WAT?! First store built on my e-commerce framework went live today!
So I've spent the past ~18 months building a modern open-source e-commerce framework (https://www.vendure.io). I was planning on being my own first customer (my family has a successful online retail business) but today I learned that I've been beaten to it!
A couple of months ago, a developer from Italy joined my Slack and said he's gonna use Vendure for a project. I was like "cool! It's beta, but it should be fine!" (massive fingers crossed and sweating not visible via Slack :D)
Anyway, we've been chatting most days and I've been supporting him as he deals with the perils of beta software. I knew he was getting close to going live but this evening he SHOCKED me by slacking a cheeky link to the LIVE WEBSITE! 🤯🤯🤯🤯
For context, my own project is not planned to go live until Q1 2020.
Here's his website by the way: https://cbmadeinitaly.com/
The front-end is built with Vue Storefront, since Vendure is a headless GraphQL server.
Anyway, this is a massive milestone for Vendure, and I'm feeling pretty damn motivated right now.
Scratch your own itch, solve real problems, and make it easy for others to come along for the ride!
Do you have plans for monetization via pro/ enterprise support if some kind? Or maybe though monthly donations contributing to the project? Or just to build and grow right now?
Vendure has a very flexible plugin system and I will be creating some pro/enterprise plugins for things like advanced reporting/business intelligence, extended shop features (loyalty points, product reviews) which I will make available as paid plugins. Support it not a major part of my plans simply because it does not scale well with my resources (I'd like to hold off taking on employees for as long as I can manage).
But that's probably a year off yet. Right now I am just building the best product I can and my goal is to get as much developer exposure & buy-in as I can, so that by the time I am ready to roll out the paid stuff I already have a decent base of user (developers & agencies) and have built trust with the quality of the core product.
Nice, I like the plugin idea. Could be a great source of revenue if done right, and I think folks are willing and open to paying based on other similar models (shoppify)
Are you allowing outside developers build plugins to sell? or is it just your plugins right now?
Outside developers are welcome to make plugins and distribute them however they wish, paid or free, but I am not planning on setting up a shopify-like centralised marketplace for 3rd party plugins. My concerns would be the added work of administrating it and also quality control. It's currently in the "future possibilities" pile along with ideas like a hosted SaaS offering. Stuff like that I can get into once I have a steady income from the paid plugins.
Congrats!
What do you think made him choose your product over of the other more known alternatives?
Thanks! I didn't ask directly, but my guess would be he knows JS & Node rather than eg PHP or Ruby, it is relatively simpler than many alternatives to get up and running and deploy, and maybe the fact it is natively headless with a GraphQL API. The existing frameworks are not headless by default, and often if they have a GraphQL API it is often incomplete.
Or maybe he just likes to live dangerously 😂