p/commerce-js-by-chec
Full-stack eCommerce API for developers & designers
Shahed Khan
Commerce.js 1.0 — Create the best commerce experiences with API level control
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Commerce.js is API-first commerce infrastructure for developers and next generation businesses.
Take full creative and commercial control of your commerce with our APIs for products, carts, checkouts, customers, and more.
Replies
Devan Koshal
Thanks for the hunt Shahed! We launched our beta late Jan and we’re happy to announce our V1 release! Commerce.js V1 has been rewritten from the ground up and has moved over $1.6m. The V1 release brings in support for automatic tax rates (including EU VAT MOSS), built-in fraud protection (via SiftScience partnership), and radically refined cart & checkout support. Here’s an example of it in action (take a look at their console debugger):
What’s unique about Commerce.js’s approach to this problem is our helper endpoints designed to handle all tedious eCommerce logic you’d normally have to program yourself. Like, Is this quantity/discount code valid? Is this variant available? What's the current total? What’s the new tax amount since the customer just changed their address etc. Docs: https://commercejs.com/docs/api
Shahed Khan
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Hunter
Commerce.js is a full-stack eCommerce API that allows developers and designers to rapidly create eCommerce experiences on web and mobile. With support for everything including cart, checkout, fulfillment, live tax rates, and fraud protection. Huge props to @devankoshal and @andrunder who've been consistently executing and grinding to get this live version out. 🎊🚀 Live Examples: https://mondaymotorbikes.com/ https://www.leonandgeorge.com/ Demo Examples (Make sure you checkout the console!) https://commercejs.com/showcase
Benjamin Lupton
Would be great to have a complete showcase of all the different live sites using it currently, with an optional description of what is Chec / Commerce.js stuff and what they did.
Devan Koshal
@balupton We will definitely be doing that when we have enough examples. We're thinking of something similar to https://framerjs.com/gallery/ but with checkouts/purchasing experiences you can download or view.
Dylan Jhaveri
This looks very exciting and promising for someone building any kind of eCommerce checkout flow. Having worked on an eCommerce product before, at first you think a cart and checkout process would be trivial but it actually ends up being incredibly complex when you get into shipping rates, taxes, currencies, discounts, fraud. It looks like commerce.js handles all this complexity.
Andrew Underwood
@dylanjha Cheers! Checkout logic certainly is a big pain point when it comes to eCommerce builds, hopefully we've eliminated that for you now :)
Vinay Hiremath
I love the attention-to-detail at the API layer. I've been following Devan's progress on this platform and can say with confidence that I think commerce.js will be around for a while. :-)
Devan Koshal
@vhmth Thanks man!
Filippo Mursia
@andrunder @devenkoshal - Seems very interesting, and I actually have to work on an eCommerce soon. What are the technical difference between Commerce.js and Moltin? I was planning to use Moltin, but now the game is on!
Andrew Underwood
@mrdobelina @devenkoshal The primary difference between Commerce.js and Moltin is integration speed and the merchant dashboard. With Commerce.js you can launch in a fraction of the time. Our helper endpoints and general approach to integration contribute to this -> https://commercejs.com/docs/intr.... Devan goes into detail about it here - https://www.producthunt.com/post... Moltin's focus is on building eCommerce infrastructure. Commerce.js is focused on the storefront and "purchasing experience" integration as well giving 100% design control beyond the storefront. Our merchant dashboard is another big differentiator. We have a merchant first approach to everything we build and spend as much time focusing on the merchant as we do on the developer. We're meticulous about this as it is where the end user (merchant/admin) will spend most of their time after you're done with the integration.
Filippo Mursia
@andrunder @devenkoshal thanks for the explanation! I'll be sure to check out Commerce.js with my developer.
Adham Badr
beautiful designs and seems like a sleek product, however 3% plus payment (usually 2-2.9% for cc) is a bit lavish. The developer in me wants to give it a go but I know no startup with a decent volume would sign a constant 0.5-1% off every sale to a new platform that easily. Hope you guys reconsider your pricing, Id like to see this a hit.
