E-commerce in PW: starting a webshop

[motionmindz]

I read PW does not have e-commerce functionality available throug a module. Is that true ?

Do we have to embed this functionality using ecommerce solution providers and their API ?

[einsteinsboi]

Welcome to PW. I think the approach most people take with ecommerce is get a third party cart and integrate it with Processwire. A good example of this would be something like Foxycart or Lemonstand, or Shopify, etc.  One of the legendary devs here (apeisa) has been working on a shop module (http://modules.processwire.com/modules/shopping-cart/) which you could play with, but as it states on the page it's still in alpha stage and not ready for production environments.

[teppo]

The module Antti has been working on is actually pretty nice, as you can see from this site. It has most of the basic shop features, including cart, different payment methods (and support for adding new ones), variations etc. built-in already, so I'd argue that it's really much further than an alpha release.

I'd still advice treading careful here if you're serious about those shop features. This is an area where you don't want to develop your own solution unless you're ready to invest a lot of time in it or only need it for small-scale / personal use. Just take a look at the feature list of some of the more robust solutions, such as Magento or Bigcommerce, and try to guess how hard they've worked putting all that together

For the record, I'm not saying that you'll actually need all of those features or that ProcessWire + Antti's shop module wouldn't already include many of them, just pointing out that there are lots of full-featured alternatives you could just grab and start using now if you don't mind not having everything built with one system (i.e. building a site with PW but integrating shop from another platform).

Just my five cents.

@einsteinsboi: +1 for legendary dev.

[Beluga]

I have just built a shop using Prestashop and I had to create many little modules and overrides because the shop owner has very specific ways of working and also a unique customer type (food clubs). The documentation of what I had to build or copy/modify from others now consists of 10 different sections. Working with the database structure was tiring as always (hunting where everything is stored). Maybe I should post the documentation on the PW forums sometime so you can evaluate, if all of it would have been possible already with PW + Antti's module.

[motionmindz]

Wouldnt mind this Beluga.