I’m new to WeWeb. I recently started learning Bubble but I noticed that I can not build HIPAA compliant apps. I believe I can build a HIPAA compliant app in WeWeb + Xano and I want to understand if WeWeb is a good tool to build a 2 sided-marketplace and what challenges I could face building a marketplace in WeWeb. I don’t have a technical background.
Hi @aglz 
Technically, there are no product limitations to building a 2-sided marketplace with WeWeb + Xano. You can do it for sure 
That said, as with other no-code tools or programming languages, there is a learning curve when first getting started in WeWeb (and Xano for that matter).
If you have no technical background, we’d recommend watching our first course of the WeWeb Academy and taking part in Xano’s Office Hours to help you get started.
Is this your first time building a website or web-app?
A little off, but still regarding e-commerce. I heard somewhere that WeWeb was originally meant as an Ecommerce product, later becoming a multi purpose tool, is this right?
Ok, thanks Joyce. It is my first time I will build a real web app, but I entered to Air Dev’s No-Code bootcamp and watch a course to build scalable databases. I have experience with other no-code tools such Wordpress and Shopify.
Mmm I guess that could be one way of putting it. Prior to doing Y Combinator in Winter 2021, WeWeb was more of a website builder focused on being able to create lots of pages on the fly with a headless CMS so it could be used for e-commerce but wasn’t necessarily the focus
During Y Combinator and the months following, the team realized users were bending the tool to add interactivity, essentially adding lots of JS to build reactive web-apps so, in true startup spirit, we pivoted 
That’s awesome, congrats! A great skill to learn for sure 
With your Wordpress and Shopify experience, I’m sure you’ll pick it up in no time 
I’m very biased of course but the thing I really like about Xano and WeWeb is that what you learn in both tools are standard web development and programming concepts so you can transfer the skills you learn using those tools to other tools and even in conversation with traditional developers.
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Hi Joyce, related to this topic, i notice in Weweb’s pricing section that roles and permissions are only available in the scale plan. Does this mean that to build an e-commerce marketplace one would need to subscribe to that plan?
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Hi @joao-h
Not necessarily. There are workarounds to build a project where users have different roles without using our in-built roles & permissions feature.
The downside is that you won’t be able to use the roles and permissions to setup private access on pages:
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Thank you Joyce, i didn’t get email notification on this answer, or i didn’t find it. I thought i would. Anyway, thank you for your answer, i think i understand that workarround. However, could another possibility, alltough more time consuming be a good possibility for a multivendor marketplace? that is 3 apps connected to the same database. The public app for buyers, that retrieves products, vendors and data, while also managing payments. The public app for vendors to make new records and retrieve buyers data and orders, and finnaly a third app for marketplace admin and only in this one would require private users?
Thank you again in advance.
It’s totally possible to have 3 different apps. But you will need to maintain the same object and logic at three different places. It could not be the most efficient solution if you have common pages and elements
By the way, you will also need to pay for three apps in WeWeb
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I’m getting some mixed signals on the forum. In anouther post one of the WeWeb staff is suggesting anouther platform Shogun for e-commerce since this is a different use case. WeWeb for ecommerce frontend?
I’m working on a SaaS enabled marketplace for the construction industry so I need to be able to sell products as well as provide analytics for design options and value engineering.
I’m debating using WeWeb Xano and potentially a headless e-commerce solution, like Medusa or BigCommerce. It doesn’t seem like WeWeb has any out of the box integrations but since headless e-commerce is REST api based I would be able to make that connection.
I could go with just Xano but I figure that building everything from scratch makes less sense than using a pre-built e-commerce backend for CMS, checkout etc.
Definitely if you have a REST API integrated CMS and it fits all your needs, I’d go for it. I personally would not build an e-commerce or any marketplace/craigslist like site on WeWeb.
The following is just my personal opinion. The fact that it runs on Vue.js, you have only one option for having server-side rendered pages - their Static collections, which are limited to a certain number of prerenders. When you use dynamic rendering for this kind of apps, it just feels very unnatural in my opinion. It lacks the server side rendering. As I feel it, client-side rendered apps feel very unnatural for having marketplaces and stuff like craigslist, where you expect to have the page served to you.
I worked on building a Listing platform like this on WeWeb, and it felt very bad, when switching pages, waiting for data to load, it was just not a great UX overall.
It’s great for dashboards, where you need reactivity and a lot of toying around with data, very responsive, snappy and especially dynamic, that are the points where WeWeb reigns the market. But for static pages, blogs and such, I would not suggest it, if your ambition is to have the best solution, and the best experience.
