Unrealistic eCommerce Platforms
I am really getting tired of the unrealistic eCommerce platforms.
They all seem to be centered around this sexy web-forms backend, like real people have time to sit at their computer and just manually enter in data. It boggles my mind entirely.
Every time I have ever used a store software, rails, or php, the first question I get asked by customers is: Isn’t there a better way?
I have built so many freaking excel/csv/tsv importing scripts that I am at my wits end that no one offers this ability out of the box. My customers have thousands of items, some run into the 20-30 thousand items. Who’s gonna manually update those?
I am so close to just building my own from the ground up. The thing that stops me: payment gateways. I don’t want to have to my own integration code for them.
The main issue I have is, all of these systems are user friendly, not programmer friendly. They aren’t designed on an easy to use/understand/implement programming idiom, they are philosophically accessible to the lowest common denominator, which means under the hood, they are so convoluted as to be nigh incomprehensible. When I say incomprehensible I mean incomprehensible when you are working on a deadline, like program me a shoppe and get it done by the end of the week. When you have to spend a week hacking on a code base and reading the reams of user friendly documentation, that’s a waste of time and money.
Don’t get me wrong, I could just be stupid, maybe it’s easier for other developers, but I doubt it when perusing the forums and help lists of these pieces of software. No one seems to be interested in coding a solution that is the most direct path to success, for programmers only. Who cares if grandma moses can use your software.