If it were a personal project then it could be a fun learning experience to build it with Phoenix, but for a client where time is of the essence I wouldn’t try reinventing the wheel for my own sake. An ecommerce site has all sorts of moving parts under the hood that would take quite a while to get even halfway to what shopify offers, the #1 thing being the seller dashboard where they can manage their business, sells, inventory, chargebacks etc.

Gotta use the right tools for the job.

If you decide to go with Phoenix though, this thread should be a good resource: Resources for building an e-commerce store in Phoenix?

I’ve been building Shopify integrations and apps for about 4 years now, about 2 of them I’ve been using elixir / phoenix for that purpose as well. From what I can tell you, setting up a Shopify shop for your friend does not mean you wont get a chance to use phoenix

As you can see here Shopify is highly customizable and provides a lot of opportunities to build custom solutions.

I started writing a guide how to do embedded apps but I’ve since learned a lot and have to revisit it (untill last year, I had never done an embedded app in phoenix, only “supporting” APIs and private apps, but I think I have a pretty good grip on it now.)

I would be happy to welcome you in the unofficial club of elixir Shopify app developers

I second giving shopify a go. Using Shopify and building apps for it is my bread and butter. There’s a lot of opportunity to customize processes for specific use cases for both private and public apps. Let shopify handle the hard (boring?) part. Have fun building integrations with elixir and profit .

Where do I pay my membership dues? I just started using GitHub - nsweeting/shopify: Easily access the Shopify API with Elixir. about 2 months and it’s really nice. I am using it to migrate an existing app. Good work to you all.