Hi HN,<p>I run an e-commerce business which now turns over ~$500,000/year. It was initially built on Shopify but I am currently looking to invest some money into rebuilding the website and am considering all my options.<p>I assumed it would be cheaper in the long-term to invest in having it custom made, but with the new Shopify online processing fees it seems this is not the case.[1] Shopify payment fees are 1.8% + 20p compared to Paypal which is 2.9% + 30p and Stripe which is similar. Even with the unlimited Shopify plan which works out at $2148 a year it's still cheaper for me to use Shopify as I save ~$5000 on online processing fees.<p>My questions are:<p>1. If Shopify payment fees are nearly 1% lower than Paypal/Stripe, why does anyone still build their own custom website outside the Shopify platform? Is there some kind of catch I'm missing?<p>2. Are there any other platforms I should be considering building my website on?<p>Would really appreciate any thoughts or feedback you might have. If you need any more information please ask and I'll be happy to answer.<p>Thanks in advance for your time,<p>[1] https://www.shopify.co.uk/pricing
Well with regards to #1 a lot of vendors with your revenue find themselves able to negotiate better rates with payment processors, particularly in combination with a merchant account. Shopify have obviously negotiated a deal with their payment processor based on their volume.<p>People build their own still for a multitude of reasons, one of these being may be that they don't want to be locked in to a single platform. If Shopify shut down tomorrow, would your business be in trouble?<p>People also want custom features, better analytics, control over SEO, and all those extra things that aren't currently possible with Shopify.<p>At 500,000 a year, a sum like 5,000 is nothing, especially if you feel that you can increase your revenue by 1% or more with a new custom site.
You've had 3 threads about this today, one of which was killed (presumably because it's a dupe).<p>Original discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455956" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455956</a>
> People build their own still for a multitude of reasons, one of these being may be that they don't want to be locked in to a single platform. If Shopify shut down tomorrow, would your business be in trouble?<p>This is correct and sums up the hosted vs self-hosted arguement. It really depends on your needs and resource - if you have Devlelopers/IT folks for example then building out your own site would be sensible. Yet if you have less of those and more marketing people, hosted might make more sense.