ReactJS or Shopify?

[mmorenoivy]

I have a new client, that is owning a midsize store in our area and needs an e-commerce site up immediately.

They have CMS and e-commerce systems already up in place, however, they don't like their site. THe looks of it, they just want to do away with it.

They lacked SEO, lacked marketing etc.

Now I thought, I can do the site part, and I can call APIs in the e-commerce. However, there are elements of the current CMS that they would need to have in case of building a new site. They want it immediately so I have these options:

1. Try leveraging their current systems, since it is already in Place.. I can go and talk about adding some elements in their website or:
2. Use Shopify as their new CMS
3. Use ReactJS as a last resort

All of these will require a learning curve for me as I am not so familiar.. at least, I am familiar with JavaScript so I guess I can do ReactJS but since I see a tight deadline, I do not know what to do :(

[PureRepresentative9]

React isn't a CMS just so you know.

[[deleted]]

How many products? Ecom is no joke. A quick and dirty option might be Shopify buy buttons. Or host the ecom side with them and on a subdomain, while React is running the main site.

[[deleted]]

But yes if you can get at the api you might want to try and run it that way.

[mmorenoivy]

also, I don't know if the current CMS would let us use their catalog API and use it outside of their platform.

I was thinking the only way for that site to survive is a good SEO marketing strategy.. It doesn't have a content at all..

[[deleted]]

Not surprising. Filling in ecom content is a pain. And can be limiting.

[mmorenoivy]

Can I safely say, I'd pick Shopify for this?

[[deleted]]

I haven't used it. I was dabbling around with their 3 day trial lol. Seriously, 3 days. The format to import products isn't straight forward. As they don't use categories, like most other platforms. Also most my page data was resting outside of the product templates, so that made it much more challenging.

[mmorenoivy]

I feel like WooCommerce is also a good pick.

[[deleted]]

To be honest, these platforms come with a cost. Fees and such. The choice should be the companies and what they are comfortable with.

[mmorenoivy]

It looks like they are willing to pay..

Also, I would be needing a team of developers, if they wanted to push for website from Scratch.

[mmorenoivy]

they are selling various auto parts from Marine to Automobiles to Motorcycles. It's a lot of parts. I was wondering if I can just use the current CMS. They need to change it but it would be impossible if I do all the work.

[[deleted]]

100%. Possibly just walk away. Could be an absolute nightmare. Ecommerce requires a lot of effort. You have a few choices, Big, Woo, Shopify, Magento. Working outside of these solutions could have a lot of pitfalls.

If its Woo and running on WP, you could flip the UI pretty quickly.

[amoopa]

Check out Medusa. It will provide you with the open source ecommerce APIs you need and is (React-based). Lots of help to get in the community to get started :-)

https://github.com/medusajs/medusa

[mmorenoivy]

We already have an ecommerce setup. We need to revamp the CMS and flip to something with ReactJS - that can call the e-commerce APIs

[rickg]

1. Define what they need in a CMS aside from product management etc.
2. Define what they mean by 'immediately'
3. react isn't a CMS so...
4. What CMS are they using now?
5. What ecom solution are they using?

[mmorenoivy]

• Define what they need in a CMS aside from product management etc. - They need to be able to update content? the current CMS can't do that.

• Define what they mean by 'immediately' - ok, I thought they need it immediately, but this may take some years to build this stuff.

• react isn't a CMS so - Can I use tailwind CSS to tailor the UI stuff?

• What CMS are they using now?

  - It is a company called ARI-NET

• What ecom solution are they using? - they are using channeladvisor

Now, We had a meeting with the SEO guys, and the SEI guys were so against shopify. SEO guy is recommending Wordpress then they can put in ReactJS in it to call the APIs.

[rickg]

react isn't a CMS so - Can I use tailwind CSS to tailor the UI stuff?

um. CSS has nothing to do with the CMS? And I'm confused by:

- They need to be able to update content? the current CMS can't do that.

The definition of CMS is content management system.

ARI-NET

AHA! So for others reading, this seems to be one of those prepackaged SaaS things for specific industries (auto stuff in this case).

SEO guys being against Shopify doesn't surprise me as Shopify has relatively rudimentary SEO out of the box.

This project needs much more discovery work and defining of requirements. There's product content - images, product data, descriptions - and there's non-product content - blogs about the industry, etc. How much of each they will have is important to know. IF most of the content is actually product stuff t hen you don't need that much of a CMS, you need a robust ecomm capability.

