Category: Ecommerce

Shopify’s sticker price is only part of the bill. Card processing, third-party surcharges, and even collecting product reviews can mean extra costs stacked on top of the subscription itself. Whether you’re just learning how to sell online or migrating an established store, the alternatives compared below vary just as much: on platform fees, on what ships built in versus what needs a separate app, on how their AI actually works, and on the support and infrastructure behind the storefront. Here’s how six real Shopify alternatives compare.

Why sellers are looking beyond Shopify in 2026

It’s become increasingly more clear that Shopify’s advertised sticker price is only the start of the bill. The Basic plan costs $29 a month billed annually ($39 a month if you pay monthly), but there’s a lot more to it than that:

• There’s the subscription itself: $29/month on Basic (billed annually), rising through Grow, Advanced, and Plus as your store grows.
• Plus card processing: 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on Basic, with lower rates on higher tiers.
• Plus a surcharge for skipping Shopify Payments: up to 2% extra if you use a different payment system.
• Plus apps for ecommerce features ranging from basic to advanced.

About those apps, reviews are the clearest example. Shopify retired its native product reviews tool in 2024, so any store built since then needs a separate third-party app just to collect star ratings on new products. It’s a small line item on its own, but it’s one more subscription stacked on top of a platform fee that already scales with every sale you make.

What to look for in a Shopify alternative

This is the comparison worth running before you commit to a platform: not “which one feels cheaper,” but the actual stack of subscription, processing, and app costs at the order volume you expect to hit. If you’re mapping out how to create an ecommerce website for the first time, that math is worth doing before you pick a platform, and not after you’ve built the store and started migrating products.

Five things actually predict whether a platform will work for your store, and price is only one of them.

• Fees. Check the platform fee at every tier, not just the entry price. The strongest ecommerce platforms lower or drop that fee entirely as your store grows, so what you pay on day one isn’t what you’re stuck paying once you’re scaling.
• Setup time. No-code builders can go live in hours. Open-source platforms like WooCommerce take longer, because you’re also setting up hosting and security.
• What’s actually built in. Reviews, email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and ecommerce sales tax calculation either ship with the platform or require a separate app subscription. That list of need-to-haves adds up fast.
• Support. Look for real human support hours and response times, and not just a chatbot buried behind a help center search box.
• Infrastructure. Uptime and page speed affect conversion rates directly. A cheap plan on a slow host isn’t actually cheap.

The best Shopify alternatives compared

The six alternatives below get judged on that same basis: what they charge, how fast you can launch, what’s built in versus what needs a separate app, and how their AI tools actually hold up. Here’s the breakdown, followed by what each platform is actually built for.

Pricing, plan names, and features across every platform in this comparison reflect what was publicly available as of September 2026. Prices are for each platform’s lowest-priced plan that lists selling products online, billed annually, in USD. This space moves fast, with plans renamed and prices changed with little notice, so confirm current details directly with each platform before making a decision.

SiteGround Ecommerce: easy no-code launch, with AI and reviews built in

• Price: $18/mo on the Sell plan (3% platform fee), or $24/mo on Grow and $36/mo on Scale (0% platform fee) — all prepaid annually, on top of standard card processing. 
• Setup: fast and no-code.
• What’s built in: reviews on every plan (five-star scale, approval step before anything goes live), plus basic tax calculation and shipping tools included, with advanced shipping on Grow and up and optional paid Advanced Tax via Stripe Tax. There’s no large third-party app marketplace, but the native feature list covers enough ground that you’re less likely to need one.
• AI: the AI Wizard builds the store from a description; the AI Store Agent runs it afterward, answering questions about your actual order, product, and customer data, and executing bulk catalog edits. Both run on AI Studio, a broader AI workspace included free with every plan, up to 20,000 tokens a month, with multi-model chat access to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini plus 15+ specialized agents for marketing tasks like social posts, ad copy, and SEO.

• Support: 24/7 via chat, phone, and ticket.
• Infrastructure: premium hosting is included on every plan, run by a company that has been in web hosting for years rather than a design tool with ecommerce added on top.
• Best for: sellers who want a fast, no-code launch with reviews, AI store management, and solid infrastructure all included, without stacking plugins to get there.

WooCommerce: full ownership, no platform fees

• Price: a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store, not a standalone platform on its own. You need WordPress, and hosting for it, before WooCommerce does anything.
• Setup: the most hands-on option here — you’re managing hosting, updates, and security yourself, not the platform. Full control means more technical skills are required.
• What’s built in: basic reviews you turn on in settings. Core WooCommerce supports manual tax rates, but email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, and automated tax calculation come from extensions you add, some of them paid.
• AI: no built-in AI assistant or store builder. WooCommerce core has early support for connecting outside AI assistants to your store (still in developer preview, and technical to set up); other AI features come from plugins.
• Support: not included with WooCommerce itself. You’re relying on your hosting provider’s support team or community forums, not a built-in help desk.
• Best for: sellers who want full ownership of their store’s code and data, and either have technical support in place or want to build that control themselves. For a deeper breakdown against Shopify and AI-built alternatives, see our Shopify vs. WooCommerce vs. AI-built store comparison.

BigCommerce: multi-storefront and B2B options

• Price: $29/mo (Core), $79/mo (Growth), or $299/mo (Scale), billed annually, each with a revenue cap before the next tier is required. Platform fee is 0% on orders through BigCommerce’s embedded payment providers, including Stripe and PayPal; on other gateways, a surcharge applies that steps down from 2% on Core to 1% on Growth to 0.6% on Scale.
• Setup: a steeper learning curve than the no-code builders on this list.
• What’s built in: native reviews, unlimited products and users, and abandoned cart emails and customer groups from Growth up. Multi-storefront support is available as a paid add-on, and B2B capabilities sit on its custom-priced Performance plan.
• AI: BigCommerce’s AI is about product content, not store building. BigAI Copywriter writes product descriptions now, and you start from a theme. More advanced tools are still rolling out, reserved for its Performance and B2B plans.
• Support: 24/7 chat and email support on Core; 24/7 live phone and chat on Growth and above.
• Best for: multi-storefront or B2B businesses that can absorb that learning curve in exchange for the extra power.

