In my opinion (9 years FE exp) you should build your ecommerce site in shopify or wordpress + woocommerce or some other off the shelf tool. It will be up before the evening's out and you won't be spending that much extra than you would have anyway, and everything will Just Work (tm) and look pretty good (chuck out 50$ for a nice wordpress theme and you're golden).

If you insist on rolling your own, Django + templates should be plenty. Lots of existing code for integrating Stripe or whatever. AI will be fine at it. You could potentially investigate medusajs or prestashop. Here's a list that could be fun to investigate: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab... but keyword is fun. You should build it in wordpress because that is a bombproof solution running like half the internet and will save you endless amount of time.

If you're doing this as an exercise to learn a new tool, leave the AI to the side as you're robbing yourself an opportunity to delve into docs and gain more domain knowledge. And absolutely do not touch nextjs with a 10 foot pole, it's an absurdly overwrought tool. The only people that should learn nextjs are people working at dev houses that churn out a shitload of full stack apps for clients that have the budget to shell out for vercel's hosting costs. And even then imo they should just be using django + react + vite + tanstack MAYBE.

HTMX is cool but I'm not sure the point, again if for fun why not, but I would ask yourself: you get your site up and running and you spend the next year scrambling around putting things in boxes and printing shipping labels, and then in 2026 Thanksgiving right before the holiday rush something breaks in your app and you want to fix it but HTMX/nextjs/whatever have gone through 2 breaking change upgrades and so have 4 different libraries they rely on and actually the most up to date version of two libraries you rely on are not interoperable right now because they depend on different node versions or some other bullshit, and now what do you do?

Just use wordpress.

I was 100% on board with WordPress/WC at first, and had already started building with it, but was immediately coming into issues. Just Work (tm) was my expectation, and was most definitely not what I found.

- I used the product variations feature, 18 variations per product, and all of a sudden the "Duplicate" button took 15 seconds! I learned this is because each variation is it's own thing, so it was making 18 new things (still insane it took that long, on my beefy dev pc). I can't imagine 30-50k products * 18 variations * metadata stuff working fast in any way.

- In avoiding product variations, there's plugins for adding product fields, and plugins for pricing rules, but clicking around to do stuff, or maybe writing php that integrates with plugins that I'm clicking around in... it's not the way I want to spend my time developing. It especially integrates terribly with AI tools, which at this point are an important development tool for me.

- I don't want to have a 1-to-1 mapping between products and pages. This doesn't fit the WC model well (or Shopify for that matter).

Generally, I can imagine an experienced wordpress/PHP dev being able to overcome these issues, but if I'm learning something anyway, I'd personally rather learn a proper frontend framework (be it any of the options you mentioned). Leveraging AI tools also matters.

I appreciate your response! Gives me more confidence in maybe sticking to Django + templates. But from what I've seen, and also in discussions with other developers, I think wordpress is out for this project. Thanks again :)

No! PHP is merely bad, but Wordpress is truly abysmal. Steer clear. Webdev since 1998 (27y).

htmx will not have gone through 2 breaking change upgrades

https://htmx.org/essays/future/

This is the real advice.

Do what gets the actual job done: focus on the selling, not the tech of the shop. Grab a template and adjust it to fit your marketing.

Actual useful tech is integration with a printer/printshop. Or getting packaging labels automatically for orders. Or using AI to make new posters.

Or use PayloadCMS, which is Next but at least you don't need to deal with WordPress.