unchained.shop 2018-2019
Authors: P. Kaufmann, V. Rudelj
Pascal and Vedran have been asked to build a combined B2C/B2B online-shop for a startup called Avantyard early 2017. The guys of Avantyard just finished their very successful crowdfunding campaign for a new smell-free thrash bin: Freezyboy.
We believe in cutting edge web app technology and when we started to evaluate existing shop platforms we tried to match the feature-sets with our requirements. After a while we found out that actually only one open-source digital commerce platform could suite as a base for the Freezyboy shop at that time: Magento.
We had a look at the technology stack and then decided to build our own shop platform. A platform which is designed for the future.
That was the hour of birth of the unchained.shop platform.
Bootstrapped by 2 Entrepreneurs:
- Pascal Kaufmann, 32, Software Engineer & Operations, Founder of Reactive Code GmbH
- Vedran Rudelj, 40, Interaction Design Engineer & Finances, Founder of Fliptation GmbH
That power team has almost everything which is needed to build the company.
- Vedran is an Interaction Design Engineer who enjoys to design & develop components, style guides, websites, apps & shops. Running Kickshops (https://kickshops.com) & Unchained Commerce.
- Pascal has 10 years of software development experience in web & native apps, lead a team at Swisscom and was once a SAP consultant and network engineer.
Both of them studied business administration and work for their own companies since many years.
We are still looking for somebody to relieve us with the PR, Sales & Social Media parts.
Become the next global market leader in digital commerce, unchaining enterprises from monolithic proprietary software.
To build the current software stacks we have already invested tons of non-billable hours. All investments flow into a Slicing Pie equity splitting model.
Unchained.shop is an open-source omni-channel digital commerce platform for the IOT.
Open Source
Development agencies and enterprises that create and maintain software drop proprietary software out of their landscapes.
Most of the time, this is because of the following killer argument: Users of OSS prevent vendor lock-in. Using software that is open to the public leads to communities that help each other, the software is resilient to economic issues like bankruptcy of the software owner.
Therefore, opening up the source code of unchained is not a goodwill, it's a key factor to gain market share on the backs of already established digital commerce platforms.
Headless & Hackable
Building an enterprise storefront includes evaluating digital commerce platforms to find out what the different platforms can deliver. Non-hackable software (like SaaS) use the technique of "customizing", meaning they provide a massive control panel where every aspect of the software can be configured, themed or disabled. Sadly there is always something that needs some extra development work and people need to hire somebody to create a plugin.
Unchained is not trying to create an online shop which can be configured by a non-developer, the software flow is changed through code and not through UI. This means a software developer is always required to configure the platform. It's called "hackable" software and allows to configure even parts of the software that were not intended to get configured by the core developers.
Product Innovation
Connecting the two factors hackable & headless means:
- Possibility to integrate the platform with any kind of device popping up that has internet connection
- Possibility to configure the platform in any way possible
- Possibility to connect the platform with any kind of core system through network connectivity
Unchained is the most flexible and future-proof digital commerce platform on the market.
Unchained strongly believes in the "eat your own dogfood" mantra and implements smaller online shops as a boutique to SME businesses with Unchained Engine.
When the project is too big, we hand over the project to our partner agencies. For all of our developers, we provide developer support plans and managed hosting services.
To further fund the development of our OSS components, we are going to build SaaS services to complement the OSS offerings and help developers to get out the most of Unchained.
Managed Hosting
- Managed Hosting in Switzerland on a highly avaiable Docker Swarm Cluster
- SLA, Phone Support, Performance Monitoring of Unchained
Developer Support:
- Support plans (Frontend, Backend, UX, CSS)
- Events & Trainings
SaaS Tools
- Plugin Marketplace
- Big Data, Analytics & AI Microservices that connect to the Unchained backend
Solutions:
- Unchained Express Online Shop for SME
Valuable blog around e-commerce in general: https://www.twispay.com/blog
Magento and WooCommerce together is about 35% of the global digital commerce platform market. Based on the 10K web store statistics from https://blog.aheadworks.com/ecommerce-market-2017/ (September 2017):
OSS Business Model Market share 10K 44%, 100K 55%
- Magento (PHP)
- Prestashop (PHP)
- Shopware (PHP)
- ReactionComerce (Node)
- OSCommerce (PHP)
- Opencart (PHP)
- Sylius (PHP)
Proprietary Software Licensing Market share 10K 39%, 100K 7%
- Spryker (PHP)
- SAP Hybris (Custom)
- Oracle ATG
- IBM Websphere
- Salesforce Demandware
SaaS Market share 10K 17%, 100K 38%
What is our conclusion?
- Small Shops don't use proprietary licensed digital commerce systems (uneconomical to do so because of high license fees and setup costs)
- Big Shops don't use SaaS (price is not an issue, feature requirements can't be met, integration barriers are too high)
- OSS platforms rule the mid- to enterprise sectors and grow faster than proprietary platforms. even in the enterprise sector
This market analysis is based on data from the following sources:
- https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/e-commerce-platforms/Alexa%20top%201M/
- https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/e-commerce-platforms/Alexa%20top%201M/
- https://www.cloudways.com/blog/top-ecommerce-platforms/
- https://www.appsruntheworld.com/top-10-ecommerce-software-vendors-and-market-forecast/
In a world of digital commerce, the user experience gets more and more important. Some digital commerce providers differentiate themselves already from their competitors by introducing 360-Degree-Videos / Virtual-Reality-enabled-content on their shop platforms. To make those fine-grained shop individualizations a reality, the underlying e-commerce platform has to be increasingly flexible.
Headless is the most flexible architecture allowing completely individual user interfaces, followed by semi-headless (Core functionalities exposed through API's) and monolithic architectures.
Headless
Semi-headless (Specific parts of the system exposed through API)
- Spree Commerce
- Shopify
- Magento 2
- WooCommerce
- Spryker
- Hybris
Strictly Monolithic
- Reaction Commerce
- OSCommerce
- Shopware
- WixStores
- Salesforce Demandware
- …
There are many more reasons to go headless:
- https://ordercloud.io/headless-ecommerce-guide/
- https://lamia.fi/en/blog/headless-ecommerce
- https://public.four51.com/headless-ecommerce-platforms-future-saas/
- http://www.greenlightcommerce.com/headless-commerce-b2c-commerce-suites/
Open Source is growing rapidly in the enterprise market and at the same time, headless platforms and headless-enabling technologies like GraphQL start to show the true potential.
But there are currently no headless digital commerce platforms which are open source at the same time. Unchained will fit into that spot by combining a state of the art extremely flexible headless API based on GraphQL and a true open-source business model.
Small e-commerce shops today have a variety of options to sell their products easily through SaaS providers like Shopify or equivalent solutions which provide superior easy CMS possibilities that allows anyone to create a simple online shop. SaaS solutions on the other hand can not compete with flexible systems like WooCommerce, Magento, Hybris, etc. if more-than-usual individualization is required.
Eliminating consumers and startup markets and taking business model and software architecture into account, Unchained.shop is generally suited for mid- to large digital commerce applications with more than USD 20’000 of revenue per month that want to deliver a superior digital commerce user experience to their customers.
Using Unchained as a base for a more complete product, it can be used as a good starting point for smaller companies as well (5'000 - 20'000 online revenue per month). This is what Unchained Express is about, targeting SME's with a non-technical product on top of Unchained.
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Build online shops for local companies.
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Use that money to develop an open source & headless e-commerce technology, providing support plans & hosting to a global audience.
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Use that money to build additional apps (analytics, marketplace, insights).