I’m just chiming in to share my experience. I’m currently building an e-commerce app using Phoenix. It’s not a traditional ecommerce app, rather it hooks into your Instagram account and turns it into a store. It’s a personal project.
I chose Phoenix because I wanted to do things like conversational commerce, build a chatbot, and make heavy use of channels. I already knew Elixir and absolutely loved the language. As a person who used Ruby, Elixir seemed so familiar and exciting, and Phoenix was very easy to grock.
I wrote the project from scratch because I’m interested in the building process and the learning more than the actual commercial product.
My main difficulty was finding libraries. Thankfully, I found most of the essential ones. Now that I’m fleshing out the payment solution, my issue is finding an Elixir lib to integrate with Brazilian payment gateways.
In general, however, it’s been really pleasant to work on this project and has proved to be a wonderful learning experience.
At some point I integrated React and Redux for some more complex UI (tagging photos), but it slowed down development time so much that I ditched them in favour of Turbolinks and server-side-rendered pages. I had to change a lot of UI, but the result was great and I’m happy I made that decision.
Here’s what I’m using:
- Ueberauth and Ueberauth Instagram for OAuth
- Guardian for authentication
- (Plays well with Phoenix 1.3 and is impressive at handling authorization)
- Elixstagram for Instagram API
- Cachex for caching API requests
- Bodyguard for authorization
- Furlex for scraping opengraph data
- Number for formatting numbers
There are a few others more abstract libs, but that’s about it.
