Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered:
- All the little tax issues for various countries/states
- Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data
- Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.
For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...
In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...
You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure
Just adding to that (especially for software): not only was the development overhead minimal: I think setting up the shop, integrating the license key generation, determining all the pricing etc. took like 1 day including testing?! The savings on accounting were also significant. Had we been the direct seller, we would have driven the (tax) auditors fee ad absurdum. E.g., we would have needed a tax id in every EU state we are selling to, the tax audits would have taken ridiculously long and cost a lot, the paper trail (every sale an invoice that has to be kept on record...).
Instead: we only booked 2 revenues per month and that was it. We were not liable for the taxes, everything was taken care of.
I do think that purchasing these services makes small & large gigs easier than ever. Highly recommend.
I personally used Fastspring. I cannot talk about Stripe or Shopify. They also model your “shopping page” to fit in with everything else. So your customers have a consistent experience.
Good advice. While it might seem a good idea to hire some freelancer to set up self hosted ecommerce solution as it is cheaper, but looking in a long term, your eshop will need maintenance. Especially annoying with Wordpress and Woocommerce, when using lots of third party plugins. After few months you obviously think up a new feature or two, but original freelancer won't be available and you'll have to find a new one. He will have a hard time cramming in new features and installing updates. The cycle continues and usually such eshop becomes a mess. Slow loading times, unsecure, hard to implement new features. And if custom integration for local payments or delivery provider breaks one day - you are in real trouble.
Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.
For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...
In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...
You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure