Alternatives to Shopify. Part 1

Cartiology E-Commerce @octavianusrom

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Author: t.me/octavianusrom

Very often, Russian and English speakers ask me the same question: what are the alternatives to Shopify?

To make life easier for myself and for you, I decided to write this article, which I will update as new information becomes available.

Alternatives to Shopify

At the moment, Shopify is the most realistic engine for building your online business as a beginner. But if you are impatient and don't want to wait for an article on how to reduce the chance of being blocked by Shopify, here is the first edition of the list.

Shoplazza

There is an alternative, https://www.shoplazza.com/, but the registration process is more complicated, and I cannot guarantee greater survivability if you are involved in shady business. It is worth trying in any case, but I will warn you right away that you will need a manual drop with an LLC/LTD and a registered legend about the business you are running.

Wordpress + WooCommerce

The payment infrastructure in WooCommerce is based on Stripe. For those who are not familiar with these six letters, let me explain. It is the most famous and, accordingly, the most complicated of all available processing systems. It's easy to open (if you have a pair of unbroken hands), but as soon as your chargeback rate rises to 1.5-2%, i.e., out of 100 orders, a maximum of 2 customers can complain (which is unrealistic even in the realities of the most legitimate business), your account will be closed with funds held for months. I know and have heard about people who represent a law firm and write complaints to Stripe and sometimes get the block lifted, but it's usually not worth it.

Stripe needs a good warmup with clean transactions before you start any sales.

There are solutions like https://www.chargeflow.io that notice refund requests before Stripe does and simply refund the money without triggering your Stripe account. This helps, but not if you are involved in anything even remotely resembling gray/black market activities.

WooCommerce + Cloak

Even though I just told you that Stripe is totally messed up, there's one cool solution I'd suggest you check out. There are a bunch of these solutions, and they're collectively called Cloaking of Stripe, but I'll give you two solutions I've worked with to think about.

https://cardsshield.com/ - a cheap version of cloaking, up to $150. I've worked with them on two stores myself, and I can't say I'm ecstatic, but it's not bad.

https://muadata.com/ - price starts at $600, but the scripts hide the original traffic source better and reduce the chance of being blocked by Stripe/PayPal.

I want to clarify that I am not affiliated with either of these two solutions, I'm just sharing my experience. No one is stopping you from continuing to dig and search in this direction, I've given you the direction where there is a vein and a shovel, all you have to do is use the shovel.

The essence of all Cloacks is as follows:

You create a white store on Wordpress + WooCommerce, register Stripe under whatever suits you (LLC/LTD/Individual).

On the site you want to hide, you set up the cloak plugin, and all sales will go to Stripe through your white site. Most often, this is a very decent solution, but it requires a little time and effort.

If you want to try Wordpress, write to me at t.me/octavianusrom and I'll send you a couple of themes that I bought for my stores, because finding a decent theme on the old Wordpress is quite a task.

There will be an addition to this list soon...