required more adjustements the first year.
I would recommend to hire an employee or use someone in your area so this person will understand your culture, your business type and the more important someone that you can reach easily during the business hours (same timezone) and someone that you can have confidence.

>>The main problem after selecting any solution is that they will compare old application with the new one.

Exactly! they're doing it now already and I didn't want to say anything to them - at least not yet. We have a list of requirements. My manager wrote it. He developed the original code yrs ago because they needed specific requirements and no platform gave them what they need.

>>And if you need to set an ERP this can be very long ... 
They first wanted the ecomm portion but now want the ERP as well. Question: is there an open source ERP solution? Odoo (Python platform) has ERP + ecomm solution and we get the code. Any other ones out there?

>>Any application will required customisation.
When I first started, they actually thought they can just a platform and drag and drop plugins. 

I told them to go thru the same exercise as me --> download open source code and go thru them and compare with a list of reqs.

Thanks so much for your advice. It makes me feel better that I'm on the right track with my thoughts.

Found this https://dynamics.folio3.com/blog/open-source-enterprise-resource-planning-software/

I've been looking at "Odoo". I see NetSuite on it too. Another issue is that management wants something "well known", "famous", "others have used  it and are happy with it" and on and on.

I'll summarize Shopify and let them know. This should be good enough. 

The problem with many of these sites that give you the "ten best" is you don't know if they are somehow sponsored. So look for other corroborating reviews. I would make sure to include reddit in your research too.  I have looked at it myself on and off since it was openERP.

I would look to why you need open source?  If the reason for open source is to get the code, I would suggest that is perhaps an older way of thinking. Any of the new modern projects have API's.  

When you say ERP, that can mean different things to different people. It would be good to define what you need vs what is nice to have. is it really better to have one product only because they have many modules with the same brand name?  Or do you need the best marketing automation?  Does that product fit the bill? or managing a sales funnel or ecommerce or shipping, billing etc.

You mentioned salesforce.com. Would that have the pieces to meet your needs? Your not going to get any code for any module, but you will have access to api's and you can design as you like https://www.salesforce.com/design/overview/  or you can have access to the api's for developers https://developer.salesforce.com/ and administer https://admin.salesforce.com/

I would say there are advantages to using something cloud based like salesforce or shopify because you don't worry about the nitty gritty day to day of maintaining a server, hosting and core code. Given that you are leaning towards an ERP, and want something well known, Salesforce seems like a better fit. Also look at Microsoft Dynamics too in addition to Oracle/NetSuite. My own gut feeling is these last three options are going to be better than odoo. And that is only based on some reading of what I saw on my own and having to try out odoo a few times and never pulling the trigger.

The fact that they want to go ERP is a different animal than just ecommerce, so that may put shopify out.

I would also make sure to get the right people to review the different modules. It's been some time since I was in the corporate world. How many times did somebody make a purchasing decision out of ego and not bring in the right people that would also use the product such as finance or marketing only cause havoc.

Pay attention to seemingly small details. As example, how does your company treat prospects vs contacts vs accounts?  Some businesses treat them all as contacts where others have those things separated. If you use the SFA module, does that track your prospects, contacts and accounts in the same or similar manner? Or do you have to change your own business workflow?

>>I would look to why you need open source?  If the reason for open source is to get the code, I would suggest that is perhaps an older way of thinking. Any of the new modern projects have API's.  

Yes, my thinking is having the code would be better because if the vendor goes out of business...we at least have the code. Another reason is control over database and data. With open source, we get the database.

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Also, company wants to easily be able to find developers to work on whatever platform they choose. I know Odoo is Python and has its specific way of coding.  We spoke with an Odoo vendor and he said everything can be done with it. No, we didn't buy that.

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Another thing is cost. We spoke with a Magento rep and their enterprise license is $100k to $200K a year. My manager was taken aback by it.

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I agree the "top 10" lists aren't reliable. 
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At this point, I think I'm going round and round with them. They've hired an outside consultant as well who's talking to different vendors like Netsuite.  My manager has a list of requirements and he's going thru them one by one with nopCommerce. I think I need to leave them to come up with their own top two or three platforms and not send them any more info. 

Yes, my thinking is having the code would be better because if the vendor goes out of business...we at least have the code.

