Need some suggestions for a new shopping cart host.

[Chimanimani]

@Thelunatick

Which plan do you use?

Shopify Plan that is $78/mth - $900/year.

The Credit Card Rates shown on the plan sheet are for MC/Visa. Amex is more.
Took me a while to locate, when I wanted to view.
As well, if you do not use them as the gateway, they charge a middleman fee to use your gateway,

The payouts have been fast, I think, within a few days of posting. You do have options on the payout days. Forget what they are.

I have not know downtimes. Whenever I access my site, it is up.

I converted to shopify this year in July. Big job, as I did a great job on the site, and I have a ton of products. since then, I have moved on, and do need to review the site again.

I use Easify for variations on my product. Customer Accounts Hub, for the Customer interface (Shopify and my theme is TERRIBLE0.
iwish for a wish list
Joy as the loyalty program (the most expensive of the plug ins I have @ $25)
Judge me for reviews
and because i need invoices for (some) of my customers I with Oxilayer Invoice.
The sub apps cost $45 per month

Social media, is integrated, so if you have pinterest, tiktok, google, youtube, FB, insta. it is just a matter of set-up, and then a crazy amount of time in ACTUALLY being on SM. hahaha

oh, the first question, about calculating shipping - I honestly do not know. everything on my site is $2 shipping or less.

[Chimanimani]

Again for me I do not use.

But the inventory has a weight field,
and shopify does calculate per that weight.

Shopify has built in discounted rates with UPS and USPS.

Here is a screen shot.

and a few others - Make a custom Rate, or base it on a price or weight.

[Old-Timer]

Side note: Shopify has a known glitch with shipping rates, but they do offer a monthly subscription app to fix the glitch.

If you notice buyers entering words like “home” or duplicate street addresses into the “Company Name” box on Shopify addresses, then you may need to pay for an app to add residential surcharges to those shipments.

Shopify will default to commercial rates anytime a “letter/character/number” is placed into the Company Name Box on checkout.

Shopify or the app marketplace has a monthly subscription fee application to override and add the residential fee if needed to the correct addresses.

[Thelunatick]

@Chimanimani

I use Easify for variations on my product.

does shopify not allow variations without add on apps?

Also Thank you. The information you are providing is extremely useful.

[papy]

@Thelunatick

does shopify not allow variations without add on apps?

It’s been a minute since I had listings with variations and am not in a position to check at the moment, but at that time, I could do them natively, without an add-on. Maybe it depends on how many, or whether you are duplicating them on other platforms?

[Thelunatick]

Thank you

The only issue now is when I have the time to do the changeover.

[Old-Timer]

I may be wrong, but Shopify says they will allow you to create a limited amount of variants without needing to subscribe to a monthly app. (see below image)

But for some reason, it did not work for us and we had to subscribe to an app.
Either the Shopify system was too large of a hassle, or we needed more than 3 options. (I do not handle this part of the company)

It seems anytime we need something we have to subscribe to an app.

You can print Packing Slips in Shopify, but they do not provide professional Invoices with product prices. We had to subscribe to an app to be able to easily print invoices instead of packing slips.

Side Note: we really don’t need the monthly invoice app because my ShipWorks program, and other company software, prints invoices correctly. I guess other employees may need the app.

We even needed a monthly app to help with quantity pricing discounts.
I think we even have an app to make a Contact Us page.

The Shopify chat called “Inbox” is a free Shopify app and it works okay. Just well enough. We had a paid app that worked much better, but discontinued and have been using Shopify Inbox for chat now.

It takes 6 months to a year to figure out all the different apps you will eventually need for your website to function as you wish on Shopify.

A drawback with the third party apps is if their server goes offline so does their app.

I hope this info is helpful. I feel they get you to sign up with a free trial, but then after you invest so much time and energy you do want to give up. Then you feel like you need another app to help.

Here is in info from Shopify.

[Old-Timer]

Side note: Shopify started remitting sales tax on Shop orders via Shopify Pay. I am glad I do not handle company taxes. I just noticed the extra blue warning box and then the info in the Timeline section.