Devan Koshal
@adhambad Thanks for the kind words. We have 2 monthly plans which offer 1% per transaction & 0.5% per transaction. We're also planning on releasing a 0% transaction fee at a later date. Trying to get revenue in quickly since we're currently bootstrapping everything :) What we we like about our standard plan is the fact it lets you try out the platform without any upfront costs and our success is dependent on your success i.e. when you make money, we make money. The 2/3%, 1%, and 0.5% options are pretty common in the eCommerce space - for example shopify's plans are $29 + 2% per transaction $79 + 1% per transaction $299 + 0.5% per transaction Hopefully we can drop our pricing when we see more $ moving through the platform, but at this stage we have to keep it where it currently is. Wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on alternative pricing models you'd like to see. Thanks again!
Adham Badr
@devankoshal thanks for taking up on me, I get the price modelling from your point of view :) but i've been there with a lot of startups at the stage to choose the right platform to sell their products and I know how the pros and cons weighing go on with this decision, which as a cto you'll have to live with and defend for long! my honest opinion : - any company who can afford 300$ license per month will not happily sign off another 0.5% next to the payment fees. I've seen them all as they grow, everyone exhaustingly negotiates every 0.1% with their payment provider as it really hurts revenue once the numbers go up, growth startups will always prefer fixed costs over scaling ones. Which makes using your platform has a hight potential to migrate later; - Im happy to hear you're changing the price model once cash flows in, however migrating the shopping infrastructure midways is a killer for companies; therefore experienced people happily take a good deal knowing it works for them the next 2-3 years than gambling on such an important piece of infrastructure. - I never used Shopify, but what i understood their 2% is including the payment gateway and yours not. Even if its not the case, my honest evaluation before even reading your comment you have to be at least half shopify's price since they have double the experience (im sure you guys are great devs, but experience in ecommerce not so uncommon ecommrece problems is invaluable). you'll need patience from your first users of course till you get there, however the arguments to move in given all the available "relatively maturer" platforms (magento, opencart, moltin, keystone, simplecart) given the price are not that attractive. Im not a biz dev guy to give you a constructive price modelling suggestion, im just letting you in on my thoughts as a customer. Hope the insight is useful!
joshua bradley
Looks like a pretty awesome and elegant solution-any plans for ruby gem/sdk? Also, with Stripe support does it allow for subscription + single products on same cart? @andrunder @devenkoshal
Devan Koshal
@airjoshb @andrunder @devenkoshal - Yup we actually have them ready (thanks to Swagger) should be live post thanksgiving. Subscription items are still in development but yes it will! When we were rewriting the cart/checkout we wanted to make it product agnostic. All items should work together in the cart regardless of there settings. Product Types Digital Physical Items with PWYW enabled PreOrder Items Subscription items all will work together in the cart.
joshua bradley
@devankoshal @andrunder @devenkoshal very cool. I am rebuilding a subscription based product right now—not sure if I can wait, but will definitely give it a whirl when it is ready.
Devan Koshal
@airjoshb @andrunder @devenkoshal No problem, subscription support is probably about a 4 to 6 weeks away.
Devan Koshal
@airjoshb Hi Joshua, just letting you know our Ruby SDK is now available - https://github.com/chec/commerce...
Andrei Oprisan
Does this support Apple Pay? Also, a wizard setup would be nice, making it easier for designers than developers, as it stands. Really awesome work here, congrats!
Devan Koshal
@andreioprisan Not yet, but we're working on it. We've were actually hoping to have a wizard setup and ready to go for this release, but didn't want to hold the release back any longer. Thanks for the kind words!
Bryan Curtin
Great work guys! This looks amazing. Can't wait to get a site up and running on this API
ʀʀ
This is super cool! I can imagine a million use cases and a million feature requests to go along with it. What will you guys be focusing on? What's on the roadmap coming up?
Devan Koshal
@ronradu Thanks! Next up where focusing on preorder + subscription support, as well as integration 3 party providers such as TaxJar, ShipStation, Printful, etc and more payment gateways. Stay tuned for our Extend SDK
Joe Thomas
Top Product
Well done @devankoshal and @andrunder! For those who are a little less nerd-savvy, how quickly would it take somebody to integrate Commerce.js over Shopify or Magento?
