Shopify vs Custom Website

Hi,

I'm currently looking into building an eCommerce shop for a digital product niche (gaming) and further promoting it on Instagram. The niche itself is whitehat, but since it is greyhat to sell some of this stuff because of Terms of Service, ideally i would like to get payments in Crypto, but I also could handle simple PayPal.

I'm fairly new to eCommerce but have quite a lot of experience with coding websites myself. My goal is to create a minimal testing page, which can still convert sales.

What should I do?

As far as I understand, I can use Shopify and set up a single-page website and let Shopify handle the payments/delivery.

On the other hand, I could use a custom-built page and host it myself (which will take way less time to do), but I never had any experience in handling payments, so I would have to figure this out. Maybe it is possible to use stripe?

What would you recommend?

Thanks for everything, I've learned a lot here

I've been involved in the digital goods industry for years (selling/trading virtual items for various games). I'm not sure whether or not Shopify support the sale of digital goods. But I've had a lot of problems recently with payment processors when it comes to digital items. I had a PayPal account for years, and out of the blue they decided to close it down. The only reason the guy could give me was for "high risk transactions" (virtual items). From what I've experienced, they've decided to move away from supporting the sale of digital goods. I also tried G2APay (which took months to set up due to having to provide a bunch of company information, etc.) and I have just stopped using them. They were charging me fees of $25 per chargeback (even on a $5 transaction). I'm not sure about Stripe, but I read through their terms some time ago and it didn't fit for the virtual items I was selling.

I'd say, if you were able to set it up through Shopify and they support the sale of digital goods, let them deal with any potential issues with chargebacks/disputes.

If you want any more info, feel free to ask or you can drop me a PM if you like.

Shopify does not handle the delivery of your goods, you'll have to sort that out yourself. You could use Stripe to process payments but if you have a chargeback percentage of 1% - 3% they'll close your account.

Well, wordpress is godly for this type of thing.

You can create a website at the drop of a dime and also have complete control over it. With Shopify, you're somewhat limited in the backend creative aspect.

Here is a plugin that allows you to accept Stripe payments with Woocommerce: https://woocommerce.com/products/stripe/


Hope I've been helpful!

akaCube said:

I'm currently looking into building an eCommerce shop for a digital product niche (gaming) and further promoting it on Instagram

Click to expand...

Sorry to hijack. I am about to do the same thing. Would you mind sharing more about how to promote a new product on instagram? Are you hitting up influencers?

don't go with PayPal for digital product,Shopify have many options for cryptopayments... for wordpress you can try cooinpayments and utrust

Stripe has a very well documented Api, it's pretty easy to integrate it as your payment processor if you have a little bit coding experience

Thanks to you all for your answers, the final decision is to create a very simple one-pager with one product with bootstrap, host it myself on a cheap cloud host and use shoppy backend for payments (only paypal and crypto) and after some time and testing connect a stripe account and process visa/cc payments through there.

I'm scared of the $15 charge for disputes on stripe, but it sounds like a common thing. Have to try it out.

Woocommerce or EDD if its a digital product.

If you are selling digital goods, pirated stuff then instead of using Shopify you should use Shoppy.gg

It functions the same way basically but its for digital products, everyone who are selling microsoft / AV / VPN keys are using Shoppy.gg

Shopify will shut you down fast.