Hello there! I’m Cody, and since this is my first post and I didn’t do a presentation before: 26yo Software Engineer with a Full-Stack Web Development Background, now trying to get into Entrepreneurship.
Lately, I started to see many of these Instagram Ads that tells you "We build your Ecommerce store now just for $X" and it's fine, is a cool, easy and cheap way to start or expand your business into the internet.
I have some experience with platforms such as Magento, Prestashop and Woocomerce, so that got me thinking.. there's an easy approach to automatically build and deploy web stores? As you may possibly know, the answer is “yes, kinda”.
I investigated a bit more, and.. I defined two or three ways to do it.
First of all, the Manual: You’re fast and you can build yet configure not only the script but the DNS, SSL and so on, with your bare hands.. But that’s not good in matter of human costs and scalability.
To the Second, Let’s say you can automate your work, build and deploy some custom Docker Images, automate common configurations and Ta Da! you have your store at one or two commands.
In an alternate way, you can build and configure some Shopify stores, but is not really a short task (I know that someone can disagree with that).
But I wanted to do all this with less human interaction, I got ambitious.
So I came up with this idea: A web panel that builds and deploy stores on the platform you want, which could be creating and deploying Digital Ocean Droplets or directly hitting your Kubernetes (or using Shopify’s API), you can add some stepper to rapidly get user information about the store and so on, but always trying to keep it simple.
As a comment on the side, I know that this idea will work well with every kind of prebuilt website such as blogs, but... I think ecommerce would be more interesting.
It is not easy to do, for sure. I started coding a small PoC using the Digital Ocean API and it is working quite well, but I am not 100% confident about if this is going to work as a product (or a service).
So, thank you for your time, I'll read all the critics and suggestions!