we had similar discussions before and most services offer you an pre-defined shop but want to comission at a percentage rate per sale.
whilest depending on payment processing you will have fees anyways…
- paypal 3,4% + 35 cent
- stripe 1,9% eu, 2,8 us% + 35 cent
- mollie multipayment
- manual “check your account for payments” free
if software or service, they will always want to get a piece from the cake.
it really depends on how much money are in the talk, obviously when your turn-around is in the ten-thousands each month you might not want to add additional percentage fees to the shop software yourself but you will have to invest in a custom / or any other development to adjust to your needs.
for someone starting out, there isn’t a budget to be placed in advance, so they are mostly fine giving up some percent of a sale to not have a hassle.
having friends tied to magento, while this is a free software, there are huge developers selling plugins and services as well.
In the end it really depends on your needs and everyone is very individual. A shop itself does not mean to be too complex…
- product page
- product list
- cart
- checkout
- after-sale
- order
that’s what i would consider the basics… obviously there are many things to consider.
if you were to find someone to code a shop to your needs, he wants to get paid and you’d have to calculate how many month the “2-8%” you are saving need to be invested until it paid off, and if further development then is required…
There are many different ways to attempt it and it all comes down on how much traffic the shop is generating, should it be flat file, database, should it connect to something existing? while having programmed something shop-like which suits my needs to at about 90%, there’s always the question how to improve it…