Squarespace: best for design-first, boutique catalogs

• Price: $16/mo (Basic) to $99/mo (Advanced), billed annually. Core ($23/mo) is where most sellers land, since that’s where the online-store fee drops to 0% (Basic still carries 2%). Card processing rates step down by tier too (2.9% + 30¢ on Basic and Core, down to 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced), and digital content/membership sales run on their own steeper schedule (7% down to 0%).
• Setup: fast and no-code.
• What’s built in: native product reviews. Its extension marketplace is small and curated, covering shipping, inventory, marketing, and finance.
• AI: Blueprint AI builds the store from a few brand questions. Beacon (run-stage AI) and its composer tools for products, FAQs, and discounts are included only on mid-tier plans and up, not the entry tier.
• Support: email support 24/7; live chat Monday to Friday, with no phone support at any tier.
• Design: a library of designer-made templates, customizable with a block-based editor.
• Best for: boutique or brand-first sellers where design carries the store.

Wix: large app marketplace

• Price: around $29/month for its entry ecommerce plan, with a 0% platform fee on top of standard card processing.
• Setup: fast and no-code.
• What’s built in: native abandoned-cart recovery and product reviews, plus the largest app marketplace on this list if you need more. Most of those apps carry their own separate cost, so it’s a paid ecosystem, not a free one.
• AI: Aria builds the store, then keeps working after launch, monitoring performance, generating analytics, and helping edit products. A separate AI Site Chat tool answers visitors’ questions on your storefront.
• Support: 24/7 in English via chat, ticket, and phone, though there’s no number to call directly. Phone support works by requesting a callback instead.
• Best for: sellers who already know they’ll need a specific app or integration, and don’t mind paying for it separately instead of getting it built in.

GoDaddy: budget-friendly entry point

• Price: $9.99/month on annual billing (Starter, GoDaddy’s entry tier), with no separate platform fee. Standard card processing (2.7% + 30¢) applies on top.
• Setup: fast and AI-generated. Describe your business and GoDaddy’s AI produces a starter site in minutes, similar to the other no-code builders here.
• What’s built in: unlimited products and services and multiple payment and delivery options on every paid plan, with tax and shipping settings available in its store setup.
• AI: generates the site and store from a description, then keeps working afterward through the same chat interface. It can update pages, blog posts, or product listings over time. It also handles AI-driven SEO and automated responses in its web chat tool.
• Support: 24/7 phone, chat, and text, plus a ticket system for specific product issues.
• Best for: very small or first-time sellers on a tight budget who want the a simple, chat-based setup.

Which Shopify alternative actually fits your ecommerce store

Different platforms solve different problems, and no single one is perfect for everyone. Here’s a quick way to match what matters most to you with the platform that actually covers it.

Is SiteGround Ecommerce the right Shopify alternative for you?

The right platform here depends on what you’re optimizing for: a wider marketplace over what ships built in, or a lower monthly price over deeper features. None of that makes one platform objectively best, just better suited to a specific kind of seller.

One option shows up across several rows above: support, AI, and what ships built in. SiteGround Ecommerce launches fast without code, includes reviews and store management tools standard rather than behind a paywall or a separate app, and runs on SiteGround’s own hosting infrastructure, not a design tool with ecommerce added on afterward. You can try it free for 14 days, no credit card required.

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FAQs about Shopify alternatives

One checkbox on a product page can do more for your bottom line than your last sitewide discount, and it costs you nothing to offer. Gift wrapping, insurance, and engraving are three simple forms of product customization, but the same logic works for almost any optional extra you can attach to a product. This guide covers which ones you can put to work for your online store, how to price and configure them so they actually convert, and how to set them up without touching a line of code.

What is product customization in ecommerce?

Ecommerce product customization can be as simple as an optional add-on, like gift wrap, insurance, or engraving, that a shopper selects on the product detail page before adding the product to their cart. Most ecommerce businesses don’t need dedicated online product customization software for this: it’s a setting on a product that already exists, not a new system to install.

Add-ons vs. product configurators

An add-on isn’t the same as a full product configurator, though, which is the kind of tool that lets a shopper design a product before it’s even made.

• Add-ons attach a service or extra to a product that already exists, with no configurator required.
• Configurators build the customizable product itself (color, materials, dimensions) and usually need dedicated product customization software or a developer to set up.

Why should you offer product add-ons?

Product add-ons raise average order value (AOV) because a customer who’s already decided to buy is far more likely to accept a small extra than a stranger is to click a discount banner. Upselling and cross-selling programs lift AOV by roughly 20-30%, according to 2025 research from Fairing, and add-ons are one of the lowest-effort ways to run that play because they need no new inventory.

Here’s what that looks like on a single item: a $3 gift-wrap add-on doesn’t need a high attach rate to matter. Even a modest 10-15% attach rate adds more to margin than a comparable discount, because there’s no unit cost behind it beyond tissue paper and a few extra minutes of packing time. On 1,000 monthly orders, that’s an extra $300 to $450 a month in near-pure margin, without touching the base product’s price.

Add-ons also improve customer satisfaction and experience in ways a discount can’t:

• They let a shopper solve a real problem (protecting a fragile item, wrapping a gift) at the moment they’re already buying.
• They add margin instead of eroding it, unlike a sitewide discount.
• They require no extra product photography or listing work.

