I’m aware that new Meteor sites are being launched all the time, but wanted to announce the launch of https://flatwarefinder.com a site that was originally launched 8 years ago using Drupal 6 with Ubercart. I finally decided to modernize it, migrating the products and users, and despite the fact that I’m no graphic artist, I’m happy with it. I love Meteor!
I hope to post a blog shortly about the issues, and the solutions I used to resolve them, but if people have questions in the mean time, feel free to ask.
By the way you can speed up the initial load by deferring the load of the stripe dependencies. I’d suggest only loading those scripts when the page loaded by moving them at the very end.
I’m sure you put a lot of work into it, but why in the world wouldn’t you use Shopify for an ecommerce site? You get a metric shit ton of features, and access to high-quality free and paid (low-cost) professionally designed themes. Shopify have a large marketplace of apps to extend the functionality of your store, and it also support selling on multiple channels like facebook, pinterest and elsewhere. It’s really an unbeatable value.
Simply because Shopify, like any other 3rd-party site, constrains me to their way of managing the data. Being Meteor I can develop any feature I want for managing, displaying and analysing the data. One key issue is that I migrated over 3000 products, 2000 images and 8000 clients (with their original passwords) from the original mySql Drupal database. Previous clients can still log in with no issues despite the password encryption scheme being different.
As well, I developed a ‘live-inventory’ process so that carts and pages reflect the true remaining inventory as items are placed in carts. I believe this makes it somewhat unique for a small shopping site. This was a requirement since inventories of most items are low, and I wanted to ensure that people are guaranteed their selected items when they hit the payment process. Even the original Ubercart failed in this area allowing users to add the same single product into two different carts at the same time. People were getting dinged at checkout if two people ordered the same item.
Ubercart handled inventory, but only at checkout time. Perhaps (and I don’t know) Shopify handles it immediately when items are added to the cart, updating all relevant pages with live inventory based on open carts, as I am doing. That’s somewhat important.
But migrating all the data, including user accounts with passwords, was the primary reason for the migration, that and that I host the site myself on my own server.
It is interesting though that you mention Shopify, as it is also located in Ottawa, Canada, where I am located. I attended some Meteor Meetups at their office, in fact.
For sure, that’s what npm packages are for. I’ve not used Shopify before so I’m just being a bit skeptical, I’m sure it’s providing a lot of value since it’s success and popularity. But I’m pointing out that some requirements might outgrow those platforms quickly (and I’ve seen this happen many times before) and it might better for skilled developers to invest a bit to get a simple e-commerce working then to depend and be locked in a third party platform.
I try to avoid writing code unless it’s absolutely necessary. There is enormous value in platforms like Shopify. If you write it, you need to maintain it. With Shopify I get a team of 3,000 people working on the product for me–plus a large community of third-party app developers. I get a high-quality, hosted, auto-scaling solution which is maintained by others, and they delivery valuable new features to me at impressive speed.
Shopify is now powering more than 500,000 businesses in 175 countries.
More than 1.2 million people are actively using the Shopify backend platform.
1800 apps in the App Store with 7 million installs to date. source
We had some special custom needs too, so we wrote our own Shopify app to calculate real-time shipping rates for Japan Post shipping methods.
Shopify has done an extraordinary job. I can’t praise them enough. Instead of maximizing profits they are investing heavily in their platform. They have amazing leadership. They make smart decisions and it shows: Shopify is the best-performing U.S.-listed tech company with a $1 billion-plus market cap so far this year. The platform is extensible via API and there is a large, thriving marketplace of third-party apps. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to start from scratch. Do you write your own code editors and financial software in-house too–just because you can?
good to see another meteor developer in town!