Devan Koshal
@joethomas_x @andrunder Thanks Joe! That really depends on what your trying to create, at the most basic level you could have something up and running inside your existing website in a matter of hours. The longest part of any eCommerce integration is usually in the creation of the checkout. Checkouts are notoriously difficult due to how dynamic they need to be. The customer changes one thing that could trigger something else that needs to happen etc. It's for this exact reason why we created helper endpoints to do the heavy lifting for you when you build with Commerce.js. Some examples of what the helper functions do: - Create client side validation rules which can be passed straight into jQuery, all you have to do is make sure your input names match - simply call "Commerce.Checkout.helperValidation()" - Calculate live tax rates for an order - just call "Commerce.Checkout.setTaxZone()" - Check if the pay what you want price entered by the customer is valid - "Commerce.Checkout.checkPayWhatYouWant()" We even built-in a few helpers purely to help the developer/designer such as; - Getting a list of countries for a dropdown - Getting a list of states/provinces in a country for a dropdown - Calculating the buyers location from their IP address (If you ever wanted to just pre fill address inputs or just have it handy) (For a full list of current helpers, check out the docs - https://commercejs.com/docs/api/...) What's great about this approach is that every time a helper function is called that influences price, for example setting a new tax zone or verifying if a quantity is available, we can (and do!) return something we call "The live object" - https://commercejs.com/docs/api/.... This is a living object which constantly updates & changes based on what events are happening, it contains things like up-to-date totals, tax breakdowns for the current cart, and more. The entire purpose of the live object is to solve this question. "What new total(s) do we show now that X has happened?" There's not a set answer I could give here, but in a nutshell even the most entry level developer/designer with basic HTML/JS knowledge could have something up and running in a few hours to days. We want the kids at home that are up at 4am learning how to code to be able to use this, so we're trying to make the skill set barrier to entry next to none.
Drew Bedard
Love it. Got set-up in minutes and it has a beautiful interface
Andrew Underwood
@drewbedard Thanks Drew, awesome you're already up and running!
Shruti Kaushik
Does it wire up with Woocommerce, Magento and other providers?
Devan Koshal
@shrutikaushikit We're more of an api based/cloud competitor to those platforms. Unlike woocommerce we work on can work on any CMS and you don't have to deal with Wordpress's backend admin, and we're quicker to integrate than Magento (you're not making an existing codebase work around your website) You can get an idea of how easily it fits around your code here - https://gist.github.com/dvnkshl/... :)
Sam Maclean
This is slick guys, great detail touches and looks very functional! Keep up the good work.
Paul Benigeri
Worked in the same coworking space as @devenkoshal and @andrunder for a few months. We were often the only ones in the office late at night and on the weekends. Super excited to see their hard work come together. I've been using the new Commerce.js beta for a couple personal projects and have been loving it. Their apis and tools are super easy to use. Very easy to customize the checkout flow while keeping it smooth, simple and well designed. I remember talking to Andrew about how Commerce.js could facilitate A/B testing, especially for the checkout flow. Can you talk about some of the A/B testing features you were able to ship in v1.0 and how the compare to some of the other competitive products?
Andrew Underwood
@paul_benigeri Yeah! The ability to easily A/B test checkouts was a feature that kept coming up when speaking with developers and merchants. Commerce.js lets you create as many checkouts as you want and have true control over the purchasing experience for your checkouts. Test a multi step checkout vs one page checkout. Test a heavily branded checkout vs a more traditional plain checkout, all are simple to design, implement and launch. CJS plugs into any major analytics platform so you can determine which has the best conversion rate and track your customer purchasing journey. You can literally implement any design or flow you can think of to see what resonates with your audience!
Devan Koshal
@paul_benigeri @devenkoshal @andrunder One other interesting potential is re-engaging abandoned cart customers. For example if you notice a customer dropped off on the 3rd page of a multi step checkout you could then re-engage them with a single page checkout. Our tokenization approach lets carts & checkout "instances" live for up to 7 days and accessed anywhere - They drop of on their desktop during a multi step checkout, you can re-engage them on their phone with a one page checkout.
Paul Benigeri
@andrunder Yeah sounds great. The deep integrations of cart + customer info + billing seems very powerful. Connecting everything together is usually the hardest part. Thanks for the additional info.
Christine Stahl
Looks like a great idea!
Arnob Mukherjee
Damn this is something beautiful :)