this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Is there an Online Shop / eCommerce solution that is entirely Free Software? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'd like to play around a bit with an online shop. Nothing professional with proper requirements, just a hobby project. When googling for open source e-Commerce solutions, I can find the usual software. But I don't like open core models, and all the projects seem to want to make some money with an add-on marketplace. And most of the times the basic product seems very limited and they want you to extend it with proprietary extensions to get it usable in real-world scenarios.

Is there a project that does things differently? I mean for invoices I can choose between several platforms that won't push me to buy anything. I just can't find an online shop solution like that. My requirements would be something along: Sells products and keeps track of remaining stock, maybe sells services like online courses and software/pdf downloads. Can generate invoices and ties into payment providers. Maybe generates shipping labels. Isn't too bloated, a small, nice and clean hobby project will do. I'd like to avoid running a Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla underneath it if possible.

I get that companies have different requirements and commercial products are somewhat the obvious thing if you're doing commerce. But there has to be something aligned with the virtues of the free software community. Something I'd like to use to sell Tux stickers and power my Etsy shop with.

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[–] thefactremains 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Check out Vue storefront

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Thx. Mmh I think I'd still need a good backend that goes along with that plus an example project to set up the storefront.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I used to run a network of ecommerce sites ~10yrs ago.

Back then there wasn't an ecommerce platform that was 100% free for everything. Sooner or later you'd be forced to buy something. Whether is WooCommerce CSV importer or OpenCarts courier plugin - there's always something.

Having said that I would say you can go a long way without doing that on:

  • Wordpress + WooCommerce
  • OpenCart.
  • Medusa
  • Ecwid
  • PrestaShop
  • Spree Commerce
  • Bagisto (Laravel-based platform)
  • Shopware (German)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Thanks. I think I'm going to spin up a container and try a few. I had hoped there was a hobby project entirely without important paid add-ons, maybe a hobby project or something by the free software community for niche use cases. But I see, I'll probably have to use one of the proper solutions. I got quite a few recommendations now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ERPNext does have ecommerce. All of it's modules are free. The whole thing's integrated with it's back-end accounting and inventory system. There may be some features you might not need because it's primary purpose is for back office usage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Wow, thx. That looks really good. At one point I've tried Odoo and decided it was too much and too complicated for me. But this looks a bit cleaner. And everything seems to be free software, even some of the add-ons. I definitely have to try this. I just hope it doesn't eat all the resources on my VPS.

[–] z00s 2 points 4 months ago

Odoo

Haven't used it yet myself but it seems to be quite versatile

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

What you're asking for is a CMS, there is no online sales tool I know that does all those things in a single PHP/JS script. Woocommerce does pretty much everything you need and is open source.

You can loop in Bitcoin lightning payments (also open source) and not be dependent on or pay fees to any third-party CC processor. Fees are often less than 1 cent per transaction and confirm instantly. You can run your own payment server (BTCPayServer) which is quite easy to setup or outsource that job to a third party. There are free woocommerce plugins for this. If you have your own lightning payment system, nobody can block payments to it or do chargebacks (assuming here your website remains live and/or you have some way to communicate checkout details to customers).

Prefer credit cards? Paypal, stripe, etc all have free integrations with woocommerce. Well, the plugin is free, obviously you pay high fees and risk chargebacks and go through a not fun KYC process but it is what it is. They may decide they don't want to do business with you for some reason, in which case you can't use them.

For shipping labels, woocommerce does provide free integration with major shipping providers. You can also use shippo or pirateship which are often cheaper.

[–] kylian0087 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I know that dolibarr has a eCommerce module. You can self host it and it is foss as far as i can tell. Not sure how well the module would fit in to your use case but perhaps worth a look.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Dolibarr looks good to me. But their website says "In the future, Dolibarr will provide its own eCommerce module [...] tentative date of availability is: the end of 2026."

It seems to have lots of nice features, but not an online shop.

[–] Burn1ngBull3t 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hello ! You might find Sylius suitable. It’s an Open source framework based on Symfony.

Im pretty sure it has all your requirements. The thing is that it’s a headless framework, so a frontend needs to be built on top of that if you want some custom features.

Hope that helps !

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thx! I had a look at it. It's a bit more on the enterprise side of things and they also want to sell a "Plus" subscription. I'm putting that on my 'read later' list.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Everything you've described can be done with Drupal

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Drupal is a major pain in the ass. I have multiple years experience with every major CMS. I loathe drupal. Unless you are building a super complex website and want to manually handle theming and a bunch else? Skip drupal. Drupal has the potential to be powerful and useful. I've only ever seen it be powerful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Can it be done nicely with Drupal? I mean everything is doable with Drupal, it's more the question: do I have to code/program a whole online shop in the process?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

not from what I recall, there's a module "commerce" (and many extending modules) that can be installed through the admin webui. I think they already have a Drupal spin where the more popular commerce modules are included with the install