Journey high risk WAAS (website as a service)

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RiskyBusiness247

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Hey everyone,

I've decided to document my journey as I build a Website as a Service (WAAS) focused on headless e-commerce. The goal is to offer a fixed monthly fee for a fully functional headless e-commerce website, including offshore hosting, maintenance, and payment processing.

Project Overview:​

  • Platform: Using Next.js for the frontend and WordPress/WooCommerce for the CMS backend.
  • Focus: E-commerce sites for high-risk niches.
  • Hosting: The project will be hosted on an offshore server, separating the front and backend for a more robust structure, better page speed, and enhanced security.

What I’ve Done So Far:​

  • Platform Setup: Established the core architecture using Next.js integrated with WooCommerce.
  • Page Speed: Optimized for a perfect mobile score while maintaining a professional e-commerce experience.
  • CI/CD Pipeline: Dockerized and automated deployment to an offshore VPS, with the CMS in one location and the frontend in another.

To Do:​

  • Finalize i18n (internationalization) for blog posts without using any paid WordPress plugins.

Goals:​

  • Traffic: Bring on at least 20 clients within the first six months.
I'll keep this thread updated with my progress, challenges, and insights. If anyone has experience with similar projects, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Note: This is solely about my journey. Please don’t message me about services—I’m just here to share my progress as per forum rules. In the future, I may offer the service here as a Junior VIP. Thanks for understanding!

Looking forward to engaging with the community here!

Cheers!
 
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Mark Eternally said:
How are you planning to get at least 20 clients?
Click to expand...
I’ve already got a few contacts selling steroids offline and have been doing some outreach through Instagram to people selling reps. I’m also working on getting some organic traffic over time by blogging about high-risk payment processing, etc.
 
Ugh this a great idea, ton of work to be done I tried to make an AI page builder and it was too much work for a MVP
 
RiskyBusiness247 said:
I’ve already got a few contacts selling steroids offline and have been doing some outreach through Instagram to people selling reps. I’m also working on getting some organic traffic over time by blogging about high-risk payment processing, etc.
Click to expand...

Just a thought, what if you were to tie in an affiliate marketing platform with your product so any of your customers could use the affiliate marketing as an additional purchase? You could test and refine it by using the affiliate marketing to help you get your 20.
 
hexagonal said:
Ugh this a great idea, ton of work to be done I tried to make an AI page builder and it was too much work for a MVP
Click to expand...
Yeah, it was quite a couple of weeks of struggling—setting up the GraphQL queries with WooCommerce and the CI/CD pipeline was quite a challenge. It was actually my first time setting up a headless construct with WooCommerce. Normally, I just used Decap for a simple blog CMS and pushed everything to Netlify or Vercel
 
Mark Eternally said:
Just a thought, what if you were to tie in an affiliate marketing platform with your product so any of your customers could use the affiliate marketing as an additional purchase? You could test and refine it by using the affiliate marketing to help you get your 20.
Click to expand...
That's an interesting idea. Are you suggesting something like a continuous referral bonus, as long as the referred customer stays subscribed?
 
RiskyBusiness247 said:
That's an interesting idea. Are you suggesting something like a continuous referral bonus, as long as the referred customer stays subscribed?
Click to expand...

You could work it however you want. You could offer different "plans".

PLAN A: Pays higher commission but requires more effort.

PLAN B: Pays lower commission but requires less effort.
 
RiskyBusiness247 said:
Yeah, it was quite a couple of weeks of struggling—setting up the GraphQL queries with WooCommerce and the CI/CD pipeline was quite a challenge. It was actually my first time setting up a headless construct with WooCommerce. Normally, I just used Decap for a simple blog CMS and pushed everything to Netlify or Vercel
Click to expand...

Great that you are not using any major cloud provider, vercel is enough
 
I recently set up something similar for a client.

He wanted a car dealership site, complete with search filters. I went with a headless CMS setup: a WooCommerce back end for inventory management, and a static, Eleventy-generated front end.

The front end's inventory images, descriptions and search results are dynamically generated by vanilla JavaScript.

In order to maximise performance, the front end does not directly query the back end for inventory data. Instead, it fetches a pregenerated JSON file. The only work that the back end does is to update the JSON file, and this only happens when a vehicle is added/updated/deleted.

This has two benefits:

1. The website can scale to many more concurrent users than would otherwise be possible with direct WooCommerce API queries.

2. Improved security. WordPress has a notoriously large attack surface. The back-end url does not appear anywhere in the front-end code. A would-be attacker would have to: a) guess the back-end url and b) get past two layers of login prompt (the web server and WordPress).
 
WebDevPro said:
I recently set up something similar for a client.

He wanted a car dealership site, complete with search filters. I went with a headless CMS setup: a WooCommerce back end for inventory management, and a static, Eleventy-generated front end.

The front end's inventory images, descriptions and search results are dynamically generated by vanilla JavaScript.

In order to maximise performance, the front end does not directly query the back end for inventory data. Instead, it fetches a pregenerated JSON file. The only work that the back end does is to update the JSON file, and this only happens when a vehicle is added/updated/deleted.

This has two benefits:

1. The website can scale to many more concurrent users than would otherwise be possible with direct WooCommerce API queries.

2. Improved security. WordPress has a notoriously large attack surface. The back-end url does not appear anywhere in the front-end code. A would-be attacker would have to: a) guess the back-end url and b) get past two layers of login prompt (the web server and WordPress).
Click to expand...

You nailed it with the explanation. I had some issues with scalability and getting 502 errors when too many products were uploaded to WooCommerce, but I’ve already solved them. I addressed the problem by performing a GraphQL query, converting the data to JSON, and then passing it to the front end, just like your explanation. Directly querying with too much inventory was causing the 502 errors. It’s definitely challenging to find the back end, especially with the images served through a CDN.
 
Good idea! Can see a bunch of use cases for this. Hope it goes well and look forward to checking in on your results, best of luck!
 
WebDevPro said:
He wanted a car dealership site, [...]
Click to expand...

I do not envy you there. Many years ago I was part of a team that designed a car dealership solution. The database was crazy. The number of screens they required was ridiculous. When we simplified the processes they were frustrated that it was not asking them more questions, as they felt the application was not smart enough to keep track of data. We showed them it was not only smart enough but also vastly more efficient than anything else they had seen at that time. One of the issues we had was their need to constantly update the software, but not in a traditional sense, more in a feature creep type of way. We bowed out, but not after investing a lot of resources into it. I learned a lot from that project actually.

** Side note: I just realized the development server we used for that project is sitting next to me right now. I am going to be putting linux on it and turning into some drone. **

@RiskyBusiness247 have you isolated where your 20 Clients are currently existing?
 
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