Review - eCommerce options

By Alex White

- 7 minutes read - 1413 words
What is a good choice for an eCommerce solution for a small ttrpg publisher?

Criteria

At the moment I direct site visitors off to Indie Press Revolution, DriveThruRpg, or Itch to purchase my games. That’s OK, but each of them take a cut and it would be nice to allow customers to purchase directly from me.

1. Integration

My first criteria is that I want something that can integrate nicely with this existing website (which is a static website generated via Hugo). This rules out for me some of the all-in-one options which can provide e-commerce as well as everything else on the site. So no Wordpress, Squarespace, or Wix in my considerations. I ran a squarespace site for my wife for 8 years, so I know that it can do an acceptable job, but I found lots of limitations in formatting things. Plus I like having a basically static site - all my web pages are highly cacheable, which makes them very fast to load.

So I want an e-commerce solution which can either integrate directly with my web pages (best), or which is a simple link off to another place which handles the transactions (not so good, but still workable).

2. Cost

I’ve got to be honest, being a tiny RPG publisher doesn’t bring in much money for the company. So a low monthly cost is really important, otherwise it isn’t economically viable.

3. In-Person

Later this year I’m going to running my first in-person stand at a convention (Dragonmeet 2025 at the end of the year) and it would be really useful to have a way of accepting electronic payment for goods.

So ideally I want to find an e-commerce solution that supports in-person payment as well as online payment. Even more ideally it would be able to use the features in modern phones to accept payments without additional hardware being needed.

Options

  1. Shopify Starter
  2. Big Cartel
  3. Square
  4. Open Cart

Reviews

Shopify Starter

They can be found here https://www.shopify.com/uk/starter (sometimes I see Shopify Lite, I think that is properly used for POS Lite, their intro level POS system).

Integration

Integration is very straightforward. They provide an HTML snippet that can be included on pages to provide a ‘button’ and which works via JavaScript. It can be a small button, a picture with title and button, or an element with a whole product description. The buttons can add to bag or go straight to checkout.

On the face of it this looks like the cleanest integration available of the eCommerce solutions I’ve looked at.

Cost

The basic cost is £5 per month, which is affordable if I am able to make four or more sales in a year. At the moment I don’t know whether that is likely... I get more sales than that through the other channels, but they have more eyeballs.

The transaction cost is 5% if using the Shopify gateway. (plus an extra 2% if using ApplePay or GooglePay)

If I were to sell 12 products in a year, at an average of £20 each, my annual cost would be £60 (hosting) plus £12 (transaction fees)

In-Person

The Starter plan includes POS Lite, which is their basic POS solution. If you have the Shopify POS app on a smartphone you can accept payments with tap to pay on an iphone.

Features

The starter plan includes

  • product pages, contact page, checkout
  • Mobile POS
  • Linkpop (link in bio tool)
  • Order management
  • Sell on social media
  • Create discount codes

Bottom line

This looks like a really good option in terms of integration and in-person sales, and the cost is the lowest of the paid prices that I’ve seen.

Big Cartel

They can be found at bigcartel.com

Integration

From what I can see, you have to have your shop on their domain. At the free level I would link out to planesailinggames . bigcartel. com. Presumably at the more expensive level it is possible to use fancy DNS to make it appear to be part of your own site, but for my purposes that is moot.

Cost

They have a free offering, but it is limited to a maximum of 5 product listings and 1 image per product. If you want more than five products you have to graduate to their next level up which is $15/$12 per month (depending on whether you pay monthly or annually).

I suspect that the cost is going to put this out of viability, as I don’t expect my sales to cover that much to start with.

Transaction cost is typically about 2.9% +30 cents

In-Person

Not available on the free plan.

There is a “Big Cartel for iOS” app that can be used for in-person transactions at a convention. It accepts payments using cash or credit cards via stripe. Can search orders, view order details, add notes and print packing slips (most of that for online orders I imagine).

Features

  • sell online
  • Accept cards and paypal
  • Mobile app
  • Sales tax autopilot*
  • Store templates
  • Sales dashboard

Doesn’t include in free tier

  • discounts and promos
  • Shipment tracking
  • Inventory tracking
  • Bulk editing
  • Ad support
  • Custom domain

Bottom line

Free option doesn’t support enough products, and doesn’t allow in-person transactions; you have quite a high monthly cost to get those, so this one is out.

Square

They can be found at https://squareup.com/gb/en/online-store

Integration

They have integration with a lot of the ‘all in one’ providers, but if you want to integrate your own website with them it is necessary to contact their API department. That sounds like more work to set up and manage!

Cost

There is a free plan, and a paid plan at £20+ per month. (There is also a free Square POS plan). The paid plan adds website themes, more customisation, removal of square branding, QR code ordering, advanced item settings and a free domain for one year.

The free plan uses a website builder to build the website, and it can have a single ordering page or a multi-page affair (not sure what this means!)

Transaction cost is 1.4% +25p for UK based cards, 2.5% +30p for overseas cards.

In-Person

Integrates Square Online with Square POS so that you can manage online and in-person sales within the same system.

Accept contactless cards and digital wallets in person via your phone. Or purchase a Square Reader for £19+VAT.

Features

  • offline payments are accepted
  • Inventory management
  • Shipping rules
  • Sell on social media (e.g. integrates with shopping on Instagram or facebook)

Bottom line

This looks like a strong contender. Both online and POS sales are viable at the free plan level. The only apparent downside is that I can’t integrate with my own website, and I’ll have to link off to a square website for the sales. On the other hand it is completely free to run and I’d only pay transaction fees.

Open Cart

They can be found at https://www.opencart.com

It is an open-source, free eCommerce platform. Free downloads and updates, not monthly fees. The idea is that you can self-host yourself, in which case you need to reckon on your hosting costs and the cost in time to set up, manage and patch. Or you could go for their OpenCart Cloud fully hosted solution.

Integration

Any integration is entirely manual.

Cost

If I was to host it myself, there would be hosting costs I would need to cover. Their OpenCart Cloud has a starting level of just over $35 per month, or $135/year at their discounted rate.

In-Person

Doesn’t seem as if there is support for in-person shopping.

Features

  • Administrator dashboard
  • Product options
  • Affiliates
  • Discounts and coupons
  • Unlimited categories and products
  • Sell digital products
  • Ratings and reviews
  • Reward points
  • Tonnes of other stuff

Doesn’t support

  • Decent security
  • In person payment
  • Fraud protection

Bottom line

It would be expensive in money and time to run this, and it doesn’t meet my needs for in-person transactions and it doesn’t have good security out of the box, so this is a no for me.

Decision

Solution Integration Monthly Transaction In Person
Shopify Starter JavaScript on site £5/month 5% yes
BigCartel no $12 2.9% +30 cents no
Square API? free 1.4% +25p yes
Open Cart hard $11/month ?? no

At the moment it looks like my decision is between Shopify and Squarespace. The key difference is weighing up the cost of Shopify Starter vs the lack of integration which is possible with my website with Square. There may, of course, be additional devils in the details.

I need to do a little more research here to get to a point that I'm happy with.