Any ecommerce web or platform owner mind to share any technical problems and issues which you faced within these 5 years? Technical problems include server issues, downtime, error, hack case, others, and what platform you're using.

doubt anyone is gonna post this here. cause:
1. it makes them appear bad
2. it is bad for the company

ex: yahoo got hacked 2x in the past 3 years, so by posting here u r trying to tell people not to use your company , especially the platform owner

lol, too good to be true. I am expecting people who are using woocommerce, magento, opencart or saas product like shopify to post their problems here. I doubt that posting those problems will hurt their company. One thing bothering them might be they have no idea what is the real problem. As long as the cms they're using is working, cost effectiveness and optimization is just an option. They might only start nagging when shits happen...and that is very bad for operating an online store.

best to reword the title as "which ecommerce platform provider you think is best (sample: a, b, c, d, e, etc)"
cause ecommerce means selling online (or electronically), most successful ones have their own system (custom)

I'm using Shopify. The platform is stable and has all the features you need to fulfill an order, but the platform feels somewhat incomplete. For example, it can't really generate a proper sales report for you, at least this feature is not part of the Basic plan that I'm subscribing to.

Also, it does't allow you to create a child theme (like in Wordpress). So if you need to modify a theme, you will need to modify the original files, instead of creating a child file to override the source file.

I thought the way shopify modifying theme is more clean compare to wordpress. The less the size and number of your website's file the faster your website speed. Can you create your own plugins by yourself for the sales report?

I'm sure you know this isn't true. There many other factors that can affect a website's speed than just the size and number of files.
For examples, proper use of CDN and caching.


Yes, I can but it's not worth my time. My current focus is to improve the store's revenue.
Once it makes more money I'll be able to afford to upgrade the subscription plan to the one that includes sales report.

What you say in first and second sentences sound self-contradictory and misleading to me. In fact it is true that file size will affect loading speed of a website and of course it is not the only thing that affect the speed but it is definitely one of the main key for fast website else developer will not try so hard to make web files like html, images, videos and so on to minimal size. Try host a website with tons of images and videos, then another one with just some text. You will see huge loading difference. As I check out shopify in more detail, shopify indeed does not support child parent theme system as for now.

So that means, shopify do provide the sales report function but just not the plan you choose. I do believe develop the sales report plugin should not take more than few days of your time or even in single day . Since sales report is important for reporting tax, I think it's worth your time to work the sales report function first.

Yes they do provide that feature if you're willing to top up an additional $50 per month. So yeah, not exactly a technical problem there. For tax purposes I can just copy the order info into Excel and get it over with. No sweat there.

I think I should have worded my previous reply a little bit better. What I meant to say was, just because I'm adding one or some files in the child theme doesn't mean that I will slow down the website in a noticeable way.

You mean copy the order info one by one manually? sounds troublesome for me. And $50 sounds a lot for low currency exchange rate country users.

That actually depends on where is your visitors' location and the type of servers and hosting company you choose from. Even loading difference in ms still affect UX badly especially ecommerce site. Imagine each site is like 1 to 2 seconds delay compare to those optimized hosting. Your visitor is going to jump page to page to keep shopping so you can now calculate how many seconds to minutes they wasted as they wait site to load. You might say most people don't care about that, but once they found other seller's site with better shopping experience. They will just gone from your site forever. Of course there might be other reasons why they leave. I can assure you the reason shopify choose to avoid child parent theme structure is due to loading performance. That's why they try to make developer's life easier with their liquid template engine. It's like a static generator.

This post has been edited by k8houz: Mar 23 2018, 11:36 PM

I just discovered that there's an Export button and some Analytics that come with my Shopify plan.

I'm sure you would agree with me if I say if loading speed is only one part of a good UX.
Using the example that you provided, "Try host a website with tons of images and videos, then another one with just some text",
Youtube can't just become a pure text website all of sudden in the name of loading speed.
That's not good UX, that's no UX.

So yes, we need a fast website. One way to achieve this is to minimize the number of files served to the user.
Again not necessarily true in all cases, because this way you can't parallel load your files!
Serve a minimal number of files, but not in a way that affects good UX and functionality of the website.

This brings me to the next point. The number of files served to the user != the number of files you have in the backend.
This actually reminds me of my train of thought in the previous reply when I said "There many other factors that can affect a website's speed than just the size and number of files", I meant to say the size and number of files in the backend!

Using Shopify's liquid templates as an example. Parent theme has a file parent/checkout.liquid. IF I want to add some trust signals in there, says "verified by Visa" just for example. I will simply duplicate checkout.liquid from the Parent theme, add that line in there and save as child/checkout.liquid.

When the generator/compiler kicks in, it will simply use child/checkout.liquid instead of parent/checkout.liquid.
To the end user, there's no difference in terms of number of files.

Or perhaps I'm being adventurous. I really want to add a separate CSS file in my child theme called child.css, in addition to the parent's style.css.
Say the file size is 50kB -- pretty negligible. Shopify could minify it to make it even smaller. Combine all css into one file (bad for parallel loading). Distribute it through CDN.

The loading test example i provided above is not to ask you to build your website in pure text but in purpose to show you the number of files and file size is in fact will affect site loading speed since you say "I'm sure you know this isn't true." when i said "The less the size and number of your website's file the faster your website speed.". Of course everyone, even non-developer know websites normally come with at least some images or videos. This is a no-brainer.