I understand that thinking, but the chances of Salesforce.com or Microsoft or Oracle going out of business are pretty slim. I would say the chances of something breaking because you do have the code and are hosting the product are much much greater. And when you do start making a lot of custom changes to what you have on your own, it becomes very hard to manage later on.

Now, if you are getting a consultant to help with this, your chances of their business not functioning is many times higher than salesforce, microsoft or oracle going out of business. Plus, I would put money on that consultant not being biased because they are more than likely getting back end money from whichever product they help you decide to use.

Odoo is Python and has its specific way of coding.

And the API's for Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle will have SDK's in Java, .NET, Node, PHP or allow raw HTTP POST/CURL.

I would be more concerned if the product works as much as it can out of the box. The things you really need to change are going to be the look and feel of your ecommerce site. All the products have an option for that.

The workflow from a customer buying something to talking with inventory and shipping and customer service to me would be more important.

It sounds like all of this is out of your hands now though.  Best of luck for your company!

>>The workflow from a customer buying something to talking with inventory and shipping and customer service to me would be more important.

I think so too. I agree.

And yes, out of my hands now. I don't want to keep pushing for this. The decision has to come from them. I'll help with the analysis. 

On this site : https://raintreenursery.com/
if you scroll down, you see Shopify. Does it mean their ERP is also Shopify or Shopify website can use any other ERP?

It means the site is a shopify site. Nothing about a full ERP.

View the source and you can tell it is a shopify site

Thanks. Was wondering what ERP they're using. No way to tell.

No, because that is in the background.

I simply viewed the source and looked at the top. The easy way would be to use builtwith https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fraintreenursery.com%2f

I wish there was a simple solution...use this with this ERP. That's it. I know it's not that easy tho. 

I would use nopCommerce with Syspro. At my last job...a client of ours upgraded to Syspro. They had challenges and they worked thru them.

No matter what you choose, there are going to be issues you will have to work through.  

Yes. Very true.

Hi,

What you can do with Shopify (or any cloud that use API) is to develop your own ERP then make bridge using the Shopify API. This solution allow you to start selling rapidly and keep a copy of your data.

So you keep Shopify for the frontend to display (catalog) and checkout (payment) and your custom ERP to manage the rest (inventory, pipeline, client etc).

You can sync the data using the API this way you always have a copy of your data.
So this way you will endup with a ready to use solution Shopify and a custom ERP for a backup of your data.
* I'm saying custom ERP but this can be opensource ERP as well as long as you can host the scripts & data.

*So later you can switch to a different solution / API and keed all your data.

This is a good idea with Shopify. They're nervous about replacing the ERP now but also want to explore ERPs. I'll add this to my summary. Thanks. 

A friend of mine works with Shopify and said it's much much better than Magento. He used to work with Salesforce.

He said Shopify charges 4% to 5% of sales. Is this correct?

You pay the monthly fee and the whatever discount rate based on that fee. If you buy more services, you pay a higher rate, but get a better discount rate.

https://www.shopify.com/pricing


If you start digging into discount rates, the 2.9% + 30 cents is about right. 2.6% is a good rate and 2.4 is an excellent rate for a small business with online (card not present) sales.  If you have a brick and mortar shop where you take payments in person using a chip, you are going to pay an average just under 2%.

Discount rates used to be a lot more confusing because the actual rates are based on

• Your type of business (Gas station vs restaurant vs retail)
• Sales volume
• Average transaction amount
• Card type (Debit vs Credit vs Miles vs Business all have different rates)
• Your own credit (applies more to small businesses)

In actuality, each individual transaction has it's own discount rate. You can have 10 sales and each sale could have a different discount rate.

If you have ever started pricing out payment processors, it is like dealing with a used car sales person. What has happened over the recent past is the prices have been simplified by averaging. In the old days, you would be quoted 1.7%. But after a transaction has add ons because the card was perhaps a miles or business card the rate goes up. Also, there are multiple other fees like AVS (Address Verification System) and in the end, your average discount rate ends up at 1.9% for card present or closer to 3% for card not present.

I think Square was one of the first (along with PayPal) to have simplified fees and they go into some of the same details I mentioned too https://squareup.com/us/en/townsquare/credit-card-processing-fees-and-rates

Back to your question, if you are paying the middle rate of $79 per month, your discount rate is on par with Square but you are also getting a robust ecommerce platform.  For a small business that has $500,000 in online sales, the difference between 2.9% and 2.6% is only $1,500. To get that lower rate you are paying $50 per month more in monthly fees and that is $600 so you still have a savings.