If you’re mapping this against a broader ecommerce marketing plan for growing sales, add-ons are one of the few levers that touch checkout directly instead of traffic.

What are examples of common add-ons by product?

Gift wrap, insurance, and engraving are the obvious product customization examples that probably pop into your mind, but their fit for your own products might not always be so obvious. So let’s unpack add-ons by product type, since it might just reveal one you hadn’t yet considered.

Gifts

If a meaningful share of your orders ship to someone other than the buyer, then news flash: you’re selling gifts, and gift wrap could be worth testing. Jewelry, home goods, and kids’ items carry a high gift-to-self-purchase ratio and convert on gift wrap even outside the holiday season; commodity items like phone chargers or office supplies mostly don’t, regardless of the time of year. The AOV mechanic here is simple: the customer is already paying for the occasion, so the wrap reads as part of that spend rather than an extra expense.

High-ticket or fragile goods

Insurance and warranties fit anything expensive enough that a customer worries about damage or loss: electronics, furniture, fine jewelry. The AOV mechanic is different from gift wrap. Customers aren’t paying for an occasion here; they’re paying to reduce risk, and their price tolerance scales with the item’s value rather than sitting at a flat few dollars.

Genuine insurance, priced against an item’s actual value, usually comes from a dedicated warranty provider, not from a basic add-on field. If you’re using a generic product add-on for this instead, what you’re really offering is a store-backed guarantee: you’re promising to replace or refund the item yourself if something goes wrong, funded by that flat fee. That’s a legitimate thing to sell, but it isn’t the same as a formal insurance policy, and customers should know which one they’re getting.

Made-to-order goods

Engraving and personalization touches fit products made or finished to order: jewelry, watches, apparel with monograms or custom text. The AOV mechanic here comes from the item’s uniqueness of a personalized product rather than an occasion or a risk: a customer will pay more for a customized product that is made or finished specifically for them than for the off-the-shelf version. 

The operational catch is separate and worth keeping in mind, though: personalizing something takes time, and a three-day turnaround collides with that two-day shipping promise you made or the feasibility of return. So set the expectation on customization options up front, on the product page and in the confirmation email, so a slower fulfillment time or a non-returnable item don’t turn out to be unpleasant surprises for your customer.

Bulky or time-sensitive goods

Furniture, electronics, and fitness equipment are bulky enough to carry an optional assembly or setup service. Meanwhile, time-sensitive orders can carry a rush or expedite fee handled as a product add-on instead of a separate shipping tier. The AOV mechanic is convenience: the customer is paying to skip a hassle, whether that’s assembling something themselves or waiting in the standard queue, rather than paying for an occasion or reducing risk.

How do you configure product add-ons?

Once you’ve picked your add-ons, three settings decide how they behave on the product page:

Optional vs. mandatory

Leave add-ons optional by default: forcing a selection a shopper doesn’t want adds friction at the exact moment they’ve decided to buy, and that friction costs you more carts than the extra revenue is worth. Make one mandatory only when skipping it would mean shipping something you can’t stand behind, like sending a fragile, high-value item with no protection option at all. 

Free vs. paid

An add-on with no price attached reads as free to the customer. That’s fine for goodwill gestures (a thank-you note, a simple ribbon) or as a competitive edge against other brands who charge for the same thing. Charge for anything that costs you real time or material, like engraving or a protection plan.

Single-select vs. multi-select

Most display formats are single-select by nature: a dropdown, a color swatch, a button. Only when you need a shopper to choose more than one option at once, like a gift note plus a ribbon color, does a dedicated multi-select checkbox format make sense. If a shopper might want more than one unit of that same add-on, enable quantity selection alongside it too, so they aren’t stuck adding the option twice.

Getting these decisions right shapes how the options look on your product page, so treat them as part of the product’s design instead of a checkout-settings afterthought.

How do you set up product add-ons in your online store?

Setting up add-ons generally follows a similar order regardless of platform:

1. Identify your extras. Pick two to four add-ons you’re actually offering before touching any settings.
2. Decide format and pricing per extra. Free or paid, single-select or multi-select, using the table above as a starting point.
3. Reuse the same add-on across products where your platform allows it. Many platforms save each add-on as a reusable template automatically once you set it up, so you can attach the same gift-wrap option to other products instead of rebuilding it from scratch each time.
4. Preview how it looks on the product page before publishing, on mobile as well as desktop.
5. Confirm your fulfillment side can see which orders include which add-ons before the first order ships.

None of this requires developer time beyond what building an ecommerce website already involves. On SiteGround Ecommerce specifically, you can enable and manage add-ons directly from the product page: pick extras, set pricing and format, reuse them as saved templates, and preview before publishing, all without touching code.

What should you watch for before launch?

Run through this list before turning add-ons on:

• State your add-on refund policy on the product page or in your returns policy, not just in a support reply after the fact, especially if your platform ties add-ons to the base product with no separate refund option. Setting proper expectations builds customer loyalty.
• Make sure fulfillment can see, order by order, which add-ons are included.
• Decide whether any add-on value needs its own SKU or stock tracking, at least a simple in-stock/out-of-stock flag. Gift boxes run out too.
• Keep add-on pricing consistent across products at different price points. A $5 gift wrap reads differently on a $15 item than on a $150 one.
• Test the whole flow on your mobile web design, not just desktop, before publishing.

A checklist like this pays for itself: it’s cheaper to catch inconsistencies now than after the first refund request.

Turn every product page into an upsell opportunity

Everything above, from picking the right add-ons, to pricing them, and deciding optional vs. mandatory, still needs somewhere to live on the product page. That’s usually the part that requires a developer or a paid plugin, which is the whole reason product customization for ecommerce gets treated as way more complicated than it needs to be.

