In java world, there is ofbiz.apache.org and moqui.org available, for building ecommerce and erp.
Is it possible to build something like them in elixir? What is the advantage and shortage by doing it in elixir?
TdXiong
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acrolink
Takes less time to compile and run an Elixir code compared to Java. So, faster development.
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abitdodgy
I don’t have anything concrete in mind yet, but I want to experiment with a couple of things. Initially, I want to broadcast offers in real-time.
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abitdodgy
Thanks. I did build some functionality in React, then React and Redux, and then I went back to Phoenix HTML when it got painful to make progress. I ditched React and Redux because of the overhead. I wrote a couple of vanilla JS classes, barely 40 lines each, that replaced all that react stuff above. My app has some photo tagging functionality, but it’s not so rich that it required React. I added Turbolinks and the app became so fast and responsive that it became almost indistinguishable from a clientside app, so I stuck with it.
My advice about building from scratch is to only do it if it aligns with your objectives. I’m interested in learning and building something unique. I crave the learning and building experience. If I were looking at this project as an entrepreneur, I would build and test faster, and make decisions to move on or iterate further constantly. For now, I’m happilly letting this thing organically grow and so far it seems to be working out well.
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dsignr
In my use case, I use this reference diagram (taken from Google Images for the sake of an example)
I think it’s a simple design. It’s also pretty easy to take things from here, add more variables, etc.
The biggest challenge in building your own E-Commerce solution would be order fulfilment. It’s easily the most time consuming. In my case, I sell digital and physical products, so we’re talking about an Amazon clone, and both (offline and online) fulfilment methods are of course, drastically different.
Also, as with RoR, if you have (and you will have) 2+ layers of nested models, then it will consume a lot of your time. For example, a product has many variants and each variant will have many images. So, if you have a create product form that will also allow you to create an image and variant, then you will need to work on pretty complex logic.
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dsignr
I agree about the payment gateways part. Unless you’re based in a Stripe-supported country, you’ll be in so much pain since most Payment gateways are incompetent, built on legacy technology. Take PayPal for example, they have the worst possible code quality. Their APIs are almost always unreliable and slow. I wouldn’t be surprised if you tried to integrate them and saw a drop in conversions. A dirty solution would be to incorporate a company in a country like USA or Singapore which are business friendly and setup your payment gateway under them. But, you will need to decide if the bureaucracy and compliance of your company with the business laws would be worth it (hiring a tax accountant, etc) the cost trade off.
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acrolink
So, at any given time the user will have one shopping cart. Thanks for sharing the diagram. I hope @abitdodgy would share his model also. I think attributes, variants, colors, sizes, weights and associated costs need much coding to be implemented fully.
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hassan
attributes, variants, colors, sizes, weights and associated costs need much
coding to be implemented fully.
Exactly. If you think about separating concerns, one piece of what
you’re building is an inventory management system tailored to the
types of products involved.
The “shopping cart” is separate, and fairly simple by comparison.
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TdXiong
For data model, I recommend to check out the Moqui data model-mantle udm(universal data model). It looks complicated but is good for future expand.
For example, product price can be put in seperate productPrice table, so you can record prices of different time period by defining fromDate, thruDate. Images, warnings, terms and conditions, warranty, specification, meta keywords, meta descriptions… can be put in seperate productContent.I am trying to get myself familiar to it and it looks great. Some introduction of the data model can be found in the PDF file in moqui.org homepage, mantle-udm can be found on github. It might be helpful for your reference.
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acrolink
I could not find the PDF. I am tempted to start coding my own e-commerce Phoenix application with some JS driven front-end but I believe that much planning work must be done on modelling the whole thing first, to specify the tables/fields needed for an application of this sort.
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