Jon Baer jonbaer-at-jonbaer.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:
Probably because the future is in hosted third party web services
that do all the work for you? ;-)
If you look at things like Shopify and Blinksale API it's obvious
that they offer 2 well defined things:
1. Extremely easy to understand setups for beginners
2. Extremely easy to understand APIs for advanced developers
So the better question would be .. why reinvent the wheel again? ..
I'm not sure it's re-inventing, because of the customizations that are
needed. Programmers seem to think in terms of automata, but today a
good portion of coding is customization that hinders more general
automation. It can't be both at the same time.
Shopify is not mature enough IMHO. It's great for selling your own
t-shirts I suppose, but lets' try uploadng a merchant feed to a Shopify
store. And 3% off the top , with so little accountability for dropped
sales that might result from service interruptions or whatever. What
shop can operate on a basis of "a sale is a profit, and no sale is
simply no profit". We can't. 'No sale' is in fact a loss. I need my
shopping cart to share that loss, or provide a value that offsets the
risk of loss based on sound business decision making. Shopify IMHO
doesn't offer that. Neither does Blinksale. And what about returns?
These service-based outfits take 3% of the sale... regardless of return
or even failure for the merchant service to close the deal etc. It's a
lop-sided deal, but still 3% off the top.
If I spend $2-5k on a cart solution I need it to last N months, and then
port easily to the NextBigThing. I don't really see any need to spend
less and get less. I'd spend more to get more, but then the risk of
change weighs in.
Why re-invent the wheel? Because based on what I am hearing from PHP
developers, the wheels we have are still kind of square.
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