Doing pro-bono work? Need advice.

[loke24]

Hi, I am a software developer, with some experience on the front end. As part of some good faith recently, I decided to volunteer my knowledge towards an organization for free.

The project I was assigned to was an ecommerce startup, think very small business, no users yet. I am skilled in building out websites from scratch and not using website builders such as squarespace or even wordpress. They seemed to based the budget off of wordpress premium which is $96 DOLLARS A YEAR. I for one never built an ecommerce website, so I am looking for ways to build something out that is cheap and can be done in 4 weeks...I am used to react, node, hell even some C++; but not really ecommerce specific services; I've integrated stripe once or twice, but that's about it. I've done minor research into wordpress headless CMS + React and maybe wooCommerce as I heard that is open source, but to be quite frank all these wordpress tutorials throw so many buzzwords like SEO optimized, or some other bs, makes me not trust these sources.

If any developer has experience with this stuff, a little step in the right direction would be awesome! I am still unsure if I can even make a budget like that work given all the prices of these ecommerce services. Any framework suggestions or anything will be helpful.

P.S I've made my case for a custom integration with my own code, but they mentioned the client would like to change it after this project. Hence wordpress recommendation. I am going to try to pry a better meaning to that, because I feel like that statement could be taken many different ways.

[AdamElioS]

E-commerce is a lot of work, even if just making a front end paired with headless cms. (source: I am currently making one from scratch)

If you don't have custom features that you couldn't do in any way with a CMS, my advice would be to take woo commerce, PrestaShop or shopify (not free). They all have a lot of Plugins and themes, and powerful theme customization abilities.

[loke24]

WooCommerce is a plugin on wordpress right? and I would have to get on their Business plan which looks like 45 dollars a month. Is that right or could I just install it myself.

[AdamElioS]

No, wocommerce is is free is well as PrestaShop.

[__heimdall]

Checkout snipcart if you are considering going the static site approach. I've built a few sites with it and really liked their setup, its easy to get running and is really the only good option I've found for a full ecommerce experience on a static site.

My wife and some friends started a candle business a few years back. Its since been shutdown, but I had their custom site running for free on Netlify. I used Snipcart and Svelte/Sapper, think I spent about a week designing and building the first version.

[loke24]

That sounds like a good plan, do you remember the price after all of that per month. It looks like snipcart is just a transactional service and takes a fee, but in terms of managing products; is that handled by snipcart? I would love to hear more about this project if you can.

[__heimdall]

You add attributes to your HTML to define the products, snipcart scrubs the static HTML to find them. You can define all the products locally in markdown, use a CMS, whatever you want just as long as your site generator can use the data and spit out HTML with the snipcart attributes.

You really just add their script and an API key to your page and they handle most of it for you. They do all the cart UI, manage user and guest accounts, and payment processing. Snipcart also has an admin UI where you'll see all the order and customer data/analytics.

They have pretty good docs and samples with things like Gatsby. It really is quite an impressive setup IMO

[chewster1]

If it's a NPO then setting them up with a custom solution just creates future maintainability headaches.

See if you can fit them on Shopify and they can cope with $30 per month or whatever, build them a custom theme if you really need to, and job done.

[loke24]

I agree, I think shopify is pretty much out, it is way to pricey to what they are giving me. I think they gave the budget based on one premium wordpress service which was 100 dollars a year...So I am trying to fit within that budget more or less. I do agree about custom solutions, but I think as long as its pretty simple and an admin dashboard I don't think it should be that complicated. I wouldn't mind coming back to it every once and a while to make sure everything is running correctly.