I’d like to play around a bit with an online shop. Nothing professional with proper requirements, just a hobby project. When googling for open source e-Commerce solutions, I can find the usual software. But I don’t like open core models, and all the projects seem to want to make some money with an add-on marketplace. And most of the times the basic product seems very limited and they want you to extend it with proprietary extensions to get it usable in real-world scenarios.
Is there a project that does things differently? I mean for invoices I can choose between several platforms that won’t push me to buy anything. I just can’t find an online shop solution like that. My requirements would be something along: Sells products and keeps track of remaining stock, maybe sells services like online courses and software/pdf downloads. Can generate invoices and ties into payment providers. Maybe generates shipping labels. Isn’t too bloated, a small, nice and clean hobby project will do. I’d like to avoid running a Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla underneath it if possible.
I get that companies have different requirements and commercial products are somewhat the obvious thing if you’re doing commerce. But there has to be something aligned with the virtues of the free software community. Something I’d like to use to sell Tux stickers and power my Etsy shop with.
Check out Vue storefront
Thx. Mmh I think I’d still need a good backend that goes along with that plus an example project to set up the storefront.
I used to run a network of ecommerce sites ~10yrs ago.
Back then there wasn’t an ecommerce platform that was 100% free for everything. Sooner or later you’d be forced to buy something. Whether is WooCommerce CSV importer or OpenCarts courier plugin - there’s always something.
Having said that I would say you can go a long way without doing that on:
- Wordpress + WooCommerce
- OpenCart.
- Medusa
- Ecwid
- PrestaShop
- Spree Commerce
- Bagisto (Laravel-based platform)
- Shopware (German)
Thanks. I think I’m going to spin up a container and try a few. I had hoped there was a hobby project entirely without important paid add-ons, maybe a hobby project or something by the free software community for niche use cases. But I see, I’ll probably have to use one of the proper solutions. I got quite a few recommendations now.
Hello ! You might find Sylius suitable. It’s an Open source framework based on Symfony.
Im pretty sure it has all your requirements. The thing is that it’s a headless framework, so a frontend needs to be built on top of that if you want some custom features.
Hope that helps !
Thx! I had a look at it. It’s a bit more on the enterprise side of things and they also want to sell a “Plus” subscription. I’m putting that on my ‘read later’ list.
I know that dolibarr has a eCommerce module. You can self host it and it is foss as far as i can tell. Not sure how well the module would fit in to your use case but perhaps worth a look.
Dolibarr looks good to me. But their website says “In the future, Dolibarr will provide its own eCommerce module […] tentative date of availability is: the end of 2026.”
It seems to have lots of nice features, but not an online shop.
Odoo
Haven’t used it yet myself but it seems to be quite versatile
What you’re asking for is a CMS, there is no online sales tool I know that does all those things in a single PHP/JS script. Woocommerce does pretty much everything you need and is open source.
You can loop in Bitcoin lightning payments (also open source) and not be dependent on or pay fees to any third-party CC processor. Fees are often less than 1 cent per transaction and confirm instantly. You can run your own payment server (BTCPayServer) which is quite easy to setup or outsource that job to a third party. There are free woocommerce plugins for this. If you have your own lightning payment system, nobody can block payments to it or do chargebacks (assuming here your website remains live and/or you have some way to communicate checkout details to customers).
Prefer credit cards? Paypal, stripe, etc all have free integrations with woocommerce. Well, the plugin is free, obviously you pay high fees and risk chargebacks and go through a not fun KYC process but it is what it is. They may decide they don’t want to do business with you for some reason, in which case you can’t use them.
For shipping labels, woocommerce does provide free integration with major shipping providers. You can also use shippo or pirateship which are often cheaper.
ERPNext does have ecommerce. All of it’s modules are free. The whole thing’s integrated with it’s back-end accounting and inventory system. There may be some features you might not need because it’s primary purpose is for back office usage.
Wow, thx. That looks really good. At one point I’ve tried Odoo and decided it was too much and too complicated for me. But this looks a bit cleaner. And everything seems to be free software, even some of the add-ons. I definitely have to try this. I just hope it doesn’t eat all the resources on my VPS.
OpenBazzar, but honestly I’d reconsider woocommerce
OpenBazaar is discontinued. I’ll reconsider woocommerce but I really would like to skip on the wordpress…
Why? You’ll kick yourself later when you dont have the features you need and you’ll be spending more time developing software than running your business.
WordPress is half the 'net
Sure. But I mean that isn’t unique to wordpress or woocommerce. I mean there are other CMS and e-commerce solutions. And this one isn’t even closer aligned to my requirements than any of the other big platforms. Or did is miss something and woccomerce has more feature baked into its free software core than all the other platforms?
I’ll have a closer look at it, but I’m currently still evaluating some of the other recommendations. I’ve kind of disregarded a solution like that at first, because in the past I’ve used CMSs for everything. But having a broad and general CMS with many features and then customizing it with several modules / add-on and customizations also gets complex and hard to maintain over time. Nowadays I kind of prefer solutions that are tailored to a use case instead of extending a CMS and I’ve replaced my wordpress installs with static sites. But I’m not set on it. If WooCommerce turns out to be good and usable without additional paid extensions, I might as well use that.
