in this series of articles, I will show you 3 different ways of creating e-commerce website

1. Easy (for the startups with a low 💰)

don't over-engineer the website if you are starting since there are plenty of tools available which will help you to get into the market quickly with little effort

• Development
  • Use website builders like shopify, woocommerce,bigcommerce & wix etc
• Payment (*for india)
  • choose from available options eg. razorpay, paytm, instamojo etc
• Delivery (*for india)
  • delivery services like Delhivery, shiprocket, speed post etc.
• Marketing
  • SEO, Google ads, Social media, influencers & content creation
• Deployment
  • choose appropriate plan from your website builder

👉 shopify

• it is hosted online store & you will be billed according to the plan you have selected, so it's like renting the house
• pros
  • relatively easy for beginners and lots of content & youtube videos are available to get started
  • themes can be customized
  • you can extract your data with shopify api
  • it has around 10,000+ employees, it matters because they are managing our e-commerce store
  • shopify app store
• cons
  • not everything is free, you have to pay for some themes, apps & transaction fees
  • it is not as much flexible as woocommerce or custom website

👉 woocommerce

• it is the WordPress plugin which can convert any WordPress website into powerful e-commerce site
• if you are familiar with the Wordpress eco-system then this is just one more plugin for you, for others learning would take effort
• pros
  • large community
  • fully customizable
• cons
  • paid extentions

2. Medium (growing business)

• separate frontend from the backend & use Rest API or GraphQL for communication

• If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel then here are some open-source headless eCommerce projects

  • strapi (headless CMS)
  • Sylius (headless e-commerce)
  • saleor (headless e-commerce)

• Monolithic architecture as the backend is sufficient

• Modules of the E-Commerce Plateform

  • Customer Service -> responsible for customer info
  • Payment Service -> payment processing, digital wallet
  • Order Management -> cart management for all the customers
  • Product Service -> product information with reviews
  • Inventory Management
  • Authentication Service -> authentication & authorization of regular user & admin

3. Sophisticated (mature)

• if your e-commerce business is booming, people love your brand & you have enough money then this is the right time to adopt microservice based architecture
• here we will create one microservice for each module mentioned above, each microservice will have its own database.
• microservice communication protocols

  • sync -> HTTP
  • async -> gRPC, AMQP(with kafka, RabbitMQ)

well, that's enough for now, see you in the next article bye bye :)