Yes, I know that Shopify exists, and that Ghost is designed primarily for blogging/publishing content
But look, here’s how it is:
Shopify sucks.
Ghost doesn’t suck.
But seriously, I can’t see any good reason not to use Ghost for a small online store. I’m looking at doing this because:
I’m building a little online store for an elderly person who I’ve already shown how to use Ghost, which she is currently using for her blog website. So this would save her from having to learn how to navigate a new UI, and probably save me many hours doing unpaid tech support over the phone.
I have a strong preference for self-hosting and having full control over all of the code and infrastructure.
It costs about $5/month to run a Ghost instance on DigitalOcean. Shopify, on the other hand, begins at about $30/month, and whilst that’s likely a trivial expense to many ecommerce operations, the person I am developing this website for is on a limited budget.
Squarespace starts at a similar price as Shopify and self-hosting is also not an option there either.
She has around 15 - 20 different products in her range. So my tentative plan is to create a theme, possibly based on Casper (as that is the theme I am most familiar with, and it’s a pretty good foundation to build on) and have these 15 - 20 products featured on the index page (instead of blog posts).
I’m just putting this out there to see if anybody else might be interested, or have any suggestions.
@duscle Thank you for expressing your interest! If there is enough interest shown, I will likely develop this with the intention of releasing it as a theme for others to use as well, instead of just developing it for my specific use case. This would influence some of my design decisions, to make the theme more broadly useful for others, but it will also make the design and development a fair bit more time-consuming, so I’ll only do that if I feel there is sufficient interest from enough people.
@DonaldH for a static blog based website, (1-1 DB connection for fetching the post) ghost on a $5 DO droplet crashes (nothing else is installed here) occasionally and 100% of the time eats RAM upto 80%, if traffic goes in late double digits, it hangs and eats entire CPU and RAM.
For e-comm there will anyways be multiple DB connections which is bound to eat more RAM then a static blog.
Ghost blogs aren’t static. That’s why some Ghost users opt to use Ghost as a headless CMS in conjunction with a static site generator like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll etc.
In relation to creating an “ecommerce/store” focused theme, all I’m doing is writing or changing some HTML and CSS, and as I mentioned in the original post, this is for a small online store. I’m not adding payment processing or anything that should put additional load on my droplet. Checkout and payments will be handled by Stripe on their servers.
In any case, I can use a larger droplet if necessary and still save money unless I somehow manage to reach the $30 minimum for Shopify.
Hey @hermesalvesbr, yes I have a site up and running already but I haven’t seen enough interest to warrant putting in the additional work to make this small business/ecommerce theme generally available. Do you have a particular application in mind?
