Starting a small Online Store

The e-commerce platform workflow (again):

The relatively simple version for  Amazon Kindle style (Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords/Darft2Digital accounts:

1. sign up for an account

2. enter your tax and bank account details

The basic  account set up process for Payhip is very similar to the big platforms:

The first few screens are just entering personal/business information. In the case of Payhip, you will need to already have set up a Paypal or Stripe account, you do not have the option of entering your bank account directly. Pro tip, although it’s outside the scope of what is on this site, but please please set up a separate Stripe and Paypal account for your business even if you don’t have a corporation. Sooner or later you will have your local government tax inspectors looking for their money and it’s much better to have it sitting in the business account.

When you have the basic information set up, you will want to return to the Account settings screen to do further set up, it is currently the gear wheel on the top right of the screen.

Workflow for adding your product:

0: choose your product (in case of a site selling e-books, you have already chosen an ebook as your product type)

1. choose your categories/genres

2. upload your ebook

3. choose the price

4. publish the ebook.

This process is almost identical to setting up an ebook on Kindle etc, although the basic end of the process you get a HTTP link which is, to be honest, just a bit icky and not attractive even to somebody used to dealing with WordPress, web pages etc. I suppose I could set up a product page on my own website and have a hyperlink, but it doesn’t feel very powerful.

Check back again to see what more I find out and if I decide to go this way, set up a product store with Payhip, or a combination of the two.

Optionally, setting up your own store.

Payhip’s home page is much in the style of Lemon Squeezy, more of a contemporary WordPress style presentation. It is rather bare bones, they are really trying to get you to sign up, so they must mostly get pre-qualified leads rather than people just wondering about their platform. As I should have mentioned previously, their “free” tier charge is also 5% per transaction plus processing fees, which is roughly comparable to LemonSqueezy and 5% less than Gumroad. As I have spent two weeks dithering, I am going to go ahead with them as my first try. They were founded in 2011, the same year as Gumroad, and up to the price increases, seemed to have roughly equal buy-in from the people I follow.

As you can see, the Lemon Squeezy home page is much more modern and web-designy, as suits a newer player on the scene.

I haven’t checked out Lemon Squeezy in detail yet, but it does seem to offer close to comparable features to Gumroad, although it is a much newer platform. More information if I get to dig in.

Main takeaway, at free startup and a transaction fee of 5% + 50c, it seems a better deal than Gumroad straight away if you are starting out.

As you can see, the Gumroad home page is friendly and simple in a cartoonish and welcoming way. It looks easy to use, and there is a huge amount of resources available, including examples, and Gumroad University with training resources and how-tos. If I was in the United States, even at the 10% plus processing fees, it would look very attractive. Also if you are not in the USA but do the vast majority of your business there, it sounds like Gumroad will be able to handle your taxes satisfactorily.  However, I have read people saying they had a lot of work to handle even Canadian taxes, so your mileage may vary. LemonSqueezy got favorable mentions there as a North American alternative.

So, to narrow down what I mean, I’m really talking about having your own Online Store. This might seem like a lot of work, and it is, but the upsides could be huge.

My own requirements:

1. An online story which will take care of payments, international taxes etc.
2. Able to host e-books, audio files, and other digital products. Physical products is not an immediate concern, although if the option exists I am willing to look at it.
3. Low costs. More on this very shortly

Thoughts on tire (or tyre) kicking:

I would advise investigating fairly thoroughly in advance. The field is wide and although there is usually very little penalty in jumping the gun, in this day and age, it is probably better to find out what you want rather than diving straight in. Time is money.

Also, some of the platforms don’t like lurkers,   so best to have a product ready to go so that they don’t suspend your account due to inactivity or worse block you as a suspected security scammer. Some stories indicated that this might happen anyway, but you can minimise the likelihood.

1.  Have product created and ready to sell, or at least preorder (in a week, say)

2. Find/define a niche and need

2. sign up to an  account on your platform of choice

3. upload your product

4. set your pricing and payment options

5. promote your production

6. engage with your audience

7. analyse your sales

8. repeat from step 3

more on this in a subsequent post.

The most interesting players that caught my eye so far (roughly in order of popularity, size etc). Links to my own pages as I add them:

Gumroad

LemonSqueezy

Payhip

CheckYa

Thrivecart

Paddle

TLDR:

Gumroad are one of the grand-daddies of the scene and had a great thing going until 2022, when they raised their charges a lot. They used to charge around 3% plus processing fees, which has jumped to 10% plus processing fees. This would still compare reasonably favourably with the charges from Amazon Kindle, except that the processing fees push “you get to keep 90% of the price” down even further.  Most of the competitors seem to have standardised on 5% plus processing fees, which seems more reasonable. If you are already on Gumroad and doing ok, it might not be worth the effort to change, but if you haven’t set up, it might not be worth the effort to set up. My own instinct is to try Payhip first, which is around almost as long, and charges 5% plus processing fees, which can be reduced by moving up to one of their charged plans.