When you start getting into much larger online sales in the multi millions, the shopify solution may be the lower end of the scale and all the sudden whatever you were quote for full service Megento may not be out of reach.'

No matter what service you go through you are going to have to take online payments and those discount rates for most businesses will be in the 2.9% range.  Square online is 2.9%+30 cents. You can search for rates from other vendors and you will see all are very similar. Your volume would have be be in the greater millions to justify one vendor charging 2.9% vs another 2.89%.

What I would look out for instead is merchant's customer service and how they handle things like chargebacks. I do a lot of paypal payments for my own business. I have been using paypal I think close to 15 years.  My history has allowed me very fast access to money, even for large payments. As a new business, I would probably think twice though because in the last few years they changed their terms and I think a purchaser has something like 6 months to initiate a charge back.  That would be a much more important feature to find out than trying compare a discount rate of 2.9 vs 2.8 percent.

Thanks, Scott. Let me read. 

Last question. I need advice on what to say in the meeting tomorrow. My manager (Java developer), UX designer and SQL guy reviewed nopCommerce. They started with that platform because it's .Net.

My manager wants to review what works and what doesn't work in nop.I suggested looking into Shopify today and my manager said we'll talk about it. The other platform is Odoo.

I need advice because I've said more than enough. And I agree with everything in this thread and other ones I've opened; any platform needs customization, will have its own issues and will cost time and money.

Scott Fell's advice in one of my questions was very good --> I have to make this their decision. 

I don't know if I should keep quiet and see what the other 3 say? I don't want to come across as defensive.

I think what you need to do on your own is go through those three choices, come up with the positives and negatives as you see it with a little bit of back up and go through that.

My answer, as it was before, is to pick your two or three choices and for  2 to 4 weeks go through the motions of creating the site, updating, customizing, making sample orders, having others that are not familiar with the site make sample orders, and calling/contacting support for help, interact with the API etc.  This is going to be a long term investment and you want to know how everything works and not make a decision and go full force for 2 months to find out you made the wrong choice for your company. To me, support is often forgotten and when you need it and it disappoints, it can put a big damper on things. The easy part is going to be customizing the look and feel. 

Thanks, Scott. I've done most of that.  I think my manager comparing his Java mature code to something new. I'll see how the meeting goes

>> for  2 to 4 weeks go through the motions of creating the site, updating, customizing, making sample orders, having others that are not familiar with the site make sample orders, and calling/contacting support for help, interact with the API etc.

I'll suggest this. What my manager and the other guy have done is to compare nop to a list of requirements. My manager created some products but not a complete reviewing of what nop can do and can't do.

>>you want to know how everything works and not make a decision and go full force for 2 months to find out you made the wrong choice for your company.  

A consultant the company has hired told us she knows of two companies that pulled out after few months. One went with Magento.

I'm not sure what you mean by two companies pulled out?  I am assuming one of the choices.

Personally, I am always leery of consultants because my own experience was there is a monetary motive for them behind going with Choice A over Choice B. That's just me. 

I'm the same. And that's what I've told my manager as well. We have to work with the platforms ourselves.  I'll see what they say about nop tomorrow. 

Update: My manager wants to investigate Shopify as well. That's good :)

With Shopify you can start selling rapidly compare to all other solution as almost everything is ready to use and easy to use.So this can be your full time solution (you like it and fit in the budget) and you use the API with an ERP.
or this can be a transition solution (this give you time to evaluate other solution, develop custom code, ect)

Thanks,  Lenaml. I volunteered to investigate it. I think it might be ruled out if it's too expensive. 

There are a lot of fees for any solutions: hosting fees, domain name, SSL certificate, support, custom code, payment gateway fees, shipping fees, maintenance, store management, photos, marketing and other related fees.
You already know some fees with your actual solution this will give you an idea...
In fact you can get a lot of information based on you actual solution that will be useful for the next solution.

Totally agree. I'm kind of excited about Shopify. I told the team between Magento and Shopify, I'd choose Shopify. 

Thanks all. I accepted an offer. This company is not ready to move off of their platform from 12 yrs ago. ERP is from 15 yrs ago and they couldn't make a decision. Time for me to move on.