Is GAE the right choice for e-commerce?

[decuman]

Hello,

At the moment I'm thinking of building a small/medium online selling
business and before investing more of my time (and money) into GAE
based development it would be just great to know some experienced
users and expert thoughts and opinions on it.

As far as I can see (after reading related books, articles and message
group threads) GAE is just a perfect solution for prototyping and
building a social networking applications (Blogs, Chats, Galleries,
Message boards etc.) which requires tracking a lot of users and
storing data... which is great. But there is quite a few (literally
none) of nice business/e-commerce applications with decent product
galleries, shopping carts and checkout functionality and payment
service integration. Also there are lots of complains and negative
responses pointing to big GAE functional limitations (which are not
going to improve soon or ever) and overall practicability of using it
as a reliable e-commerce platform. In particular (PayPal, Google
Checkout integration)

It wasn't a very deep and thoughtful investigation but the outlined
above is just my personal subjective feeling so far. I would really
love to know the opinion and thoughts on this matter from GAE experts.
Shell I move forward with Google App Engine development or it would be
move wise to consider some other solution?

Thanks in advance!
NG

[Mike]

Hi NG

We are running our business on AppEngine. (Search "Shoes of Prey" on
Google to find us.)

So far, it is going really well. AppEngine is a delight to develop on,
and you can't argue with the cost. (I've only been charged $0.01 so
far. Although, as I've posted in another thread, the small charge by
itself was problematic for me.) :)

I had to write the entire ecommerce platform from scratch - which
suited me given the very custom nature of our business - however you
may not be as keen as me. It really depends on your business.

We choose AppEngine primarily because a) 2 of us used to work at
Google, and we love AppEngine b) if we start serving a lot of traffic/
bandwidth we want something scalable. As I said earlier as well, the
API is really nice and makes developing a breeze.

The only thing I wish AppEngine had was HTTPS support for custom
domains, and I'm hopeful that one day it will be supported. There are
workarounds too. Once AppEngine has HTTPS support and a few open-
source ecommerce software packages, it will be a really great platform
I would think.

Good luck.

Mike

[ng]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply. It is really helpful and encouraging to know
that there are successful e-Commerce models already running good on
GAE. Your online shop looks GREAT! Clean and intuitive design with
simple cart + payment structure. And yes, it is pretty much the same
that I want to do for my service - to write a custom (yet simple)
shopping cart and be able to control and change anything quick and
easy (as I understand it)... and due do appEngine development
simplicity phenomenon I actually enjoy doing it right now, but, as I
mentioned above, my main concern is all about the simplicity of
adding, controlling, 'rewiring' and, the last but not least, securing
clients online payments. I'm pretty sure it is relatively easy for an
experienced web programmer (especially Google programmer;) to set it
up nicely from the scratch but not that transparent for a beginner
(like myself) to make that part running properly without fiddling with
different approaches, trials and fails... and true, I wish there were
a couple of reliable open-source e-commerce solutions already to
investigate and rely on. Also I guess there could be a decent
guideline for embedding Google Checkout service... at least it seems
natural as it is Google's proprietary online paying system.

Thanks,
NG

[Hazzadous]

I decided to negated the issue of finding a commerce framework to run
on appengine and went for the javascript option of Google Checkout
Shopping Cart, which is working pretty well for me at www.rafikirecords.com
. Details at http://sites.google.com/site/checkoutshoppingcart/

If you wanted to secure checkout you'd have to do some more work
playing with signing the carts but its doable, and you have gchecky
available that could be of some help.

If you find any nice carts that work on appengine it would be good to
check it out. If I was to start again, I'd probably look at satchmo
or the parts that it has been broken up in to (django-bursar etc) and
see if I could get something working with django-nonrel. Ok if you
don't mind the django dep.

[Danny Tuppeny]

On Feb 1, 1:19 pm, Mike <mickn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We choose AppEngine primarily because a) 2 of us used to work at
> Google, and we love AppEngine

Wha? People leave Google? Madness!

Some of us would give up our spacebarstoworkforGoogle;)

[Kaan Soral]

You can check the headers with something like Firebug yourself, the answer is 99% Yes, as server seems to be Google Frontend

Also even before seeing the headers, I was 90% sure it was still an Appengine app, because it took a significant amount of time to load the app initially, might not have been Appengine's fault tho

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:11:22 AM UTC+2, Adam Wooding wrote:

Hi Mike,

I just came across your post and had a look at your Shoes of Prey app - it is fantastic!

I am also about to begin work creating a similar app, but for custom made wardrobes / closets. I'm just wondering - which language did you build your app on? Are you still running it on Google App Engine?

Any tips / advice you could give would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Adam Wooding

[Mike]

Hi Adam and Kaan

Yes, we still use AppEngine for our website, which is written in Python. Our 3D shoe designer infrastructure though is hosted elsewhere for now.

We're big fans of AppEngine!! It's great not having to think about infrastructure, and having rich APIs already installed. (Disclosure: I'm a former goog software engineer, so quite biased!) :-)

Not only is the platform a pleasure to use, but it's scaled beautifully when we've needed it to, for example the time when a 16 year old video blogger sent 1/2 million people to our site: http://www.22michaels.com/2010/03/juicystar07-and-world-of-new-media.html

Kaan - that's interesting it was slow! Where are you based? How slow was it? We're also using Google's PageSpeed service, so it shouldn't be slow.

Cheers

Mike

[Kaan Soral]

Wow that youtube story is really interesting and inspiring, thanks for sharing.

I also share your feelings towards AppEngine. I've been using AppEngine for ~2 years now, life is better.

I'm from Turkey, the Net graph of Firebug showed 350ms when I first checked, but the initial load was really slow, might be a DNS or third party library issue, also might be an issue with my network, currently checked the website again, loaded very fast, extremely fast. (also tested a shift-refresh, it was fast again, however optimizely gave 400 bad request and delayed the page load by 700ms, unimportant). So to sum up, don't worry, it was probably an isolated network issue

[Adam Wooding]

Hi Mike and Kaan,

Thank you very much for your replies.

Mike congratulations on the success of shoesofprey - I have been very interested in your story as what you have achieved and the direction you are heading in is similar to what we are trying to achieve with our do it yourself wardrobe products and our wardrobe designer. Thank you for the inspiration!

I have come from a PHP background, but since finding out about Google App Engine I am now planning on switching to Python as it just seems like such a solid and reliable infrastructure. The scaling is also a big bonus.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply to me, it is very much appreciated :)

Cheers,

Adam

[Umesh Veerasingam]

Hi Mike,

Do you have any documentation/API (links) about the visa/credit card payment option on your site(Shoes of Prey)?

Thanks.

[Kaan Soral]

What do you mean by that question - are you looking for payment solutions?

By the way, unrelated, I had the youtube success story bookmarked, stumbled upon it not so long ago, envied the result a lot :)
I'm also struggling acquiring an initial user-base, reached out to 1-2 tumblr celebrities without any luck, might take this bump as a sign and reach out to some youtube celebrities too :)

[Mike Knapp]

Hi Umesh

We use Adyen to process our payments. However there are many solution providers on the market you could use, e.g. Stripe or Braintree.

Mike :)