While there’s nothing wrong with using vendor marketplace sites like Etsy, they can quickly nickel and dime shop owners. With Etsy, each individual listing requires an up front fee and you must also pay a fee per inventory of that listing. Once you make a sale, you also get charged a 5% transaction fee and if the buyer found the item through an Etsy add, it could be as high as 15%. Add on other miscellaneous fees and payment processing fees and what appears affordable starts to really add up.

Like Etsy, eCommerce store builders like Shopify can appear cost friendly, but at nearly $30 per month per store it is far from the most economical – especially if you multiply that by multiple websites.

Building your own website not only puts more control in your hands to pick up and move service providers, but you can typically cut your monthly bill in half or more. Plus, if you want multiple stores, you can simply consolidate them onto one web hosting plan, clone the website to a new domain and immediately have a second store without additional fees.

When you’re dealing with membership sites and financial transactions, SSL certificates become absolutely necessary to protect customer form data. It’s recommended that additional attention is given to ensure emails are deliverable by using an email API service to send automated emails from WordPress. Backups should also be taken much more frequently (potentially hourly or more) to avoid loss of orders.

Pop-up boxes requesting sign up to a newsletter in exchange for coupon codes can be extremely effective. Store owners can also benefit from abandoned cart emails that attempt to recover sales from individuals that leave the site with items in their cart.