Why should you build your commerce experience on the JAMstack? đź’°.
- Faster performance - The faster a site is the more sales it generates.
- More security - Security breaches are costly and ruin reputations.
- More affordable to run - Process tons of transactions without scaling your own infrastructure.
- DX - Better Dev Experience = more time spent on customer UX.
Payments
If you need to charge credit cards, you’ll want to use a payment gateway service like Stripe. By sending payment information straight to them, you’ll avoid ever even seeing your customer’s payment information, leaving their all-important financial security to the highly-experienced team at Stripe. They provide an elegant dashboard, easy-to-use tools for refunding payments or handling disputed transactions, integration with hundreds of other services (including others in this list!), and a developer-friendly API for connecting their platform to your project.
Other great solutions:
- PayPal, the online payments heavyweight, offers a similar API to Stripe and a plethora of integrations. One key difference is that unlike Stripe, you’ll need to collect payment details from customers during checkout—which could introduce security headaches for you down the road.
- Braintree, is another worthwhile competitor to Stripe. It beats Stripe in the kinds of payments it accepts, including Venmo, but doesn’t integrate with as many other services. Unlike PayPal’s solution, you don’t need to touch customer’s payment information.
E-commerce
There are many giant e-commerce platforms that can provide you with a plain storefront, but if you want more control or need to layer e-commerce onto your existing site, then those platforms may not be the best choice. A service like Snipcart can be a great choice for quickly adding e-commerce to your JAMstack site, since it provides just the right balance of simple set-up and deep customization. With Snipcart, you’ll get a basic shopping cart and checkout interface, but also the ability to deeply customize appearance and behavior. You’ll also get a dashboard for managing your orders and more advanced features like shopping cart recovery and inventory management. Plus, they integrate with all the Payment Gateways listed above, so you’ll be able to get paid quickly and securely.
Other great solutions:
- Gumroad is a simple, hands-off solution designed for creators. Whether you’re an indie selling artwork, apps, or articles, you can quickly set up a store on Gumroad, add their buy button to your website, and get back to work. However, while Gumroad’s widgets are well-designed and attractive, if you want to customize the look-and-feel of your checkout, then you’ll want to go with a different service.
- On the other hand, Foxy tends more towards deep customization over quick set-up. It’s the most powerful and customizable of the solutions listed here, but much more geared towards developers than merchants. If you need more than just a shopping cart and a checkout, then you may want to look elsewhere.
Memberships
While e-commerce sites provide the ability to sell goods, selling subscriptions to your site can be much more complex. If you want to provide subscribers with special newsletters, access to paywalled content, and more, you’ll want to go with a specialized subscription service like Memberful. At its core, Memberful combines simple subscription flows and management with integrations into the most common tools for content creation and management like Wordpress, Mailchimp, and Discourse. One TakeShape customer, Massive Science, implemented Memberful for managing their community. Memberful gives them simple drop-in widgets for subscribing new members and for members to access their accounts, more advanced OAuth APIs for implementing authentication for paywalls and discussion forums, and newsletter integrations for maintaining special members-only mailing lists.
Other great solutions:
- If you’re building a web app, then you may want to consider a more API-driven subscription manager like Chargebee and Recurly. While they expect you to provide your own front-end subscription interfaces, they’ll handle all the complex back-end logic for charging your subscribers and provide analytics to help you reduce churn.
Headless CMS
Finally, you’ll want a website with an easy-to-use CMS in order to manage your products and categories, generate a secure and stable static site, and create a truly unique experience for your fans, members, or customers. TakeShape is a straightforward CMS and static site generator for organizing, developing, and deploying your JAMstack site. If you’re creating a webapp, TakeShape’s GraphQL API provides a simple, easy-to-use endpoint to query for all your content at once. And best of all, TakeShape already provides a sample “Shape Store” project that can get your site up and running within 5 minutes! You can try TakeShape for free and find that it’s the easiest way to get started selling from your JAMstack site.
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