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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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