[joelrunyon]

The combination of the two services is about a 5% cut. As a non-developer, this combination looks appealing (I'm still waiting for someone to completely kill paypal), but that's a pretty big cut.

Maybe I should just spend a few weeks learning to program instead :)

[katherinehague]

This is Katherine, Co-Founder of ShopLocket. Definitely understand where you are coming from in terms of fees. We've thought a lot about this. What we ended up doing for the pricing model is very much taking a cue from other services like Eventbrite, Etsy, and even lower plans on Shopify. Some competitors bring both there fees and the processing fees together, but it still usually ends up around 5%. This is actually a lot lower than tradition Marketplaces, say eBay that will charge much larger percentages. We're certainly open to feedback though!

[joelrunyon]

hey katherine,

thanks for replying. i guess my biggest question is what really differentiates you from shopify then?

I have a shopify store for an e-commerce site I run and a wazala store (don't ask) to sell apparel items related to a blog I run. While shopify is great, but if i was going to pay the 5% or so percentage fee, I'd probably spring for shopify's fuller featured site capabilities over shoplocket.

I get the lower setup fee for Shoplocket, but when I heard of Shoplocket, I was really hoping i'd be able to use this as a lower-cost, less-featured alternative to shopify that was less expensive as well so i could finally get rid of Wazala and host stuff on my site.

I still might give it a try - I'm really anxious to get rid of wazala, but it'd be interesting to know your ideal customer usage of the product.

[mistermann]

I totally agree, even for me 2.5% is cutting it.

[joelrunyon]

Well, you can't get it for free. Avg processing fees are 1-2% even for credit cards.

[peteforde]

5% is a lot less than 30% on iTunes.

[joelrunyon]

You're comparing apples and oranges.

Shoplocket (I would guess) has a lot of users who are using it to sell retail items - which unlike app stores sales - have incremental costs as you sell more and more products. That 5% cuts into the margin of each item as opposed to an app that has a certain development cost and then no additional costs for increased sales (other than support + updates which would have to be done one way or another).

They're also not providing distribution, which Apple does.