According to the Office of National Statistics, 35.2% of all purchases were bought online in January 2021, up from 19.5% the January before. Even before the pandemic, the popularity of shopping online was increasing rapidly, making it a great business to get involved in. The question is, are pay monthly websites the best way to go about starting up a successful ecommerce business?
What is a pay monthly ecommerce website?
A popular way to start is by using a subscription-based solution like Shopify or BigCommerce. These sites are all-inclusive online selling platforms that you pay a monthly subscription fee to be a part of. You get access to an admin panel which helps you to design your store, add products and process orders. Ecommerce platforms like these allow you to build your own online shop without any coding skills and have specific ecommerce features that make setting your store up relatively easy. But, like all important things in life, it doesn’t come for free. A basic subscription will currently set you back £24 per month, and on top of that you have to pay 2.2% plus 20p of every credit card transaction, and 2% of every transaction if you are using a payment provider other than Shopify payments. Other ecommerce pay monthly websites have similar pricing plans.
What are the downsides?
Whilst paying these amounts may seem worth it to get your shop online instantly, it becomes a problem when you consider how much you’ll be paying out long term. Even if you are making a profit after the costs, it’s a cost that isn’t necessarily needed and your business relies on a service you have no real control over. Also, what’s stopping them putting the price up? If you are relying heavily on a third party to keep your business running, you aren’t completely in charge of it.
There’s a better way to set up shop
The solution? Have your own beautifully designed online shop built that is just as easy to manage as a third-party ecommerce platform, and puts you in complete control. You don’t need to have any restrictions on the amount of users and no limits on functionality as your business grows. Choose the payment provider that works best for you without being penalised for it and be fully trained by a real human being, rather than having to rely on FAQs. Pay once for a great service, rather than endlessly chipping away at your profits for a faceless third-party website to potentially make things more complicated than they need to be.
If paying monthly works for you, you can pay for a website monthly and costs about the same as a subscription for a platform like Shopify. The only difference is at the end of the year you own it.
