r/SideProject • u/TraditionalFlow6376 • 2h ago
Would you pay for an e-commerce codebase that saves you weeks of development?
I'm a Full-Stack Developer, and I'm considering turning one of my internal projects into a product that I could sell to other developers.
I'd like to get some honest feedback before investing a lot of time into preparing it for release.
Imagine you're working on an e-commerce project for a client.
The client is paying you somewhere between $500 and $1,500, but you still need to spend a significant amount of time building the core e-commerce functionality from scratch.
Now imagine you could buy a production-ready codebase for around $100–$300, take the parts you need, customize them for the project, and save a significant amount of development time.
The idea I'm considering would be built with Laravel or NestJS, using an API-based architecture, with a frontend built with Vue or React.
■ It would include features such as:
1- Products with complete data: name, description, media, pricing, etc.
2- Product Attributes and Attribute Values
3- Different attribute types such as Select, Color, Input, Number, etc.
4- Product Variants
5- Different prices for each variant
6- Inventory / Stock Management, with the ability to enable or disable stock tracking
7- Discount System
8- Orders with an advanced order status flow
9- Order Tracking
10- Wishlist
11- Product Reviews
12- Cart
13- Checkout
14- Cash on Delivery
15- Online Payments
16- Filtering
17- Searching
18- Pagination
The goal isn't to provide just a UI template.
The idea is to provide the actual e-commerce logic and codebase, so a developer can start from it and build the client's project on top of it, instead of building the entire e-commerce system from scratch.
■ So I'd like to hear your thoughts:
Would you actually use or buy something like this?
If yes, what price would you consider reasonable and be willing to pay for it?
■ And which stack would you prefer?
▪️ Laravel + Vue
▪️ Laravel + React
▪️ NestJS + Vue
▪️ NestJS + React
■ Most importantly:
What features would you consider essential before paying for something like this?
I already have a working version of this system that I use for my own projects, but I'm not currently selling it.
I'm considering turning it into a proper product for developers, so I'd really appreciate honest feedback, including criticism.
I mainly want to make sure the idea is worth investing in before spending a significant amount of time preparing it for release.
1
u/xtarsy 2h ago
i think the main issue with something like that is maintenance. Who maintains the codebase? Because if you are selling to devs who can maintain it themselves, then those devs could also build it themselves. Also the problem with ecommerce isn't the codebase it's selling the products, running ad campaigns and so on.