What is the back-end

A webshop has a front-end and a back-end. The front-end is the side of your website that is facing your customers. Your customers see a visually well thought out view of your products. Where they can search, filter, sort, and buy your products. A back-end is the part of the shop the customer does not see. This is where you manage your products. Where you can update prices and where you can add information about your products.

Shopify

We would only recommend using Shopify in case are already using Shopify as a place to store your products. Shopify can be used as a back-end for a headless webshop. Its a great choice for many use cases. But when we start from scratch we would seldom choose Shopify. Care to know why? Mail us at support@shoppingstreet.io.

BigCommerce

Our comments for BigCommerce are exactly the same as Shopify's. Both options are similarly priced at approximately $30 per month. There is no free-tier for start-ups.

Stripe

Stripe can be used as a backend for simple shops. If you have a few products and you don't mind having your own checkout flow, we would recommend to use valuable time to create a beautiful store and use Stripe Checkout. With Stripe checkout you have a list of products on your stripe account and you simply send the unique product id to Stripe and you will go through a beautifully designed checkout form by Stripe.

We can also create a complete custom checkout flow with [Stripe Elements] (https://stripe.com/en-gb-nl/payments/elements). Don't worry, we will recognise when its worth considering using just Stripe and not a dedicated full back-end. Pros and cons will be taken into account. Also, we will think what to do with the customer data and payment, i.e. we will help organise the technical best way to do your order fulfillment.

A typical headless e-commerce solution handles all the fundamental tasks we’d expect from an e-commerce website, like inventory management, a shopping cart process, and a checkout process.

Source Lob.com post, by Sid Maestre

Commercejs

Commercejs is currently our primary option. It offers a free tier for 2% of your sales. It offers a subscription for $79 per month.

Saleor

This is not a javascript back-end but a back-end build with Python. This is a good option if your own team comes from a Python background. It offers similar capability as Commercejs and Swell. Saleor is open-sourced and can relatively easily be deployed to Heroku at low cost.

Swell

Swell is similar to the other options. It offers a free tier for 2% of your sales. A standard subscription (the next tier) is $299 per month. This is much more expensive than Commercejs.

Mailchimp Open Commerce (formerly Reaction Commerce)

This is a good outside option. It offers certain advantages and disadvantages and if this is a good option for your use-case should be assessed on a case- by-case basis.

Snipcart

Another lightweight solution which may be considered is Snipcart. Again, it is priced at 2% of your sales via Snipcart.