I hope you had a great Christmas out there and were able to let the business worries go for a little while.
I am working on developing a multi-tenant shopping cart system, but I could use some input on what fee-model to go by.
Should I charge a monthly fee of 5-6 USD pr. person for a cart (model 1) or should I allow people to create- and run carts for free and then take a percentage of each sale they make through it? (model 2) Customers that have decent- to great sales will prefer the fixed fee and then keep all profits made from the cart, but customers with more stagnant carts will probably prefer the latter.
Model 2 will probably lead to lots of low profit carts, but more of them and model 1 will probably lead to fewer carts, but a potentially strong subscription foundation for the business.
A third alternative I guess could also be a minimum fee along with a percentage of the sales (model 3).
Any thoughts or suggestions from people of competent insight here are appreciated. The issue is really quite an important one for me, as a great deal of programming will go into the final decision made.
There’s no right or wrong answer to this, each model is perfectly fine. I would suggest working up several possible scenarios and do the maths to see which one would work better for you in the long term.
If it were me I’d go for % of sales (model 2) or %+flat fee (model 3). If you just use a flat fee (model 2) then you can predict your monthly income but if your system takes off and you get a lot of sales then there’s a risk of the income not covering your costs, at least with the % sale model it would better mirror your running costs.
Why not build your system so it can run on any of your models? That way then leaves the door open to offer different fee structures in case you wanted to change them in future, or offer your customers the choice of fee structure that best suits them?