MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
We're soon to launch some new bike related products (watch this space) and need to build a website to show them off and for direct sales. Our other business uses a Squarespace platform which was easy to set up and looks good but has no commerce on it. Squarespace use Stripe as their payment gateway but doing some research in to Stripe they appear to have a some very bad feedback in term of communication, fraud prevention, and just suddenly stopping accounts.
What's your experience of Stripe? Or what alternatives would you recommend? Bare in mind that we have no real techie skills and at this stage don't have the budget to pay someone to do anything major.
Cheers
anyone?
I've read some bad reviews about Stripe, and they're fees aren't that low. From memory they are comparable to PayPal. SquareSpace allows you to use Paypal, why not go down that route? Alternative, use a separate provider for the eCommerce side. You can find some that are cheaper and provide greater flexibility in design & cost.
What sort of volume are you going to be selling and how many transactions monthly? This will really dictate what route to take.
Good experience of Stripe so far. Reliable, seamless integration with Shopify and no known fraud issues. £15,000/yr, 1000 transactions for same period or thereabouts.
We use them for Amex payments as they're the cheapest for those. No issues at all so far although we've only processed a few transactions so far, albeit high value (£25k ish each). I'd read bad things so emailed them beforehand and explained my concerns and their Comms were very good.
Stripe is fine - you do get some chances - just make sure it's all verified and successful before you post.
Paypal might get more conversions for convenience.. try both see if the convenience of paypal pays for itself
We use Stripe and no problems. If you want to setup a website quickly with all he eccomerce bells and whistle then use Shopify. It is the easiest by a long way and you can get something up and running in a day no problem. You can use Shopify Payments (powered through Stripe) as well as PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay really easily.
There are then tons of add ons to make shipping simpler. Happy to advise and point you in the right direction.
Get onto Royal Mail and get a business account setup as well. Check out Zenstores for shipping, saves a ton of time.
Thanks for the replies
The new business is small with only a 5 products maximum to begin with at £10-£40 value, est £15k pa sales.
Shopify does sound more flexible although the charges are more than Squarespace.
Squarespace with a Ecwid shop is another option but want to avoid complexity as it's not out area.
@woody74- thanks for the advice, might drop you a email. The items are all Royal mail large letter size which works out the cheapest. Will start doing in manualy but knowing that Shopify has many plug-ins means it a more attractive solution for the longterm.
I have learnt a ton over the years about cheap ecommerce backends and Shopify if not perfect by a long way but it is easy to use and well priced. Looked at most of the others and they either lack functionality, integration or are really hard to setup. My main advice is get a managed backend so you don't have to worry about software updates and security. It is amazing how much security and fraud has gone nuts in the last few years and I wouldn't be happy taking credit card payments with software sitting on my own servers. We are a tiny company but get probably 2 or 3 fraudulent orders a day. Luckily we have some software that helps identify these but a few still get through the net.