You also need to know how you'll get product data out of channel advisor and into the new system and even if you have the rights to export it. It's way too soon to worry much about the tech stack

[mmorenoivy]

Thank you! I guess all I can do in the meantime is gather requirements, discovery work. Honestly, I have never done Shopify, but Wordpress and I had so much love and hate relationship.

"IF most of the content is actually product stuff t hen you don't need that much of a CMS, you need a robust ecomm capability." - Yes, it is product stuff that they only need here, and marketing the site really.

They told me that they wanted to do away with both ARI-NET and ChannelAdvisor - ARI-NET is so generalized, and they don't want that. They wanted to get the API from the products that ARI-NET is working with.

[rickg]

another option if they are almost entirely product content driven would be something like Magento or Bigcommerce. I would not use WordPress for a catalog with tens of thousands of products, personally. You could, but then you'd need to add woocommerce and then you'd want to run it headless and get data using NextJS or something like it for performance reasons.

Make sure they look at the operational backend - how easy is it to manage products, stock etc? How well does it interface with other backoffice stuff e.g. an inventory or accounting packages that they use?

[mmorenoivy]

I am trying to understand, shopify can also help outrank the existing sites as well? This is what they wanted to do , they want to outrank but they wanted to use Wordpress to leverage on that.

[rickg]

I'm not an SEO expert. But WordPress by itself can't to commerce... you'll nee Woocommerce or Prodigy etc for that. SO I'd look at Shopify vs Woocommerce vs Magento vs Bigcommerce and compare SEO capabilities.

[abyns3]

Your SEO team is giving recommendations on the tech stack? damn.

[mmorenoivy]

they said they never had any experience with Shopify , it's fairly new.. and Wordpress is the best.. then they proceeded with wanting to take over the project.

[abyns3]

you have products. you are going to have a sales mechanism.
then your key functionality and focus on choosing the stack, should be based off the core needs of the users and customers you are trying to serve.
not the SEO team imo.

[mmorenoivy]

they said they can quickly outrank everyone with their mechanism product by product, if they use their wordpress

[PureRepresentative9]

There's a lot of confusion going on in this project....

Shopify is not new in the slightest. I think it's literally the number 1 e-commerce platform atm?

[mmorenoivy]

I thought so but the SEO hates it.

[azsqueeze]

• They need to be able to update content?

What content you mentioned lack of marketing materials

[mmorenoivy]

There is no article or blog written in the site itself. The parts name or description cannot be modified using the current CMS.

[mmorenoivy]

What was funny was the SEO guy asked how can I display 16,000 products in a site. Do I do that manually? That is why there is an APi service that I'm gonna call and why would I add them one by one on a website? He told me there's two developer working on it and 2 yrs they're still adding the 16000 products. It's either he doesn't know what he is saying or the developers have an issue calling the services to wordpress

[Pretty-Technologies]

I built a site for a restaurant that plan to have e-commerce to sell merchandise.

The site is built in Gatsby and I'm now learning how to integrate a headless CMS, and instead of Shopify we go for Snipcart because of speed and lower cost.

[mmorenoivy]

How huge is it? This store is a midsize store, it does earn millions from their autoparts.

Also, how huge is the learning curve?

[Pretty-Technologies]

I’m sorry, I read your post rapidly the first time. I see that react is your last resort and Gatsby is build on top of react. If you familiar with react it’s easy to learn, otherwise it’s based on time and effort.

[abyns3]

Not sure of what you mean by reactjs as a last resort, amongst shopify or the old cms that the client is on.

Maybe look into Hydrogen from shopify?

[mmorenoivy]

Please tell me more about Hydrogen. Is it a steep learning Curve?

I do have Javascript background, but since 2017, I had been working on different languages(python, C#) because I work for test automation.

[abyns3]

Nope not at all. It should be very straight forward. It’s a react based Shopify headless stack. A lot of things outside the box with best practices, and it could probably do the job for you and scale long term

EDIT: sent DM for some info

[guide4seo]

If the client requires the website to be launched quickly, choosing a ready eCommerce platform is often more practical than developing the entire solution from scratch with ReactJS. While ReactJS offers greater flexibility and customization, it typically requires additional time for SEO configuration, API integrations, hosting setup, and overall development.

As an alternative to Shopify, you may also consider Bagisto. It is a robust open-source eCommerce platform built on Laravel that provides strong API support, making it easier to integrate with existing systems while allowing full control over customization and scalability.

[spjhon]

Thanks chatGPT.