I am not kind of sure what you mean by "you can't parallel load your files!". Rendering and loading assets is the job of user's browser not the server, server only serve request, and the way browser rendering and loading is not exactly parallel due to it's way of getting assets. In other words, it will be faster if lesser files needed to be downloaded by browser.

I am going to give you examples how should we minimize the number of files? One way to do this is decrease the number of third party script usage, like ads, tracker, javascript, jquery and third party images and modules, instead of sacrifice your design to cut the number of files which of course will hurt your site ux and definitely the content of your site.

Decrease third party assets usage can decrease the number of request send to the server and this will help your user's browser avoid downloading so many files for rendering and will enhance the loading speed. If you must use that specific assets, choose the slim version or if you know how to do code split which I am not going detail here.

Another way is minimize the number of images usage or if possible avoid images at all which encourage by google "https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/responsive/images#avoid_images_completely". However, avoid image for code might hurt mobile ux. Use chrome dev tool to check how your files and dom loaded is the best way to get more information how to optimize your site.
These are many other optimization need to do of course like choosing the right format of image, reduce the sizes and so on.



Number of files served != the number of files in server storage is true and performance is of course mostly not affected by the number of files stored in the server storage, but number of files like images, scripts or other assets which you import into html will definitely heavily affect the performance of a website and that's what i meant by number of files will affect performance. So I think this is what I made you misunderstood here. Of course there are many factors will affect website performance which I never deny.

When you think about that 50kb load in your example is nothing for your site and your users. Try think about what you're using is a saas. You're not using your own dedicated server and obviously you're not shopify's only customer. Think about sending the 50kb for hundred thousands of users concurrently every seconds, and we not yet mention about resources for compiling. Think about bandwidth cost. You will get your answer. And obviously shopify need to consider about ALL their customer's performance benefit vs their own like cost.

This post has been edited by k8houz: Mar 24 2018, 05:44 PM

This is my last reply. This hasn't been very productive use of my time.
So in my original reply I just wanted to have the child theme feature in Shopify.
Not sure how it got to this.

Anyway, I agree to many points you raised in your previous reply, the only ones that I'd like to add on to are these two points below.

Yes, those are the browser's job, but we can provide proper setup such that the browser can do its job well.
For example, enabling HTTP2 allows modern browser to load images in parallel.
If you have one big JS file, the browser simply won't know how to load a single file it in parallel.
Multiple JS files allows the browser to load them in parallel.

Like I said, lesser files DON'T ALWAYS mean faster load time.

So there are several angles to looks at this.. I will pick three: mine, Shopify's, and Some SAAS.
Not that I care about the other two. Why should I?

My perspective:
That 50kb increase is going to happen (it probably already has), whether Shopify supports child theme or not.
My target/existing customers have fast internet.
I'm not going to stay up at night worrying whether a small 50ms increase in load time is going to hurt my business.
If it does slow things down significantly, obviously I will have to say bye to a platform that can't do optimization well.
For heaven's sake, it's a tiny file.

Shopify's perspective:
That 50kb increase is specific to one store whose traffic is so small, it is like it doesn't exist.
And if the store is taking up too much bandwidth -- even better -- time to upsell for more premium services.
It's a business opportunity right there.

Resources for compiling -- minimal resources needed. It should be compiled only once then cached.

Some SAAS company:
Large scale operation, small scale operations -- it doesn't matter.
If it is crucial to the SAAS company's business, they simply MUST deliver that to the end users, even if its 500kb or 500mb.
Offer an upgrade plan or something...

I assumed our previous discussions in http/1 protocol situation, because fyi shopify still unable to use http/2, but since you mention http/2, it's indeed allows multiplexed. But what you thought about multi parallel loading is still seems not so right because
https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6
tl:dr as stated in the article:
- There is still a protocol overhead for each request compared to a single concatenated file.
- The compression of the single large file is better than many small files.
- Servers are slower serving many small files than a single large file.
They even proved it with experiment but that is back in 2016. So i assume there are improvements, but I didn't hear anyone saying bundling files is useless now for http/2. If you find one please remind me.



So what I showed you above speaks my words. I don't really agree with this based on my dev experience.
What I want to be clear is if you load lesser assets on a page vs more assets on a page under the same server, location condition. Yes, lesser always faster. Just check the google link I posted previously, they are showing you how to optimize performance with lesser files and smaller file size. I don't think there is anything fancy to discuss here, no hard feelings.

The whole point I tried to explain to you is to let you understand why shopify avoid child and parent theme structure. If you want that structure so much, my best advice to you is to send a feedback to shopify and question them about the parent and child theme structure. If you are not happy with them of course I encourage you to switch platform or even better to host your own. However, I am quite shock that you're so confident to assume all your customers have fast connection, or maybe i read you wrong. For me as a developer, we always assume there are slow connection users and taking care of their experience is priority. But anyway thanks to you and I learnt that shopify is not as perfect as I thought. At least they don't have http/2 now. You might be able to tune http/2 with their cdn fastly or you can avail cloudflare.

This post has been edited by k8houz: Mar 24 2018, 11:09 PM

I would recommend you to try Magento. It is an awesome platform for different business purposes which will surely work nicely for you. Also, take a look at the Magento extension development service from http://www.mageplace.com/mageplace-service...evelopment.html which will definitely be very helpful to you too. Hope you will find it useful here, good luck

This post has been edited by Hereda: May 3 2018, 08:23 PM

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