Hi all, I have been looking into different e-commerce solutions for our business. We use meteor for some internal operations software, and I am thinking it would be good to use a meteor e-commerce solution to integrate nicely with the rest of our stack. Reaction Commerce (https://reactioncommerce.com) is what I have found so far, but it appears to still be early in development. I’m excited about what they are wanting to achieve though.
I’ve also been looking into different e-commerce APIs, such as Moltin (https://moltin.com). I was wondering if anyone in the community has tried building an e-commerce site with meteor, and what their experience has been. Thanks!
I’m most interested in the Moltin/Sphere.io approach, where e-commerce functionality is all API/widget driven and you integrate it with your app the way you see fit. Think Wufoo/Formstack for e-commerce. Or, even more to the point, think about integrating complete e-commerce functionality in a way similar to integrating Stripe payments.
In my imagined future, as a developer you control the shopping/buying experience and the e-commerce provider powers all the services you need through their API (cart, payments, taxes, shipping, discounts, etc.) as well as customer data, so you get a dashboard that lets you approve/cancel/refund orders and communicate with customers (e.g. order status, tracking info, etc.).
I’m told sphere.io is pretty far along this path, but I have yet to dig deeply into their product. Moltin is obviously worth watching though.
I’m definitely interested in Moltin. I don’t know a whole lot about sphere.io though…seems like a similar product. The two things though I wish Moltin had (at least I’m not aware of them having) are 1) UI templates to get up and running quickly before having to roll your own, and 2) personalized merchandizing, i.e., showing relevant items on the site based on customer data.
On the flip side, I’m a little more concerned about Reaction Commerce because 1) I get the impression they are trying to be all things for everyone, the vision laid out on the site is very ambitious, and 2) it’s open source, which means if there isn’t a strong community around the project, it could die out.
I have checked different available Packages for eCommerce in Meteor. The best which I find is reaction commerce. Though I haven’t used it in any live site so far, but it seems to be promising.
The company I work for has been looking for a eCom solution for a while now. The first 3rd party product/order management solution we found was Moltin. We wanted an API based solution so we could have full control over everything and just plug the necessary widgets in where needed. Moltin seemed like a good start.
However, after digging into it I got the impression that Moltin is an unfinished product. I found it unintuitive and greatly lacking in the simple features I’ve come to expect from eCom solutions. Product management was a real pain and there didn’t seem to be a good way to set product variations logically.
We looked into Shopify after that but it also had some issues, mainly when it came to customization. Their API left me wondering why I wouldn’t just make my own eCom solution rather than use their system.
Spree Commerce seemed like a good solution as well, and for the most part it is. As I said before, we wanted an API so our site could be built using any combination of architectures without having to custom write new methods for each. Spree has that.
The problems I’ve run into with Spree is that it has one of Moltin’s major pitfalls; really crappy Shipping options. I was hoping one of these solutions would have already done the heavy lifting of making a shipping API tie-ins to their system so that I could pass the product information to their service and they would make the UPS/FedEx API calls on our behalf.
No such luck.
One of the biggest problems I have with Spree is that it is software you have to install on a server, not a 3rd party service. That means if something needs to be updated you have to do it yourself. We have too many other things to maintain so we’d prefer this not be one of them. Additionally, it’s built using Ruby on Rails, something none of us here have any experience with.
Anyway, the problems I’ve had along the way may not be problems to most others. The problem we’re trying to find a solution for may not fit everyone else’s situations. We have 26 brands in total, 8 of which need eCom and we want a single solution to manage all of them with the ability to easily expand AND preferably have an API that includes shipping quote retrieval.
The only solution for us is going to be “build it ourselves”.
Hope my experiences with those platforms at least lead you in a good direction to finding a solution for your own eCom woes.
We’ve been working on Reaction Commerce, as a complete e-commerce platform. While it’s true we’re ambitious, it’s not really about being all things to all. It’s more about being flexible enough to support the many different use cases, and it’s just reflective of our experiences and what is needed for a full fledged ecommerce platform. That said, we’re in the process of modularizing even more than we are currently, with the idea that the core could be used similar to Moltin/Sphere as an api provider, so hopefully you’ll be able to just take what you need from that.
Also, while we are open source, and have a great community of our own, we’re actually funded and have great investors who believe in the vision of a open source JavaScript real time ecommerce platform.
I don’t need shipping. I just need to charge a small fee for every electronic transaction. And I only need it on iOS and Web. (Short term, probably just iOS, although 30% for InApPurchase bites) What’s the best one for my use case?
