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I dislike the monthly fee for Shopify apps so I go with WooCommerce most the time. I like designing in Elementor, but the Storefront theme is free and decent out of the box. If it's for a site I want to get up fast I'll go with Shopify.
Woocommerce. Can you elaborate more on "ideological reasons"? I'm genuinely curious why you don't feel ok to pay less than $1/sale to shopify to keep your store up & running but are ok paying much more on fulfillment/shipping.
I am looking for something which I can host on my own as I've nearly free servers (I receive digital ocean credit through affiliate sales on the guides I wrote) so hosting is free for me and tinkering is free as there not much work where I working so I can fix my website in that time.
Also I don't like to pay monthly for closed source product. That's my ideological reason, it's low in priority but I always choose open whenever possible
Anything self-hosted is going to need a fair bit of configuration and looking after - eg. even for the simplest of the them (Wordpress/Woocommerce), you'll need time to install and configure, updates come out ever few days, you'll have log files to monitor and keep tidy, a server to keep secure, etc. If you're doing 25-100 sales/day, do you have time for that? Wouldn't that time be better spent on increasing sales?
(depends on your goal obviously... is it to sell more? or have a fun toy to tinker with?)
There are shopify alternatives - eg. Freewebstore[1] is a small SaaS product run by a few developers.
You can build a very basic static frontend (HTML/JS) and they will host all the backend stuff and process the payments. 2% fee + payment gateway.
Beyond the technical challenges, have you considered: - All the little tax issues for various countries/states - Security in processing payments, avoiding fraud and protecting customer data - Integrating payment processing for credit card companies, Payp et al. and NOT having to deal with constant “account freezes” due to stolen credit card payments, customer complaints etc.
For selling software, I user Fastspri and not having to deal with all those things made a huge difference. We still had our fair share of annoying problems, but if you start digging around what other “self-hosted” businesses have to deal with...
In a sense, we had a more complicated case as the product keys were generated upon purchase and sent immediately - hence there was no manual/physical interaction from our end with orders...
You can also put stuff on Amaz and use their infrastructure