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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

Just today I was going through the shopify pricing page to figure out if there was any option that didn't have a fixed fee in return for a higher per-transaction fee. Why have you guys decided not to scale down more than 14$ a month? That's not a lot for any "real" stores but I've considering setting up an online store for some very low volume stuff and paying 168$ a year just to be online has always put me off. Tictail may very well be the answer to this.

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There are a number of factors, but I think you answered your own question. I don't claim to speak for the company officially, but as I understand it personally our target market are the 'real' stores you mention who don't have a problem with $15/month.

I'm curious though, how high a transaction fee would you pay if you were on a free plan? Most merchants HATE percentage fees and want them gone completely. With that in mind we do our best to minimize them.

Maybe TicTail will be a huge success. My point is that even though they have 10,000 customers we should hold our judgement until they get their business model up and running properly. When the dust settles, we'll have a better idea of how they're doing.

Sure, I assumed that's what you were doing, not wasting your time on my marginal business. I just thought this wasn't your typical freemium business as even your free users would be generating revenue from the transactions and as soon as any of them start selling a bit more it would be very easy to upsell them. To answer your question I'd easily take a free version of your 14$ plan with a 5% fee instead of 2%. I assume most people would be fine taking that deal just to launch a store to validate a concept. If it works you get an upsell, if not they go try something else.

I was just annoyed as the only other option I knew about was self-hosting something like oscommerce. I can do the self-hosting just fine but I've heard bad things about it and it looks so bad... Then along comes TicTail and I'm excited again. Even though their easy payment option seems to be paypal...

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