shelf-cms.io commerce 💖 Firebase

Tomer Shalev — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:50:40 +0000

The Promise

What if I told you, that you can transform your firebase project into a headless commerce cms for your online store or application ?

Meet shelf-cms.io

shelf turns your firebase resources into a headless commerce platform.

shelf is a CMS (Content Management System) essentially. Out of the box, it does this while utilizing the following resources, that are available to you

Firestore Database

Firestore is the leading no-SQL database offering by Google. Some of it's benefits

Very generous free tier
pay as you go pricing above the free tier
Infinitely scalable as opposed to other common databases

shelf manages your firestore to create the a fully functional commerce platform. It does so by managing the following collections:

/products collection to store product information
/collections collection to store collections information
/storefronts collection to manage storefront data
/tags collection to manage laconic key value tags (helpful for filtering)
/users collection to manage users
/discounts collection to manage automatic and manual(coupons) discounts
/orders collection to manage orders with states and line items
/shipping_methods collection to manage shipping methods
/images collection to manage images
/payment_gateways collection to manage configurations of payment gateways
/posts collection to manage rich media
/notifications collection to manage admin notifications
/settings collection to manage admin notifications

Once, shelf manages these collections for your project, you can use them in your app however you want at client side and backend side. But, we made things simpler for you, we developed an optional client side SDK and a sample backend to enable payments and checkouts from a website as well as emails.

Storage

Object Storage is a classic serverless object storage, where you can store images, files, jsons and any type of blob you can think of. shelf leverages storage services

To store images you upload and edit in the products page
Save compressed exported collections with embedded products
Save compressed exported storefronts

We support the following object storage services

Cloudflare R2 storage

yes, we support it

Amazon S3

yes, we support it

Any S3 compatible service

such as minIO

Firebase Google Storage

Of course, we also support Google storage

Firebase Authentication (identity)

shelf uses firebase authorization to distinguish you as part of the admin users, that's it.

Firebase Functions

firebase functions is Google's leading serverless functions offering. shelf does not require functions, but we recommend using them for the following use cases:

Integrating payment API such as PayPal standard checkout or stripe at your website
Sending Emails for events when a user onboards or when an order was confirmed or shipped.

Luckily, we have open sourced our very small and effective backend, that you can deploy in few clicks, and the best part, you can customize it to your own needs.

Why use SHELF

There are a few reasons why we created this platform, let's discuss it

Scalability

All of Firebase's products are scalable, infinitely or so scalable. As opposed, to the old paradigm were one would have to rent a single server, install a database on it and cross his fingers, that traffic will not overwhelm the server and the database.

So, amazingly enough, we are in the era of scalability, a thing that is hard to achieve with classic WordPress sites.

Cost

You really cannot get something better. Firebase has an amazing free tier and a pay as you go (usage based) price one you surpass it. shelf was born to take advantage of this cost effectiveness.

You can operate a small store without ever surpassing the free tier of firebase.

Headless

Headless Commerce systems are the present and future. By decoupling the presentation layer, i.e front-end from your business logic, you enable a lot of things:

Scalability - No longer does your backend system determines the vast performance of your frontend
Originality - No more do you have to deal with pre-made templates. Now you can craft your own original websites and unique experiences to delight your customers.
Omnichannels - Your backend can serve both mobile, web, desktop and IoT users

Customizable

You can customize and craft your own commerce behaviours at the backend. shelf is aware to some parts of your backend (should you choose to use one).

Speed

A lot of commerce systems have the notion of a payment gateway, for example, where they try to capture all possible features of some payment API such as stripe.

In reality, users only need to use one branch of these features, costing them in speed and bugs. We provide you a solid backbone, that you can take shape the features you need.

Our PayPal integration is just a single file, easy to understand and change for your own needs, if changes are needed.

We do not maintain a plugin with 1000 issues at github covering all possible payment scenarios, it is an overkill. We instead, use minimalism as a guide to use only what we require.

Versatility

You can use shelf to run your offline business, just to manage your inventory, customers and orders.
You can get started in minutes with shelf

Toolings

The shelf platform comes with some delights to make it easy to use at client and backend side.

shelf-client-js-sdk - a very simple client side js sdk, that talks to firebase with it's lightweight REST API. It takes care of authentication, public resources like products, collections, storefronts etc..
shelf-client-react-hooks - a React hook lib for shelf
shelf-backend - a base backend for shelf example. Easy to customize (only 160kb)

My online store costs me 1$ per year

Tomer Shalev — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:41:57 +0000

Yes, this is true, not a bait of any sort. Developers and Entrepreneurs beware of this.

Short Story

Me and my son started a retro video games shop 🚀, we used the following tools, which amounted to less than a 1USD for operational costs per year

This is the Cost of our project for the first 20 days of July

How we did it ?

Firebase > Pay as you go cloud database, storage and user management
SHELF CMS > Online Commerce Management System, that you login to with your firebase credentials. It will convert your firebase into a Headless commerce CMS
PayPal > We accept credit cards 💳 with PayPal
Cloudflare R2 > We store images/json assets with Cloudflare R2 storage service, which we connect to with SHELF-CMS. They do not have egress fees like other providers (which is amazing)
Cloudflare Pages > We serve our website static website with this amazing service
Firebase Functions > for creating Checkouts, Payments and Marketing Emails, we also connect it to SHELF-CMS

Long Story

There is no long story, simply follow the instructions 📖 @ SHELF-CMS.

It is really fast to setup

Forem: Tomer Shalev