[dragonsh]

There are many more option not just spree or saleor. Having not just studied but by building add-ons for shopify working with Shopify API including the new graphQL now I am sure it’s designed for mom-pop store trying to fit itself by custom coding into medium and large size. A medium or large size customer is better served with a custom solution built with open source base which provides all the necessary API and data models to start quickly including UI design see the storefrontUI and vue-storefront+magento.

Shopify and bigcommerce are good for small or mom-pop kind of stores which wants to spend $30-$1000/month based on sales, here shopify can take some trouble out of woocommerce and opencart kind of platform. If it’s more than that open source is still better with custom additions.

[arcturus17]

Shopify is serving multiple billion-dollar brands, and that’s a fact [1]

My point is that even in the large enterprise space there are businesses that have fairly straightforward eCommerce needs that can be better served by ready-made solutions.

If your requirements don’t fit that, then sure, go with a framework and build around it. My secondary point was that I believe in this scenario it’d probably be less risky to go with one of the long-time PHP incumbents like Magento, which you now mention, than something like Spree or Saleor.

[1] https://www.shopify.com/plus/customers

[dragonsh]

>Shopify is serving multiple billion-dollar brands

Your are right except an exception Shopify might be used in some very small parts of big brands with few SKU's. For moderately large SKU most use flexible systems and shopify or BigCommerce is not one of them. Indeed like many companies even if one small division in one country of an MNC or brand is using BigCommerce or Shopify they will add their logo on their site to show they have this big brand as their customer.

Having worked for many multi-national brand can say they use Magento, Hybris, Demandware (now salesforce commerce) more than Shopify or BigCommerce.

Indeed even all those brands can be served better by open source multi-channel commerce system whose source code they control, otherwise they might have same issue when Oracle and IBM stop investing in ATG and WebSphere commerce platform. Indeed many of our old customer moved to in-house system as ATG, WebSphere commerce and even hybris cannot keep pace with the fast paced changes required in multi-channel commerce. Shopify and BigCommerce will need to primarily serve their SaaS customers and being limited by single code-base for all customers, cannot serve the needs of individual brands or multi-nationals that effectively. Even if they come with a program to provide on-premise or deployment option on a cloud of customers choice, given domain expertise they still will not be able to provide that flexibility offered by customized solution.

So for those brands its a better choice if they retain control of their core multi-channel commerce platform than leave to the whims of Shopify or BigCommerce which are anyways not that flexible and all the additional functionality needs to be developed in-house with partner using plugins or extensions.

[jasode]

>Having not just studied but by building add-ons for shopify working with Shopify API including the new graphQL now I am sure it’s designed for mom-pop store

I don't know much about Shopify but if the following article is accurate, it's not just "mom & pop" stores:

https://wemakewebsites.com/blog/37-of-the-biggest-brands-on-...

Examples of big brand names with more than a few SKUs include Hasbro toys, Penguin books, etc.

[gavinballard]

Yes! I don’t really get the jump from using the GraphQL API to “this can only be used by small players” when it’s empirically not.

That article is absolutely bang on, We Make Websites is one of the best in the business when it comes to Shopify.

Disclaimer: my company has worked with WMW on a number of projects, including Hasbro (which last time I checked weren’t particularly “mom and pop”).