NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

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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