Say hello to my new storefront! Yesterday I switched to Shopify from Gumroad to handle the sales of my ebooks and patterns. So now I have a proper shoppe with a shopping cart and lots of options to customise it and make it pretty.
The learning curve for this switch was however much larger than I had anticipated since Shopify is such a massive, complex service and not really optimised for simple digital downloads. But after a few initial kinks that I discovered this morning, my shop now runs smoothly.
If you look at most sewing pattern stores, most of them either run on Shopify or WooCommerce, so it made sense to me to make the switch as well, especially since I’m about to launch my first garment sewing pattern later in November (stay tuned!)
Another benefit of switching to my own store is that I can finally set up customised tax parameters for my fellow EU shoppers, with the nice new low Swedish ebook VAT of only 6% for everyone in the EU, at least as long as my shop doesn’t exceed a fixed amount of EU based yearly sales thanks to some new, improved. EU-regulations.
If you sell digital products to EU countries the tax system (i.e VAT Moss) is very confusing and not designed for small business owners, hence why it’s easier to rely on services such as Etsy and Gumroad and let them take care of the taxes.
The drawback is that those external services make no difference between products and charges the same tax on everything, despite that in some EU-countries, products such as ebooks actually have a much lower VAT.
Now if you are reading this and live outside the EU, you don’t need to worry, no taxes will be charged!
So you can take a look at the new store and see if you like it! I’m still making some tweaks since I think the mobile version is excellent, but the desktop could actually benefit from a little more white space and padding and I rather skip the fancy scrolling effects, but that requires some coding, so we’ll see.
And if you prefer Etsy, I have a shop there too where you can buy my books and patterns (but not the bundles since Etsy have a very low limit on digital files).
BTW, my old shop is still up too and working, while I update all the links.
So to sum it up, I’m very happy that I made the switch so that I can finally have a proper storefront, that is easy to navigate and use, with a quick, smooth check-out process. And a shop that looks pretty too!