SiteGround Ecommerce’s Grow and Scale plans include a built-in Product Add-Ons feature, so store owners can set up gift wrap, insurance, engraving, or any other extra directly from the product editor, with no plugin and no custom code. It comes with six ready-made templates to start from, and once an order includes an add-on, it’s flagged automatically on the order page so fulfillment never has to guess. Explore SiteGround Ecommerce to see how it fits your store.

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Frequently asked questions

Trust has a price, and it’s usually the store paying it, not the shopper. A recognized retailer collects that premium without trying. A store nobody’s heard of has to earn it, sale by sale, and most conversion advice was written for the store that doesn’t have to. Here’s where that happens, and the five specific moves that close the gap faster.

Shoppers spend 51% more with sellers they trust

Consumers spend 51% more with retailers they trust than with ones they don’t, according to Forter’s 2024 Trust Premium Report. That premium isn’t distributed evenly: brands people already recognize get it by default. Stores nobody’s heard of have to earn it, one nervous checkout at a time.

The rest of this piece breaks down exactly where that premium gets tested in your checkout, and the five specific moves that help an unfamiliar store close the gap faster.

Why most trust advice doesn’t apply to a store nobody’s heard of

The trust stats everyone quotes come from the whole market at once. That means a shopper’s tenth order from a brand they’ve used for years gets averaged in with their first order from your store, which they found an hour ago.

To break it down: Baymard says 19% of cart abandoners didn’t trust the site with their card details. Forter says 78% abandon a checkout that feels too slow or difficult. Both numbers are averages of that mixed group.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer found that 88% of shoppers call trusting a brand an important or critical purchase factor, right up there with quality (89%) and value (88%). That puts trust on equal footing with quality and price, not as an afterthought.

And yet none of these reports split “a retailer I already know” from “a store I’ve never heard of.” That’s the split that actually matters if you’re the second one.

Averaged data hides the real number for unknown sellers

Cart abandonment surveys count every kind of store at once: department chains, marketplaces, and one-person shops nobody’s ever linked to before.

A shopper checking out at a store they already trust barely glances at the card field. A shopper landing on a business they found through an AI search result or a social ad has no history to lean on.

That’s the exact moment Baymard’s 19% distrust figure is measuring. It’s just diluted by everyone else who wasn’t hesitating in the first place.

No report isolates the real number for first-time, unfamiliar sellers. But it’s almost certainly higher than the pooled average lets on.

Recognized brands get a security pass that new stores don’t

Baymard’s research on perceived checkout security found something almost unfair: shoppers trust Apple and Walmart with barely any visual security cues at all. The name is doing the work a padlock icon would otherwise have to do.

Newer or less familiar sites don’t get that shortcut. That’s part of why website security fundamentals matter more for a store that’s still building a reputation than for one that already has it.

Baymard’s fix is simple: add visual reinforcement, like a border or shading, around the card entry field. It’s a small design change that borrows some of the confidence a big name gets for free. Baymard’s own explanation for why is refreshingly blunt: shoppers aren’t evaluating checkout security on any technical basis, they’re going on gut feeling, and anything that looks visually set apart or reinforced reads as safer, whether or not it actually is.

Most sites still skip it. 66% of major ecommerce sites have no visual emphasis on the card field at all, per Baymard’s latest count. Better than the 89% that skipped it in 2012, but still most stores.

Where trust actually gets tested in an unknown seller’s checkout

Consumer trust gets tested at three specific moments: the homepage, the product page, and the payment step. Get any of them wrong and you’re making one of the common ecommerce design mistakes that cost stores sales before checkout even starts.

When customers decide you’re safe to pay

As customers peruse your pages, a first-time visitor will check the following the same way they’d check a stranger’s references, because that’s exactly what they are:

• Shipping: 95% of shoppers say policy matters, and 53% have abandoned a purchase over a restrictive one, per Forter.
• Returns: 89% say policy matters, and 22% have abandoned a purchase over a restrictive one, per Forter.
• Payment: 9% abandon when a store doesn’t offer enough payment methods, and 10% leave after a card gets declined, per Baymard.

The payment step carries an extra test we already touched on: visual reinforcement around the card field is what makes that moment feel secure. A payment step that looks unfamiliar and offers only one way to pay is asking a first-time buyer to take two leaps of faith instead of one.

Which badge actually reassures a buyer at the payment step

Some trust signals don’t work the way people assume. CXL surveyed more than 2,100 shoppers and asked which badge gave them the most sense of security when paying online. PayPal won: 25% picked it as the top choice, ahead of Norton, Google Trusted Store, Visa-Mastercard, the Better Business Bureau, and McAfee.

That’s a payment logo doing more work than those five badges whose entire job is signaling security, and it comes down to recognition rather than accuracy: shoppers pick what looks familiar, whether or not it makes a security claim at all.

For a small store, a familiar payment logo can do more trust-building work than a generic secure-site seal from a vendor nobody’s heard of.

The small-store trust stack: five moves backed by data

Five specific moves make up a small store’s trust stack, each backed by its own data point instead of a guess. Here’s what to prioritize, and why each one earns its spot.

1. Choose recognized payment badges over generic security seals

We already saw that a recognized payment badge beats a dedicated security seal at inspiring confidence. Put that to use at your own checkout: skip the generic secure-site seal, and show whichever payment badges you actually accept instead.

If you already accept payments from PayPal, Apple Pay, or a major card network, display those logos during checkout. They’re doing double duty: processing the payment and reassuring a shopper who’s never bought from you before.

2. Make shipping and return terms specific and visible

We already saw that a restrictive shipping policy drives away over half of otherwise interested shoppers. The real fix is often visibility, not a better policy: show exact shipping costs and delivery windows before checkout, not three clicks into a policy page.

The same goes for returns. A “see our returns policy” link buried in the footer does nothing at the moment a shopper is deciding whether to buy. State the return window and who pays for return shipping right on the product page.

3. Add visual reinforcement around the card field

We’ve already covered why this matters: a bordered or shaded card field measurably increases how secure a checkout feels, and most stores still skip it. Implementing it takes minutes in most ecommerce platforms and instantly separates you from every competitor who didn’t bother.

4. Lead with third-party reviews over brand messaging

Your own product description will never be as convincing as someone else’s experience. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer found that unpaid advocates, satisfied customers, and peers carry more weight in building brand trust than paid or owned channels, brand websites included.

Make sure real, verifiable customer testimonials and positive reviews are actually visible on product pages, not buried in a tab shoppers have to click to find. If you’re light on testimonials so far, social proof doesn’t have to mean five star reviews: user photos, client logos, video testimonials, and a specific customer feedback quote all work.

5. Don’t let a slow or broken checkout undo the other four

None of the four moves above matter if the checkout page doesn’t load, or doesn’t load quickly. Baymard’s research found that 17% of cart abandoners left because of website errors or crashes, and Forter found that 78% abandon a checkout that feels too slow or difficult in general.

The gains for fixing this are larger than most store owners expect. The hardest data on it happens to be mobile-specific: Deloitte’s “Milliseconds Make Millions” study found that shaving just 0.1 seconds off mobile page load time raised mobile retail conversion rates by 8.4%, and checkout-to-order completion specifically by 4.7%.

A recognized payment badge, a clear return policy, and glowing reviews don’t help a shopper staring at a spinning loading icon. Reliable, secure hosting is the layer everything else in this stack sits on top of, which is exactly why speeding up your website has to be part of the trust conversation, not a separate one.

You don’t need a bigger name, you need a better stack

A recognized brand inherited that 51% premium we opened with. A store nobody’s heard of has to build it, one evidenced move at a time: visible policies, a well-designed card field, real reviews, and a checkout that actually works.

Some of that stack is on you: writing the return policy, collecting reviews. The rest, like reliable uptime, checkout security, and payment options that don’t buckle during a sale, comes down to what your store runs on. SiteGround Ecommerce is built to cover that half of the list, so the trust you’re building shows up as revenue instead of an abandoned cart.

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Frequently asked questions

You’ve heard both sides: PayPal is the easiest way to get paid, and PayPal is one bad week away from freezing your money. Both are true. The fees are manageable, more manageable than most sellers assume once you know which button to use at checkout. The real risk is a hold with zero warning and no promised release date. Here’s what the fees really add up to, why holds happen, and whether PayPal, Stripe, or both deserve a spot in your checkout.

What is PayPal for small business?

A PayPal Business account is the version of PayPal built for accepting customer payments, sending invoices, and keeping business money separate from personal funds. It’s free to open, has no monthly fee, and works for anyone from a solo Etsy seller to a multi-employee retailer.

If you’re an early-stage seller trying to keep startup costs down, a payment processor with no monthly fee is one line item you can cross off your online store budget before you’ve made a single sale.

What features come with a PayPal Business account

• Invoicing: send professional invoices with built-in payment links, no separate tool needed
• Checkout buttons: embeddable PayPal Checkout for your website or online store
• In-person card reader: a physical Zettle reader for markets, pop-ups, or a storefront counter
• Multi-user access: add employees or bookkeepers with permission-based logins
• Brand recognition: customers already trust the PayPal button, which can reduce checkout drop-off

PayPal business vs. personal account

The two accounts aren’t interchangeable once you’re actually running a business:

Using a personal account to run a business violates PayPal’s terms and is one of the fastest ways to trigger a hold, since PayPal’s fraud systems flag business-pattern activity on personal accounts.

How much does PayPal really cost small businesses?

A standard PayPal Business account has no monthly fee. What it charges instead is a percentage plus a fixed amount on every transaction, and that rate changes depending on how the customer pays.

Standard transaction fees

Source: PayPal’s official merchant fee schedule, last updated July 2026.

Take a $100 sale. Run it through standard PayPal Checkout and PayPal walks away with $3.98. Run the same sale through standard card processing, and PayPal settles for $3.48. Not a huge gap on one sale, but multiply it by every transaction you process and it stops feeling like pocket change.

For more on comparing PayPal against other options, see our guide on payment processing providers for online sellers.

Other fees to keep in mind

Beyond the headline rate, a few charges only show up once you’re already using the account:

• Currency conversion: a 3% to 4% spread on top of the exchange rate for cross-border sales
• Chargeback fee: $20 when a buyer disputes a charge through their card issuer
• Dispute fee: $15 for a standard dispute filed through PayPal, rising to $30 if your account is flagged for a high dispute rate
• Instant transfer: 1.50% of the amount (minimum $0.50) to move your balance to your bank in minutes
• Refunds: issuing a refund returns the customer’s money, but PayPal keeps whatever fee you paid to receive it in the first place, anywhere from $3.48 to $3.98 on a $100 sale, depending on how the customer paid.

That last one catches a lot of new sellers off guard. PayPal doesn’t deposit money to your bank account by default. It sits in your PayPal balance until you either withdraw it manually (free, 1 to 3 business days) or pay for an instant transfer. If you’d rather not remember to move money every week, PayPal’s Auto Transfer setting handles it automatically. 

How to reduce or avoid PayPal’s 3% fee

A few practical moves lower your effective rate without switching processors:

1. Skip instant transfers unless you genuinely need the cash same-day. Standard transfers are free.
2. Contact PayPal directly once your monthly volume is consistent and ask about negotiated rates. PayPal offers reduced pricing to higher-volume sellers, though the terms aren’t published and are set case by case.
3. Pass processing costs to the buyer through PayPal’s invoicing settings, where allowed by your state and card network rules.

Pros and cons of PayPal for small business

Where PayPal has a genuine edge

Most of what people credit to PayPal (fast setup, no monthly fee, buyer trust) isn’t unique. Stripe matches or beats PayPal on all three: its standard rate is 2.9% + $0.30 (cheaper than PayPal’s own card rate), setup takes minutes, and it natively supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other wallets buyers already trust. What PayPal actually offers that a lot of alternatives don’t:

• Existing balance checkout: a huge number of shoppers already have money sitting in a PayPal account, and paying from that balance skips re-entering card details entirely
• No business website required: PayPal accounts can activate for sellers running purely through social media or marketplaces, where some other processors expect a live storefront to verify against
• Crossover from personal use: customers who use PayPal to split rent or pay a friend are one click from checking out with the same account, which lowers the barrier for occasional or one-off buyers

The real risk: frozen funds and account holds

Ask around in any seller forum and this is the complaint that comes up first, the one most PayPal roundups mention in a single throwaway line and move on. Here’s the real version: PayPal can hold your balance for up to 21 days if its risk systems flag your account, according to PayPal’s own funds availability policy, and it doesn’t ask permission first. What tends to set it off:

• A sudden spike in sales volume compared to your account’s history
• A new seller account processing large transactions early on
• A wave of disputes or refund requests in a short window
• Selling in a category PayPal classifies as higher risk

Deep breath, though: none of these require actual fraud to have taken place on your part. A viral product launch can trigger the same hold as a genuine problem. To lower the odds of this kind of thing happening:

• Notify PayPal before a known spike, such as a planned launch or seasonal sale
• Keep tracking numbers and delivery confirmation on file for every order
• Respond to disputes immediately rather than letting them escalate to a chargeback
• Avoid relying on PayPal as your only source of operating cash, since a hold can freeze funds you were counting on

How to set up a PayPal business account

What you need before you start

You don’t need an LLC to open a PayPal Business account. A sole proprietor can sign up with a Social Security Number; an LLC or corporation will need an EIN instead. Either way, have ready:

• Your legal business name and address
• SSN or EIN, depending on your business structure
• A linked bank account
• A description of what you sell

One more thing worth knowing before you start selling: PayPal issues a 1099-K once your account crosses $20,000 in payments and more than 200 transactions in a year. That threshold has moved around in recent tax law (a lower $600 threshold was passed, delayed several times, then repealed in 2025), so treat this as a reporting rule, not a taxability rule: business income is taxable on your return regardless of whether a 1099-K ever arrives, and it’s worth understanding how ecommerce sales tax works alongside it if you’re selling to customers in multiple states. Thresholds and requirements can change, and this isn’t tax advice, so confirm your specific obligations with a tax professional or the IRS directly.

Step-by-step setup walkthrough

1. Go to PayPal’s business signup page and select Business account
2. Enter your business name, category, and website or social profile
3. Add your SSN or EIN and confirm your business address
4. Link a bank account for withdrawals
5. Verify your email and confirm your identity if PayPal requests it

Most accounts are approved instantly; some are held for manual review, which can take a few business days.

Connecting PayPal to your online store

Once your account is active, PayPal plugs into most store platforms through a checkout button or a plugin, no custom code required for the standard integration. If you’re building your ecommerce website from scratch, PayPal is typically one of two or three payment methods you’ll want live before launch, alongside a card processor.

Choosing the best payment processor for your small business

This isn’t really a question of picking one processor and sticking with it. It’s a question of which processor, or combination of processors, actually matches how you sell. PayPal alone covers plenty of small businesses. Others need to add a second option next to it.

Signs PayPal alone could be enough

PayPal by itself is a solid fit if most of these describe your business:

• You sell simple, one-time purchases rather than subscriptions or recurring billing
• Your monthly volume is modest enough that a flat rate doesn’t eat into margins
• Most of your sales are domestic, so you’re not stacking international and conversion fees
• You want a working checkout today, not a week spent on a custom integration
• Your customers already expect to see the PayPal button and trust it

Signs you need more than PayPal alone

PayPal alone starts to show its limits once you hit any of these:

• High transaction volume, where flat-rate fees add up faster than a negotiated processor rate
• A preference to accept card payments directly rather than routing everyone through PayPal’s interface

None of these are reasons to drop PayPal. They’re reasons to add a second processor alongside it.

Running Stripe and PayPal together

Stripe and PayPal aren’t an either-or choice for most small businesses. Running both means covering more of your customers’ preferred payment methods than either processor covers alone, card payments, digital wallets, and checkout flexibility that neither one fully replaces on its own. If Stripe is new to your setup, what to check on Stripe before going live walks through the parts that trip people up first: test mode, checkout, and receipts.

Is PayPal the right fit for your small business?

For low-volume sellers, freelancers invoicing a handful of clients, or anyone who wants to start accepting payments today, PayPal is a reasonable default. The fees are predictable, the setup takes minutes, and buyers already trust the button. Where it falls short is at scale: higher volume, international sales, or a dispute-heavy niche all make the hidden costs and hold risk more likely to bite.

Most small businesses land on running PayPal and Stripe together rather than choosing one exclusively. SiteGround Ecommerce supports both natively, so you can offer customers the payment options they already expect without a pile of extra plugins to manage. You also get high-performance infrastructure and around-the-clock expert support built in, so payments aren’t the only thing running smoothly.

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Frequently asked questions

Your kitchen table is covered in jewelry, candles, soap, you name it, and everyone keeps asking if you sell it. Time to make that a yes. Selling homemade and handmade products means picking a channel that matches what you’re making, pricing around that channel’s fees, and building toward your own online store once the per-sale cut starts eating into your margin. Start with a low-commitment channel to test demand, then move to your own site once fees justify the switch.

Here’s the full six-step path, starting with the one decision everything else depends on: knowing you actually have something worth selling.

Step 1: Decide what to make and validate there’s demand

If you already have a product idea, this step tells you whether it’s worth building a business around before you sink money into inventory. Every step after this one assumes you’ve settled on a specific product.

How to spot a profitable homemade product idea

A good homemade product idea hits three marks:

1. Repeatable to make. You can produce it again and again without the process draining you.
2. Real margin. Materials, your time, and what it sells for actually pencil out once you do the math.
3. Existing demand. People are already searching for or buying similar items somewhere.

Jewelry, candles, and soap tend to score well on the margin test because materials cost is low relative to perceived value. That is, a product that takes four hours to make and sells for $15 fails that test even if the other two check out.

Quick ways to test demand before you invest

Testing an idea doesn’t require betting on a full production run. Four low-cost ways to validate first:

• A local pop-up or craft fair table. A weekend at a market tells you more about real buying behavior than weeks of guessing.
• A small social test batch. Post a handful of finished pieces on social media or in a relevant community and watch for actual purchase interest, not just likes.
• A limited marketplace listing. List five to ten units on Etsy before committing to a full production run.
• A quick, no-code website. Setting up a basic online store lets you test a real product page and checkout without weeks of setup or a full marketplace commitment.

If none of those produce interest, that’s useful information too. It’s cheaper to learn that from ten units than from two hundred.

Step 2: Handle the legal and business basics

None of this replaces a lawyer or accountant, but you need to know what to check before you take your first payment. Keep this practical: flag what applies to you, then confirm the specifics for your state and product category.

Do you need a business license or LLC?

Most hobby sellers don’t need an LLC to start slinging handmade items or selling crafts online. A sole proprietorship, which typically requires no separate formation, covers most first-time sellers, and you can add an LLC later once revenue and liability exposure both grow enough to justify it. It starts to matter once:

• You’re carrying real inventory instead of making pieces to order.
• You’re shipping fragile products that could cause injury if something goes wrong.
• Your income changes your tax situation enough to want the legal separation.

Check your state’s requirements and the U.S. Small Business Administration’s guide to business licenses and permits before you assume either way.

Permits and rules that vary by product

Non-food handmade goods like jewelry, candles, soap, art, and home decor generally face far lighter permit requirements than food items, but they’re not permit-free. Most makers in this category need to check a few things regardless of what they’re crafting:

• A sales tax permit, since most states require you to collect and remit sales tax once you’re selling regularly, whether through a marketplace, at a fair, or from your own site.
• A home occupation permit or local business license, if you’re producing from home and your city or county requires one for a home-based business.
• Product-specific safety rules, which vary by category. Candles are covered by an industry fire-safety labeling standard (ASTM F2058) that most marketplaces and retailers expect even though it’s technically voluntary, and soap marketed with moisturizing or other beyond-cleansing claims shifts from the CPSC’s lighter “true soap” category into FDA cosmetic labeling rules.

Cottage food laws, allergen labeling, and health department permits sit in a separate, stricter category that applies specifically to baked goods and other food products, and those requirements shift by state and even by county. If you’re making food items rather than handmade crafts, SiteGround’s bakery website builder guide covers that compliance in more detail.

Step 3: Where to sell handmade items: marketplaces, local, or your own store

This is the decision that shapes everything after it. Your channel determines your fee structure, and your fee structure determines your price in Step 4. There’s no universally “best” option here: it depends on how much traffic you can drive yourself versus how much you’re willing to pay a platform to bring buyers to you.

Selling on marketplaces (Etsy, Amazon Handmade, and alternatives)

Etsy stacks a listing fee, transaction fee, and payment processing to land around 10-13% combined, while Amazon Handmade charges one flat 15% referral fee, and both work better than eBay or Depop for a dedicated handmade storefront. (Fees accurate as of August 2026 — always check each platform’s current seller fee page before pricing.) Those fee percentages are only part of the picture when weighing an ecommerce platform against a marketplace, which also comes down to how much control and traffic you’re trading away.

Selling locally: markets, pop-ups, and consignment

Local selling carries its own cost structure, separate from either marketplace:

• Craft fairs and markets typically charge a flat booth fee, often $25 to $150 for a weekend, regardless of what you sell.
• Consignment shops take a percentage cut of each sale instead, commonly 30 to 50%, in exchange for handling the retail floor space for you.

Local selling is a natural extension of the demand testing from Step 1: real buyers, no storefront commitment yet.

Selling from your own website

Your own store has no per-sale marketplace cut. On a typical $16 item, Step 4 works through the exact numbers, but that’s roughly $1.50 to $1.80 more in your pocket per sale than a marketplace takes, before you’ve changed anything about the product itself. A few other things come with owning the storefront:

• You own the customer relationship. Etsy’s seller policy restricts using customer data beyond Etsy-related communications unless the buyer opts in elsewhere. Your own checkout can capture an email with consent, feeding straight into the repeat-customer tactics in Step 6.
• You’re not competing in someone else’s search results. A marketplace search for “handmade ceramic mug” returns thousands of sellers ranked by that platform’s algorithm. Your own product pages compete in Google instead, where SEO effort compounds rather than resetting with every algorithm change.
• You control the presentation. Photography, the maker story, bundling, subscriptions: marketplaces standardize these into a fixed listing format, while your own site builds the page around what actually sells your product.
• You skip platform-mandated fees on top of your base rate, like Etsy’s Offsite Ads program, which can add another 12-15% on sales it attributes to itself.

The trade-off: you’re now responsible for driving your own traffic, which is what Step 6 covers. Apparel and accessory makers should check SiteGround’s clothing website builder guide and online boutique guide for category-specific setup; food sellers should use the bakery guide referenced in Step 2 instead.

Step 4: Price your homemade products so they’re actually profitable

Pricing comes after the channel decision on purpose. The same candle needs a different price on an Etsy shop than it does on your own store, because one of those channels is taking a cut and the other isn’t.

A simple cost-plus pricing formula

Cost-plus pricing adds up materials, your time at a real hourly rate, and overhead, then layers a margin on top. Here’s a candle priced that way:

Skipping the “time” line is the single most common mistake first-time sellers make. If your time isn’t in the formula, you’re not running a business. You’re subsidizing one.

Pro tip: the $16-17 price above works if you’re only selling direct to customers. It falls apart if you also want to sell through shops or boutiques, because retailers who resell your product usually want to buy it at about half of what they’ll charge their own customers, a standard called keystone pricing. That’s where the math gets tight: you can’t just raise your own retail price to make room, since customers won’t pay a wildly higher price for the same candle just because a boutique might carry it someday. In practice, most makers either accept a thinner cut on wholesale orders than textbook keystone, or price a little higher from the start so there’s some room without pricing themselves out of their own direct sales. Decide which trade-off you’re making before a shop asks for wholesale terms, not after.

Factoring in shipping and packaging for fragile items

Breakable goods like ceramics, candles, and glass jewelry need protective packaging: sturdy boxes, void fill, and “fragile” handling labels can add $1 to $4 per shipment depending on item size. Skip it to save a few cents and it comes back as breakage claims, returns, and refunds, all of which cost more than the packaging would have. Build that cost into your product price or charge it separately at checkout. Either way, price it in upfront.

Adjusting your price for marketplace fees vs. your own store’s margins

Take that same $16 candle across three channels:

That’s the entire argument for eventually moving toward an owned store: the product doesn’t change, but the channel decides how much of that $16 actually reaches you.

Step 5: What you need to launch your own online store

If you’ve decided your own online store is the right path, the channel comparison and fee math earlier in this guide already told you why. What’s left is a short, concrete list: five things to actually set up before you’re taking orders.

The launch checklist

• A domain name that matches your brand and is short enough to say out loud. Your business name is the obvious first choice; if it’s taken as a .com, a close variation usually reads better to customers than an unfamiliar extension. Beyond the name itself, buying a domain involves a few checks before and after registering it that are worth getting right the first time.
• High-performance hosting built for stores. A store handles more simultaneous visitors and heavier pages than a blog, especially around a sale or a feature in someone’s newsletter, and slow load times cost you sales directly: shoppers abandon a cart faster than they’d tolerate a slow blog post loading.
• A payment processor connected and tested before launch, not after your first sale comes in. Run a real test purchase with a real card before you announce the store, so a broken connection doesn’t surface for the first time on a paying customer.
• Shipping rates and zones set up to match your actual costs. This matters most for fragile items: a flat rate that doesn’t account for the extra packaging from earlier loses money on every heavier order, so build that packaging cost into the rate itself rather than absorbing it.
• At least one full product page built and a complete test checkout run, from browsing to confirmation email, so you catch a broken step before a customer does.

SiteGround Ecommerce covers four of these in one place: domain registration, hosting built for stores, direct payment integration so orders don’t need manual reconciling against a separate processor account, and built-in shipping zone and rate tools so you can set different rates by region without a separate plugin. Its built-in AI Store Agent even gets you a head start on the fifth, generating product titles, descriptions, and categories so the test checkout is really all that’s left to do yourself. If you’re weighing it against other options, SiteGround’s guide to the best platforms to create an online store breaks down the tool-by-tool differences.

Step 6: Market your homemade business and get repeat customers

This step matters most if you’re running your own store, since a marketplace’s built-in traffic disappears once you’re on your own site, though several of the tactics below help no matter where you sell. Getting your first sale is the hard part everyone focuses on. Getting your fifth sale from the same customer is where the actual business starts.

Social media and content that actually sells

Short-form video and photo content showing your making process performs unusually well for handmade goods specifically, because the process is the product’s story. A 30-second clip of a juice being made or a ring being soldered sells more than a polished product photo alone, which is the whole logic behind marketing a small business on Instagram: show the making, not just the finished piece.

Email, local SEO, and other ways to reach new buyers

Beyond social content, a short list of channels is worth setting up early:

• Email marketing — the highest-return marketing channel for repeat buyers.
• Local SEO — matters if you also sell at local markets or from a studio, since “handmade jewelry near me” searches convert differently than broad marketplace traffic.
• Cross-promotion with other makers — swapping mentions or bundling with complementary sellers, especially at shared craft fairs.

These three barely scratch the surface of a full small business marketing plan, but they’re the ones with the fastest payoff for a handmade seller specifically.

Turning first-time buyers into repeat customers

Most sellers stop marketing the moment the order ships, which is exactly when a repeat customer is won or lost. Three tactics do most of the work:

1. A packaging insert with a discount code for the next order.
2. A direct request for a review once the order’s arrived.
3. A follow-up email a week or two after delivery, asking how the product held up.

Ready to turn your homemade products into a real business?

The path is the same regardless of what you’re making: validate the idea, handle the legal basics, pick a channel, price around that channel’s fees, and market for repeat business once you’re selling consistently. 

When you’re ready to run your own storefront, SiteGround Ecommerce bundles the hosting, checkout, domain, and shipping tools into one place, backed by expert support, so you can launch without stitching together separate services or learning a new platform from scratch.

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Frequently asked questions