Starting a creative business? Here’s an easy way to compare your profits per selling platform.
How much will you need to sell to make paying commission worthwhile? It’s important to work out your costs carefully in order to not get swindled on commission or transaction fees. Remember that whichever payment processor you use will add a small commission too for handling the payment. I have tried to include these costs here too. Also, all products here are before vat has been added. (Correct at time of publication October 22) also, it’s worth factoring in marketing costs too as making sales is really due to your marketing efforts, your e-commerce store is just a tool. Marketing is what makes sales happen.
Here’s a guide to help you make the decision about building an e-commerce store on your website or whether to use an external e-commerce platform.
online selling platforms - Profits. PRICE COMPARISON
I used the example of 500 products sold in one year at the cost of £50 per product and worked out how much each platform takes from you for their services in terms of products. So Etsy’s services take 11 products worth of profit from you, Shopify takes around 7-8 products worth of profit, Squarespace Business 7 products and Squarespace commerce Basic 6.3.
See the table below for further explanation.
I conclude that Squarespace Commerce Basic is the best value platform if you are selling multiple items for around £50, before Squarespace Business, Shopify and the least profitable for this type of selling is Etsy.
While Shopify appears to compare well, there are some tricksy additional extras to watch out for with them, like whether you are using their own payment processor - add %2 and a myriad of very confusing extra add-ons that I couldn’t calculate without opening an account!
Etsy may still be a good choice if you are selling a small amount of higher-cost items.
But I hope that while the details may not apply to you can get an overall comparison between all of them.
Selling on Squarespace is enhanced by using the platform’s blogging capabilities alongside the Squarespace marketing suite to drive sales, all from one single platform.
My fee for setting up an e-commerce store: £250 - This can include uploading images & descriptions of up to 20 products. Optimising each product with keywords etc. I will need quite a bit of information and often this becomes an exercise for both client and designer to work closely on together. Once up and running the Squarespace selling platform is easy to use. I can teach you how to add items and take control of your store. It’s easy to promote your products with Squarespace and providing it’s added properly the SEO will drive traffic to your store at no extra cost.
There are many aspects to setting up a store. Get in touch with me if you would like to discuss selling on Squarespace. Remember selling products requires more than just a store, you will need to market your products to make sales, so you need a solid strategy that also involves social media as well as other strategies, to see good results, relying just on keywords for google won’t be enough.
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