[sodapopcan]

This is very inspiring. I'm in a similar situation! I'm also the only tech person for a small ecomm company, I'm just not the owner :)

I obviously have lots of questions but biggest one that relates to other convos I had on HN recently: did you use an off-the-shelf ecomm solution or roll your own?

[julienmarie]

It started with an off the shelf solution initially, but it didn't scale. I replaced 90% of it with our Elixir solution. The remaining 10% is the one that takes the longer to kill!

[sodapopcan]

What was the off-the-shelf one if you don't mind my asking? It's total curiosity as I'm wondering what people go for in the Elixir space. Although it sounds like you started without Elixir?

[julienmarie]

It was initially just a little side business of my wife and I. We didn't expect it to grow as it did.

So I started with a PHP solution ( Craft CMS + Commerce ) that was flexible so I can just focus on front end part.

But then Covid happened and our business boomed super quickly ( in a month we went: from 2 to 10 people and 2 to 450 deliveries ). I needed to build features quickly to handle our fulfillment processes and built a separate stack of tools in Elixir, initially for packaging lists, routing calculations, sticker printing , etc... I still have some very fond memories of these crazy times.

Then I needed to redo our front end. We went from like 50 products to 1000+ products. I needed great search, smarter default sorting, recommendations, etc... and I needed the whole stack to be fast. I rebuilt everything with Phoenix and Liveview, building a weird layer to map Ecto to the super complicated Craft db schema.

We are using Craft just for the cart and payment now. The only pages served by Craft are the payment details and thank you page.

But I'm working slowly on building a complete E-Commerce stack ( a very opinionated one ) that I'd like to open source once clean and proven.

[sodapopcan]

Thanks so much for the reply!

Looking forward to hearing about a new ecomm lib :)

I'm also rolling my own as it's built for a specific use case. Not sure I will ever open source, that isn't on my mind at this point.