Amongst my edits and videos, I sometime take on other projects. In this case I was contacted by two people who wanted to launch their own subscription box service.

After a few exchanges by the means of enormous emails, we narrowed down what they wanted:

  • Interest in using the french-based PayGreen payment gateway
  • Low % fee from the payment gateway
  • Low % fee from the e-commerce platform
  • Ability to sell subscriptions products
  • Need to sell and ship in France and Europe
  • Shipment to use the Mondial Relay and Colissimo services

Which e-commerce platform to use?

Shopify

Now, I’ve worked with Shopify for a few years now, and I absolutely love it. It’s well made, straightforward if you don’t need crazy customisations and options, secure and fast… but I wasn’t sure if it was the right fit for this job, for two main reasons: integrating that obscure french payment gateway, and how flexible the options for subscriptions are.

As I said, Shopify is a good option for e-commerce in general, but you do need to pay a monthly subscription AND they take around 2% of your earnings, that’s before Stripe takes another percentage (more on that later). Solely for that reason, the decision was made to go with WooCommerce.

WooCommerce

I had never used WooCommerce before, but knew it because I am familiar with WordPress (and it’s horrible architecture). I knew it was free, didn’t take any % from the merchant and was completely open source, therefore 100% customisable, which I thought would come in handy.

It’s free, but if you want to add any kind of little features, you either find one out 1000 apps that does it, but does it well enough, isn’t stupidly designed with menus in random places, or you buy an extension made by WooCommerce themselves (that’s how they make money).

Choosing a payment gateway

Shopify becomes more interesting when it comes to fees when you use their own payment gateway, Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments is actually just using Stripe, but is repackaged so not to confuse the average merchant.

Unfortunately Shopify Payments isn’t available in France, which is where the business was going to operate from, which meant to link up with Stripe and pay that extra fee we had decided to avoid. We decided to use the WordPress + WooCommerce combo, as they are both open-source and therefore completely customisable… a strength that is also a weakness.

WooCommerce do not take any fee on sales, therefore only the Stripe fee is to be taken into account.

Subscriptions products, recurring payments, stable business

One of the main reason we wanted to use WooCommerce was because it’s possibility to use the PayGreen payment gateway, which is French owned and operated, and aligns with the value of the e-commerce store: ecological and sustainable.

WooCommerce offers a plugin called WooCommerce Subscriptions, which is what we wanted, but unfortunately PayGreen didn’t allow for recurrent payments, which was needed with WooCommerce Subscriptions, therefore we decided to use Stripe. It is also a leading force in the market, and so was a safe choice.

Shipping, sending stuff around at the right price

The client was adament to use Colissimo and Mondial Relay, two French shipping services. They both offer integrations to the WooCommerce platform, something which wasn’t offered on Shopify (or not directly anyway, you can use stuff like ShippyPro to integrate different services).

The logic for shipping was complex as I had to take into account, country of destination, weight and price of package, the content of the package (if a certain product was included the shipping was free, except if there was another product in it…).