ericingram

Joined 16 years ago

Karma

559

Submissions

329

Member since

Jul 16

Web developer, designer, entrepreneur, skeptic, father.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago

Swell is a headless, API-first ecommerce platform that many of our users would describe as an a modern alternative to Shopify.

I'm the CEO/co-founder at here, and want to give credit to HN community for giving me a lot of encouragement early on, but in truth this has been a long journey for us to get to a place where we can say, Swell is truly a great alternative to the current "state of the art", which is managing your physical products and subscription products in two different backends. We made a key decision to make subscriptions a native feature, and to make it great, for everyone.

This post marks our announcement of a huge set of features and improvements to subscriptions, including a new headless commerce theme: Horizon (our 2nd one total so far), that will make it easier than ever to launch a beautiful, customizable, and scalable subscription membership site with Swell.

Check it out and let me know what you think :)

Show HN: API-first alternative to ReCharge and Shopify in one checkout swell.is

13 ericingram 5 years ago 1 comments

Comment · 6 years ago

Thanks @tejasmanohar! It's been a great personal journey and now global team effort to get Swell here. For the HN community, what really makes Swell interesting is that it's build on a fully customizable API schema, which enables you to create custom endpoints (content models) that are deeply integrated with all the standard ecommerce functionality you'd expect from a modern SaaS platform. That's what makes Swell fundamentally an infrastructure, and the foundation of the product.

On top of that, we want to make adopting Swell easy and approachable for everyone, not just developers, so we've created a concept called "headless themes" which is a complete store frontend that we host for you, or you can host yourself on Netlify/Vercel. It's essentially a custom app, but works out of the box as an ideal starting point for the long term growth of an ecommerce brand. The key point is that it's integrated with a theme editor/customizer so that admins can control content and other important aspects of their storefront, as enabled by developers. We're standardizing official themes on Vue/Nuxt.js, because we think it's the most accessible and well documented framework, but themes can be built with React or any future framework that comes around.

Check it out on github: https://github.com/swellstores/origin-theme

Comment · 10 years ago

You just need to eat less. A lot less than you expect and a lot less than you hear about from traditional diet advice.

React Storefront github.com

2 ericingram 10 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 11 years ago

I think we solved the common issues with REST for Schema (https://schema.io) in a way that makes it really nice for developing web apps. For example, to include related resources you can specify an `expand` field in a get request, and if you want to include unrelated resources you can do it with the `include` field.

There are probably good ways to solve most if not all of the problems people typically run into with REST APIs for web apps, but it could take a lot of experimentation to figure them out. It sure took us a while.

Comment · 11 years ago

Glad to hear that! For the time being we recommend using the HTTP endpoint with `requests` for python. The official python client will take some time longer because we haven't seen a very big demand for it vs other priorities. However, if anyone is interested in developing it with us, please contact me at eric at schema.io.