Correct. As a developer you know the amount of time you can put into building your own solution to a problem. That approach is fun and a great way to learn, but at some point the benefits can often outweigh the actual costs.
We all spent years building eCommerce websites on a range of platforms and grew more disenfranchised with them over time, we knew there had to be a better way.
We started to discuss the concept of building JS only stores. We loved what Stripe were doing for payments and wanted to bring it to the rest of eCommerce, so we ended up settling on our API approach.
Exactly, We're building for developers, Shopify (typically) supports quick stores for non-technical users, but as developers it greatly limits the flexibility we have.
There is no reason why you couldn’t do that! we’ve even open-sourced a bunch of our components to help people do it - https://github.com/moltin
The reason we created Moltin was to speed up this process, bring it up to modern standards, and give developers the creative freedom to use the tools they’re comfortable with. By not going down the self-hosting route you also no longer have to manage the installation, keep the codebase secure or worry about scaling.
Our main stack utilises nginx, php, postgres, redis and a few other things in-between, we’re built on top of AWS purely for the flexibility it gives us.
The site is OS and I opted for a flat file compile from Jekyll.
I'm using Claude Code to run manifesto content collection on schedules.
Would really love feedback on what would make it more useful, and/or shares to your Scottish fellows!