Introduction

At first, there are no ideal solution yet. If one existed, everybody around used it. Since there are no ideal, please expect that djWarehouse, or any other solution listed here would satisfy your needs better or worse.

We don't claim to be the best - but we strive to satisfy our customers needs the best possible way.

We are coming with djWarehouse as a approximation for a average user, as we see it. This approximation is based on our experience, but even with such experince, we understand that djWarehouse would not satisfy everybody's needs. Please check Features and other documents to find out and compare.

Satchmo

The first question people ask us: why we developed another e-commerce solution for Django, when there are already Satchmo? Here is explanation.

Our first site requirements (http://www.chalkface.com) put strong requirements on internal store design. Old site has already been running software which we developed, and was working very slow and unstable. We have decided that at least the following things should be done to improve speed of new e-commerce solution:

  1. Sub-sequence SQL queries considered harmful. We decided that to speed things up we should not use additional attributes per product to reduce number of SQL calls.
  2. Do not create multi-language support until one is required
  3. Avoid any other unnecessary features, split out everything to modules (like multi-currency support) so only minimum comes to production.

So, we have decided to keep 'core' very minimal, and make all specific things to live in custom modules and custom code. This required serious thinking on every thing we do.

Design principles:

  • Minimalistic
  • Fast
  • Easy to extend & rebuild

Before starting development of own solution we have carefully studied the existence of other Django based e-commerce solutions. There were not many of them. We have only found Satchmo at that time (we started development at 2006.09.23) but the model/database design did not satisfied our requirements (on structure/speed/edition of attributes).

Satchmo, was very similar to a system we've created 5 years ago, and we really needed a different design of things.

While we've contacted Criss Moffit, we have agreed that probably, as a Django e-commerce systems we can try to implement a common protocol for a custom shipment and payment modules, producing together better results then we can do by our own.

Product Catalog, Cart, Order and other things are very different between Satchmo and djWarehouse, this makes more choice for end user to choose one solution over another, depending on site requirements.

Also, by the time when first versions of Satchmo were released, we already had one running production E-Commerce store.

More links on the topic: