busybee fluffy rambles

Ko-Fi

It’s what I use for my main shop these days. Their pricing is quite nice: 5% cut for transactions on the free tier, 0% if you pay $12/month. They support both digital and physical goods, although their variant support and shipping calculation is a bit weak.

The main downside is that people don’t realize that Ko-Fi has a fully-fledged shop and membership system; for whatever reason everyone still just thinks of them as being a tip jar. Which is unfortunate, because they’re quite good at the other things too!

Payhip

Payhip is similar to Ko-Fi, but does a better job of marketing themselves as a storefront. Their pricing is okay although not as good as Ko-Fi’s; the free tier is a 5% cut, but it costs significantly more to pay down the cut ($29/month to get 2% and $99/month to get 0%).

I haven’t worked with them directly but a friend of mine speaks highly of it, and it seems like it was designed with inventory and variant support from the ground up although I don’t have any idea of how it actually works to the user. So I’ll probably sign up for it since some of my art pieces and coffee items that I’ve been meaning to list for sale again are pretty clumsy to list on Ko-Fi.

itch.io

itch.io is mostly seen as a place to sell games and conduct game jams, but it’s also great for selling digital assets and music. They let you set your platform cut, and default to 10%.

There’s technically support for physical merch although it’s quite weak, so I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose.

Jinxxy

Jinxxy is designed specifically for VR assets, and has become very popular for VRChat creators in particular. As far as I can tell they only support VRChat assets, however. Similarly to itch.io they let you specify your own cut, and default to 5%.

Patreon

I’m not exactly a fan of Patreon (despite having capitulated) but in addition to memberships they also have a means of selling digital goods. I don’t know anyone who really uses it that way and the discovery is pretty bad. It also only supports digital goods, and they charge a 10% cut unless you get one of the higher plans and I can’t really be bothered to research this one too much. But it’s an alternative to Gumroad so it was worth listing all the same.

Lemon Squeezy

I have not used this or seen it in operation but it came as a recommendation on Discord. The pricing is pretty decent, taking 5% + 50¢, and since it’s operated by Stripe it’s at least implied that you are only paying that much (rather than an additional cut to Stripe as is the case with all the other options above). They only do digital goods, however.

Less recommended: FastSpring

This was another Discord-originated recommendation. Again, I haven’t tried it at all, and they’re incredibly coy about pricing. So I’m not sure I’d bother with this one.

Less recommended: Artisans Coop

I tried these folks out for a while as an Etsy alternative. They are kind of weird to onboard on, their inventory management system is “quirky” (putting it as nicely as I can think to), and setting up shipping is really wonky. It has the feel of them just white-labeling an existing ecommerce portal thingamajig. The interesting thing about them is that they operate on a co-op model which might tickle the right ethical alignment for some, but for me it isn’t sufficient on its own.