Shopify Help Center Sales tax in Shop [link]

[Thelunatick]

ROFL so I will be filing a 0 sales tax every year.

The only sales tax I collect is from my own website.

The best is because of the nature of my business it doesn’t even look strange because most of my own customers are tax exempt anyway.

[Picks_by_Nisha]

@Thelunatick

ROFL so I will be filing a 0 sales tax every year.

We don’t use Shopify, so have been doing this for years. Every platform we sell on handles the sales tax.
Sadly, NJ still hasn’t updated the forms to handle this in a logical manner…

[Thelunatick]

So went with shopify the first week of Jan. Almost have it up and running.

The theme sucks but At this point I am not paying $300 for a pretty theme.

It actually works much better with item management then wordpress. The interface is more logical and on one page, not 10 tabs. You can actually set a default price for variations instead of having to fill out the price and weight for every variation.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions and help.

[Thelunatick]

Finally have the site up and running enough to get the domain moved over.

Got the first order in a few hours.

It’s really nice to see that Shopify does the same checking I did manually for suspicious orders
For those that don’t know there is an info icon, it tells you if the address matches, the CVV and if the ip address is near the purchase/shipping location.

Makes me wish I had done this sooner but having moved my site 4 times already it’s a ton of work that takes months to get any return on.

[ASV_Vites]

Shopify checks a number of things and classifies each order with Low, Med, High risk, and explains why.

When the order email comes over, if there’s above a med risk, this will be in the email, as well as in the subject. They do a very good job.

We didn’t listen the first time and it was a fraudulent order, and it was charged back to us… Learned our lesson. Trust Shopify when they tell you there’s a problem…

[Thelunatick]

My manual way of doing it

Shipping and billing address go to 2 different places or people. Partial red flag.
2nd day or overnight service Partial red flag
Shipping address goes to a Freight forwarder HUGE RED FLAG
IP address is nowhere near the shipping or billing address HUGE RED FLAG
E-mail address looks sus (person’s name and random numbers @gmail ) Partial red flag.
Address or CVV does not match- I just void the authorization (considering I set it to just reject the charge in this case I wonder how it even gets through)

[Old-Timer]

The Shopify system for Chargebacks seems to work very well too. It is a simple “fill in the box” template page. And, you can upload images.

I did have to add a Filter to be able to see Chargebacks a little easier.

image of chargeback won

[ASV_Vites]

Here’s Shopify’s analysis of the one we ate… Not a big deal - $30 lesson.

This turned out to be a stolen CC of which the thief had the address associated with the CC and attempted to ship somewhere else. Strange thing is the IP was close to the CC address in CA. Shipping address was in NJ.

I have a feeling our site was being used as a test for this CC.

[Thelunatick]

@ASV_Vites

I have a feeling our site was being used as a test for this CC.

I have had that going on for months. 2000 orders were placed in the past 2 weeks only 6 CC were good. (edit: yes I voided them as the pattern was the same and the IP went to east Europe)

I am hoping shopify will stop that a bit.

The one I ate was more painful. Went to a freight forwarder so it was gone, $400 order with shipping. Overnight shipping to a forwarder only 59 miles from me. That what taught me that overnight shipments and freight forwarders= fraud.
what killed me is the bank ruled against us because we had no signature. WTF it was an online order the thief had everything correct. After that any order over $200 we e-mailed a receipt and had the customer sign it. That actually won us a chargback.

[Lost_My_Marbles]

We have our website set to block IPs that are not from USA and CA. The website itself is not accessible to them so they can’t place orders. Keeps it simple.

We do it through the .htaccess file. If you have access to that on Shopify, you might consider setting it up.

[Dogtamer]

@Lost_My_Marbles

…
We do it through the .htaccess file. If you have access to that on Shopify, you might consider setting it up.

AFAIK, Shopify doesn’t support Dynamic URL behaviour like this, unless it can monetize such via an add-in.

[Thelunatick]

@Lost_My_Marbles

We have our website set to block IPs that are not from USA and CA.

I would have loved to have done that, but Godaddy never gave me file access. Only the wordpress interface