django-SHOP

Django-SHOP aims to be a the easy, fun and fast e-commerce counterpart to django-CMS.

Here you can find the full documentation for django-SHOP.

Build the database model out of the product's properties – not vice versa

Most e-commerce systems are shipped with a predefined database model for products. But products can vary a lot, and it simply is impossible to create a model which fits for all of them. This is esspecially true for products with a hierarchy of variants. In many popular e-commerce platforms, you either have far too many attributes per product, and/or the really required attributes are missing.

In django-SHOP implementations, the product models reflect their pysical properties making it possible to create complete and deep hierarchies of variations, but without having to fiddle with unneeded properties. It furthermore avoids the need for an Entity Attribute Value Model, which is considered a database anti-pattern, because it produces far too many table joins, when filtering by property.

Don't build pages using hard-coded templates – compose them

With the advent of frameworks, such as Angular, React, Vue and Aurelia, building web-applications shifted from a page-centric to a component-based approach.

In django-SHOP, you are in full control over the page's layout, since all components are encapsulated and independent from each other. This means that instead of adopting the Catalog, Cart, Checkout and Order pages, use the django-CMS plugin system to compose everything required for those pages.

All Views are either HTML or RESTful services

Browser based navigation is important, but nowadays it's only one of many channels clients use to communicate with a web-server. Consider Single Page Applications or other native clients, where we use RESTful APIs instead of pure HTTP.

This substantially reduces the payload having to be transferred. It furthermore gives the client a smoother user experience, since only the content has to be updated, rather than having to do full page reloads.

Programmable cart modifiers

During checkout, taxes have to be applied or attributed. Depending on the shipping destination, the product group and other factors, this computation can either be simple or quite demanding. Django-SHOP offers a pluggable interface to create modifiers which calculate the cart's totals, taxes and other costs.

This same interface can be extended to compute the weight and shipping costs. It also can be used for subtracting discounts or to add additional charges.

Programmable workflow for fulfilment and delivery

Fulfilling and shipping orders probably requires the most individual adaption for an e-commerce business. Django-SHOP offers a programmable interface for order by using a finite state machine to adopt the workflow. Each order may have several states, but the only actions allowed are limited to explicitly defined state transitions.

It's modular

Whenever possible, extra features should be added by third party libraries. This implies that django-SHOP aims to provide an API, which allows merchants to add every feature they desire.

Currently there are third party libraries for several Payment Service Providers, such as PayPal, Stripe, BS-PayOne and Viveum. An open interface allows you to add any other provider.

Shipping Service Providers may be added as third party library as well. With SendCloud, ship your orders using one or more parcel services available for your region.

Start by building your own demo

Instead of providing an accessible online demo, django-SHOP can be set up in less than three minutes and preconfigured to your needs. Having access to the product models, you can immediatly start to play arround with, rename, and modify them to reflect the properties of your products. This is the easiest way to get a shop up and running out of the box with the flexibility of a website that you could have built from scratch.

If you want to start with a fresh demo, please use the prepared Cookiecutter template for django-SHOP and follow the instructions.

Audience of django-SHOP users

Specifically, we aim at providing a clean, modular and Pythonic/Djangonic implementation of an e-commerce framework, that a moderately experienced Django developer should be able to pick up and run easily. Pure Django models are used to describe each product type, and so the Django admin can be used to build a minimalistic editor for each of them.

Consultancy

We provide full consultancy support and are available for building complete e-commerce systems based on django-SHOP. Please contact office@awesto.com for further questions.

Documentation

Read the full documentation on Read-the-docs:

https://django-shop.readthedocs.io/en/latest/