Hi there, I still haven’t figured out, and am doubting the best choice for my webshop—no monthly fees.
It looks like I am down to 2 options :
It would be really helpful to hear from somebody who tried one or both stacks and can highlight the pros and cons of one and the other.
Many thanks,
Karmela
Hi Karmela Faktor ,
One thing to keep in mind, is not only how your eCommerce solution calculates the appropriate taxes, such as VAT or different US taxes for each state, but also the remittances of those to the appropriate tax authorities of each state or country.
With Ecwid and Shopify you do not have to worry about a thing. All tax tables are always up to date and they handle all the remittances to the appropriate tax authorities. Of the two, not surprisingly, would recommend Ecwid.
Depending on the number of products, there’s also Reflow. The free version supports up to 100 products. However, you’ll have to also import the tax table and keep them updated.
Cheers,
Ricardo.
Can you tell us about your online shop?
The answers to the above might help to narrow down some good eCommerce solutions for you.
Dan good idea, so here comes some basic info:
Many thanks Dan G,
Cheers,
Karmela
Ricardo I’ve just sent you long answer but it disappeared.
Where could it go?
Before I write again - have you, by some chance, received my reply?
Found it, here goes:
thank you for the info and input. I appreciate it. Ecwid is probably the best solution on the long run. However - it requires a monthly fee.
I have small art practice, based in EU, and do not expect so much traffic, and so many customers to make it work financially.
Also the taxes, VAT, and different taxes for each US state are not applicable (I believe), since my prices are fixed, all inclusive (except shipping).
80 % of works are unique, one of a kind, so that’s pretty uncluttered.
I will definitely check out REFLOW.
Thank you again,
Cheers,
Karmela
Hi @RicardoR. Does that mean that if I am selling s.th. (in my case physical goods) from my Germany-based store to other countries in the EU, Ecwid will handle all the tax stuff for me? That would indeed be absolutely great…
Currently I am only selling inside Germany since I cannot handle the tax payments to all those other countries by myself. Didn’t know that Ecwid handles all that. Is that really the case?
Yes, Ecwid handles taxes automatically. You DO need to specify in which tax bracket a product falls though, so you do need to know a bit about taxes. In some countries, certain goods are exempt from tax all together or are on a lower tax bracket.
It can also automatically apply the correct shipping costs, based on the location of the buyer, and it allows you to exclude certain parts of the world if you need to (for instance, when export restrictions are in place, or when you have a bad experience with the postal services there etc.).
This is all maintained in Ecwid’s settings. The taxes are automatically applied based on a table that Ecwid themselves maintain. Shipping costs can also be maintained by Ecwid, or by using a plugin from that shipper (or a third party shipping broker) or manually. You can have multiple services for the buyer to choose from, or dictate which shipping service gets applied depending on the product or the buyer location. You can set free shipping when the cart amount exceeds a threshold, or give out vouchers for free shipping.
Ecwid offers automatic shipping label purchasing, so you only need to click a button from within Ecwid and a shipping label is bought from the shipper for you to print, based on the selection the biyer made and the dimensions and weight of the product. Caution: I’m not sure about Germany, but in both the Netherlands and Belgium this feature has been broken over a year and there’s no sign of Ecwid fixing it any time soon. There’s a lot of finger pointing by Ecwid to the shippers and vice versa.
Cheers,
Erwin
Thanks so much Erwin for that thorough and extensive reply. That’s really highly appreciated! 
The products in my shop are transparent protective foils for iPhones and iPads. So I assume that these products would be subject to the “normal” taxes applicable in each country.
This is my shop: https://www.finalprotection.de
If it’s anything like how Dutch taxes work, 99% of goods fall in the 21% bracket. A few exceptions, like food, books and newspapers, fall in the 9% bracket. Even less falls in the 0% bracket (water comes to mind).
So screen protectors would fall in the 21% bracket.
Yep. Here in Germany the foils are taxed normally with 19%. I’m confident that these products won’t be ‘problematic’ in any way regarding international tax rates. So I think I’m going to sell the foils Europe-wide soon… 
I have about 10 art products to sell, books, note cards. I need something like payloom used to be that went directly to PayPal. My clients did not have to go through another system to complete the sale. That’s what I need. Simplicity to use in Rapidweaver so I can keep updating my site. Thank you.
shopsite has a free version. This is a very robust cart. You can drop html code into a holder to add a “buy” button onto any page.
Shopsite.com is a cloud based shopping cart solution. It’s subscription based. Pricing here.
The big downside for Europeans is that it’s a bit cumbersome to accept European payment methods, unless you’re willing to go through PayPal with it. So no Wero, iDeal, Klarna, SoFort, Bancontact or Meastro out of the box.
No. It generates HTML code that you use as a widget - drop the code it generates for a product into an html holder on your page.
Thank you Erwin. Conclusion being - to incorporate a decent e-commerce solution in Rapidweaver website is either expensive or complicated. There is no way around it.
I have about 10 art products to sell, books, note cards. I need something like payloom used to be that went directly to PayPal. My clients did not have to go through another system to complete the sale. That’s what I need. Simplicity to use in Rapidweaver so I can keep updating my site.
Hey @Daphne,
Since you mentioned PayLoom, @yabdab doesn’t sell that anymore but it was replaced with PaySnap so if you have Stacks you could use PaySnap as it would likely be familiar to you.
Conclusion being - to incorporate a decent e-commerce solution in Rapidweaver website is either expensive or complicated. There is no way around it.
Both Vibracart Pro and the new Webshop.stack seem reasonably priced for the amount of features you are getting as well as benefiting from the continued development of those two solutions. They don’t seem too complicated and both of the developers are active on the community which is great if you encounter any troubles while creating your shop.
If you are wanting something that is free, you’d need to go open source. There are a ton of open source shopping cart scripts you can try. LiteCart looks pretty cool (cuz of the Rubber Ducks lol, they’re cute). You could try and style either it or your RapidWeaver site to look similar enough so as to give your web visitors a unified browsing experience. That could be complicated, unless you’re not too bothered about your main website and your shop looking exactly alike.
There are a lot of interesting options though, hope you find something that meets your needs.
If you’re not planning on doing it yourself, it pretty much always means you either need to purchase something or need to subscribe to something.
‘difficult’ is relative of course, but I understand what you mean by that. Generally speaking, you either drop in a stack, install a plugin or copy/paste code that is handed to you onto a page in your project.
There are way around this of course; I have customers that rent out a webshop from one of the commercial platforms out there, and then try to make it look like their own website as much as possible and link to it from within their navigation. Or ask me to include it inside an iFrame (for example).
On the other end of the spectrum are people who run their own webshop software on their servers (cubeCart (free) for example, or Magento (free and commercial versions available) and again make it look like their own website as much as possible and include it in their navigation.
It comes down to choice, your willingness to pay for something and how much you’d be up to the challenge of trying to do it without paying for something 
Cheers,
Erwin