I’ve been using Snipcart with my Jekyll sites with some success, but I wanted to get some details on the competition. Are there other decent shopping cart solutions for static sites? If, so can you please list their pros and cons. Here’s Snipcart’s based on my usage:
Pros
Easy to “setup”. Setup involves proper HTML markup for products and linking a Javascript file.
Competitive pricing. 2% flat from each purchase. In addition to your payment gateway fees.
##Cons
No inventory management. Snipcart knows your products only by scanning your website, so to update inventory users must update the website. This leads to 2 “dashboards”. The one for editing the site (typically a collection of YAML files), and then the Snipcart dashboard for tracking customers, orders, discounts, and retargeting customers with abandoned carts.
Only one account per person. As a web consultant I need to use a different email address every time I create a Snipcart account for a client. Once the site is out of development mode, I have to change the email address on the account to the client’s email. This can be problematic when developing for multiple clients.
The last Con is a big one for me. Are there similar solutions that allow designers and developers to have multiple eCommerce clients?
Basically, you would need to create a server route that can receive our ‘order.completed’ event and from there you could create/send the according digital good based on the order information.
Very cool! Thanks for the reply guys. I remember a thread similar to this one before the data loss happened on the forum, and I vaguely recall Snipcart not even being a part of the discussion. Unfortunately I can’t remember the competition to do my research.
@WebsByTodd, always nice to see devs pushing static e-commerce with Jekyll.
I work with the team at Snipcart, so I just thought I’d address a few points:
We now support inventory management, so quantities can be updated in our dashboard directly.
We’re well-aware of the value a developer portal has for freelancers & consultants. I don’t want to commit on anything official, but we’ll try to ship one this year. We’re still a small bootstrapped team, but we’ve got a new dev coming onboard soon. Should help.
We’ve tried to do no-bullsh*t comparisons with a few competing products here, to help devs working with clients make the right tech stack call. 2 or 3 in there can be used with static sites.
Anyhow, we’re going to keep trying our best to build & improve an e-commerce product that’s valuable for devs.
Now my cheesy but heartfelt closing line: thanks again for using Snipcart on previous projects; it means a lot to us!
Awesome! Thanks for the info @thefln. I have a Snipcart site going live in a week (I hope), so I’ll dig into the inventory management docs a bit.
Also there’s a lot of good info in the comparison articles you linked to.
Lastly, a developer portal would be AMAZING! I mean seriously, how many business owners who want to sell their stuff online know enough about web development to implement Snipcart on their own? They need dev help, and Snipcart can help the devs a lot by providing a portal to manage multiple sites.
Dev help would be awesome. I need to have digital downloads capabilities but am not savvy enough with JS or APIs to get the web hooks sorted out on my own. Getting a developer to help would be great.
I’m currently set up with SendOwl. Works well but has some limitations. If/when I can get digital downloads with Snipcart, I’ll switch.
@flaturtha if you’re looking to use Snipcart’s webhooks you’ll need some server-side functionality. Since you’re on this site I assume you’re using Jekyll and your site is currently 100% client-side. You’ll have to weigh the limitations of SendOwl against creating a new web server with a route to handle the webhook. There are a billion ways to create a web server (or use an existing one) to handle a route and trigger a secure download, most of which incur monthly fees.