If it’s an MVP, then it’s okay, but I would probably not build a project as above-mentioned on WeWeb for long term usage.
What would you recommend? I’m debating going with a react Frontend and using codux for the styling and starting with some premade components from MUI. For the backend I could have Xano and a headless e-commerce solution like Medusa.
I’m a novice developer and want to focus on growing the buisness. I’m trying to assess what is the best route. I could sink in time to learn WeWeb or improve my coding skills while building my MVP. Depending on the tool, some of the no-code solutions require lots of hacks and workarounds. Then I’m learning how to hack a no-code tool rather than gaining a solid foundation.
At this point I’m trying to create a workable MVP which has a dashboard on costs as wells as the ability to change your purchases.
No nocode solution really works for my use case since our buisness straddles between e-commerce and SaaS within an industry with little tech- construction.
I’m debating whether to hack something together with WeWeb, which does seem to allow the use of JavaScript scripts to hack things together. Seems more flexible than bubble which is a black box. The other option is to use a hybrid tech stack, with a traditional code front end, a visual react IDE (Codux) , combined with API’s and low code for the backend. (Xano)
ChatGPT has also been a game changer. I figure I can use chatGPT and get someone on Codementor to help me along until I raise my seed and can build out a team.
if you’re deciding React front-end vs WeWeb (which basically is Vue) I think you might as well go with WeWeb, as at least with WeWeb, you would go faster - again in my opinion - you still won’t have the same experience as with something like Next (React) or Nuxt (Vue), or something like Laravel/NodeJS and templates, as these are Server Side Rendered.
If the decision is WeWeb / Bubble, then I’d definitely pick WeWeb.
From what you’re saying, WeWeb, might be your best bet. Me personally, I’d rather code myself a frontend by hand to handle static data. But that’s yet again my opinion.
Medusa comes with a nextjs frontend included if you want to try this route.
Weweb will serve you well for MVP and beyond and of course it is a completely differe developer experience compared to a yes-code framework.
In the end any solution have good stuffand bad stuff and you should be ok with any of these technologies. The best way to know is to try and iterate on your experience.
Thanks for the insights. Going to play around with both and see what works best. . .
It seems that WeWeb is more Javascript freindly and lets you access the DOM in a straighforward way? The issue with bubble was that everything is wrapped inside its own system and sometimes it was hard to access the DOM with javascript to impliment any custom scripts.
Has anyone played around with Codux? Codux | Visual IDE for React Interested in getting your persepctive?
Weweb is a a lot better than bubble at many things
I didn’t know codux, looks interesting. I’ll add it to my list of things to check, thanks
Hey there
My two cent: there are pros and cons to every approach 
I’m very biased of course but, based on everything you mentioned @benFortunato, I think WeWeb could be a good fit for you.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
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you can definitely built a marketplace MVP without performance being an issue so at least, you can get your project off the ground and take it from there
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for scale, I think you should be fine because we have marketplaces with millions of items. One thing’s for sure though, you’ll need to learn about backend filters and pagination!
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again, super biased here but, as a nocoder myself, one of the things I love about WeWeb (and other tools like Webflow for example) is that the skills you learn building on our platform are transferrable to other tools with a similar approach (those that stay close to the underlying code). I love this because little by little, you get to understand code better and even write it if it’s something that you’re interested in learning
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as @Broberto mentioned, React vs WeWeb, I would say WeWeb would be a better fit for you because it’d be similar SEO performance with a more gentle learning curve.
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For Bubble vs WeWeb, I would also say WeWeb is a better fit because our integration with Xano is seamless (there’s also a bonus that you can have static pages with pre-rendered content but that’s suitable for smaller projects. if your marketplace grows to thousands of items, you’ll need to move to dynamic data)
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For Medusa + Nextjs vs WeWeb, I think both could work. With WeWeb, you would most likely build and iterate faster while Medusa + Nextjs would allow you to learn awesome skills and push search engine optimization further with server-side rendering.
Ok, hopefully that helps! Like @dorilama, I can only encourage you to continue doing your due diligence and figure out what’s the best fit for you! No matter what approach you choose, you will learn a lot and run into many obstacles but I’m sure it’ll be worth it!
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Thanks for the detailed response! Any feedback on using headless e-commerce? Seems like this would save me having to build out a PIM on my own.
I saw that I can use the Rest API plugin. https://docs.weweb.io/plugins/data-sources/rest-api.html#create-a-collection I didn’t see any documentation on how to handle asynchronous functions. If I’m making a lot of api calls I will need to manage the timing of all these with promises.
Mmm I don’t know enough about the pros and cons of that approach. Let me ask the tech team and get back to you on that one