Find & Pick an opensource project that provides same or similar features to shopify. Learn the method of how to self host which ever solution is picked. Be it regular web hosting or some sort of docker hosting.
Some of these projects also provide a hosting service. They just setup a server with the project preconfigured & ready for use. At that point you are on your own on how use the web app, they will only handle the hosting side of things. This might be a good option as long as its a good hosting service.
Another area to dig into is the payment gateway / processor that can be tied into the store front. Quick search shows the following: Ayden, Stripe, GoCardless, Authorize.net, TrustCommerce and PayPal
- Monthly or Yearly web hosting. Dreamhost is about $150 a year as an example.
- Domain name, about $20 a year
- Payment Processor, Paypal is 2.9% to 3.5% plus $0.49 of each transaction amount
- Ex: $10 transaction at 2.9%
- $0.29 + $0.49 = $0.78 total transaction fee
- $10.00 - $0.78 = $9.22 total transaction earnings
- Sales taxes might not be handled by payment processor, each state has its own rules & percentages
- What sort of features from shopify are you looking for?
- How many sales are you expecting to have per month?
- What sort of products are being sold? physical item? digital item? a service?
- Data Security, if its a good project it should be hard to hack into to steal data like credit card info, hopefully the app doesn't store this info.
- Unknowns of working with payment gateways directly
- How to handle sales tax for each state
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https://opensourcealternative.to/alternativesto/shopify
- https://medusajs.com/
- Has a hosting solution as a quick way to use the app
- https://woocommerce.com/
- https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce
- Can run on DreamHost through a WordPress Plugin. Something I can try since I have dreamhost.
- http://www.magento.com/
- https://prestashop.com/
- https://saleor.io/
- https://spreecommerce.org/
- https://medusajs.com/