intermediate
Open Source Ecommerce Is Not Free: A Practical Total-Cost Model
A six-category framework for pricing self-hosted ecommerce ownership costs: licence, hosting, extensions, maintenance, security and staffing.
Ecommerce Platforms and Architecture
A platform is chosen in a demo and paid for in operations.
Guides in this hub evaluate ecommerce platforms the way an operator experiences them: what the software costs after the licence, where the architecture bends, how upgrades behave, and which platforms are genuinely ready for API-driven automation and AI agents.
The series follows a published methodology — the same scoring rules, evidence requirements and verification checklist for every platform — so a review is a repeatable measurement, not an impression.
Common problems
Failure modes that come up repeatedly with Ecommerce, and where each one is solved.
- The platform that demoed well is expensive to change six months in
- Feature tables hide operational cost. Evaluate the extension model, upgrade path, API completeness and who owns security before committing — the series methodology scores exactly these.
- Comparing platforms by feature count instead of operating model
- A plugin ecosystem, a packaged cart, a framework and a headless engine are different ownership models, not interchangeable products. Match the model to the team before comparing features.
Latest Ecommerce guides
Browse the archive-
- intermediate
Saleor vs Vendure: GraphQL Is the Similarity, Not the Decision
Saleor and Vendure both use GraphQL, but Channel currency limits, extension models, licences and B2B pricing set them apart.
- intermediate
Sharetribe vs CS-Cart Multi-Vendor: Marketplace SaaS or Packaged Ownership?
Sharetribe's subscription SaaS backend versus CS-Cart Multi-Vendor's owned PHP source, compared on launch speed, transaction limits, ownership and operations.
- intermediate
Why Ecommerce Upgrades Fail: Core Changes, Plugins, Schemas and Search
Platform upgrades break checkout, admin panels or search not from the core version bump itself but from plugin, schema and search-index contracts moving on separate timelines.
- intermediate
EverShop in 2026: A Coherent TypeScript Store with a Young Ecosystem
Does EverShop's single-language stack offset its small ecosystem? Verified pricing, architecture trade-offs, scoring and a five-question PoC checklist.
- intermediate
Headless Commerce Failure Modes: CMS, Search, Checkout and Preview Gaps
Why decoupling a storefront into CMS, search and checkout vendors multiplies preview gaps, stale search results, PCI scope creep and webhook duplication — and how to test for each before launch.