SwiftCart: What I learned building a Shopify alternative

Shopify is a great product — for Shopify. But if you want control over your store, your data, and your margins, you're locked into their ecosystem with limited escape routes.

I wanted to build something different: a modern, self-hostable e-commerce boilerplate that gives store owners full control without requiring them to become backend engineers.

SwiftCart started as a weekend project and grew into a full-featured platform. Multi-variant products, Stripe payment processing, an admin dashboard with real business metrics, customer management, automated emails, maintenance mode — the works.

The hardest part wasn't any single feature. It was making the right tradeoffs between flexibility and simplicity. Every feature request is a potential complexity bomb. The art is knowing what to build, what to defer, and what to explicitly leave out.

Key lessons learned:

1. Edge Config is underrated. Using Vercel's Edge Config for feature flags and store settings eliminated an entire class of database queries.

2. Authentication is a solved problem. Clerk saved me weeks of work and handles edge cases I would have missed.

3. Admin dashboards reveal your real data model. Building the admin UI forced me to think clearly about what data actually matters for store owners.

SwiftCart is heading toward an open-source release with Docker support. The goal: any developer should be able to deploy a full e-commerce store in under 10 minutes.