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Posted: 3/25/2026 12:02:42 AM EDT
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I was hoping some of you might be able to give me some advice on the eCommerce side of things, focused on beginner very small business level stuff. Background: I have a day job. It tends to keep me pretty busy. I'm planning to keep that up until my business is making enough income to support me or justify making the jump (the goal is self employment, but I can stay put to a traditional retirement if needed). My background is engineering/machining/manufacturing. I've got a small home shop and have slowly been expanding it and building on it. I've done some projects and made a few parts for guys by word of mouth/friends/family/etc. I've got my FFL, I've done a bit of smithing, flipped a few guns on Gunbroker, transfers, that sort of thing. My main focus right now is on my own products. I've got a lot of ideas and am going to start making some of the simpler ones to see what I can sell and hopefully expand from there. Right now, I'm looking at primarily doing online sales of my own parts. No physical storefront, appointment only, that sort of thing. eCommerce: I'm working on wrapping my head around this and could use some pointers. I don't want to jump into something with huge monthly service fees, a drop-shipping-from-lipseys focus, or something like that. I want a simple, no-nonsense website with a store function and an area I can post technical info, articles, photos, videos, that sort of thing. Ideally with a invoice function I can use for custom work. I've got a url already. I was looking at setting up web hosting, installing wordpress with the woocommerce plugin, and signing up with a payment processor to handle card payments. I assume there's related plugins that would link to usps/fedex/ups shipping accounts to automate shipping labels, link web sales to email notifications, and that sort of thing. I did some html and a little bit of web database stuff back in school. I figure I can work my way through this. Is there any other major point I'm missing? I've got my business checking account with my bank. I assume the payment processor links to that? I've seen mention of different types of merchant accounts and have no real knowledge of this stuff. This path seems like the lowest monthly cost option, with a little bit of up front work setting up my site. I was also looking at bigcommerce, they have a relatively inexpensive starter option, it was something like $35/month, but in my 20 or 30 minutes of looking at their site, it wasn't obvious to me if they're an all-in-one hosting thing, or if I'll still need to arrange web hosting, payment processors, and all the rest with them just providing a cookie-cutter storefront functionality (which I would still need to set up and configure, if I understand correctly, so why do this over wordpress/woocommerce?). I'm looking at doing part time work making my stuff and fitting it into my schedule as I can. My fear with the larger/more established options is that my limited sales would either not cover or be quickly ate up paying monthly service fees. As much as I'd like to say "cash/USPS MO only", I think it would be too limiting. I might have a really neat sling mount, or a cool scope mount/sight/whatever, but I think that very few people will sign on to the idea of going to their post office and getting a money order for $25 or $50 or whatever and mailing it to me for something small. I think that even my larger items would benefit from the instant gratification of being able to just buy it online. I figure I need my own site if anyone will take my work seriously and that my stuff will just get lost in the noise of chinese trash if I try to sell through Amazon or Gunbroker (and the fees are getting outrageous). Also, most of those small business startup things (like etsy and whatever) hate guns and aren't an option anyway. I'll obviously need to find a payment processor (and other service providers) that'll do business with firearms and related items. I know some of you guys have gone through this. Do you have any recommendations? Solutions/providers to look at? Ones to avoid? Anything I'm really missing? There's the obvious question of what's my time better spent on? Doing it myself vs paying someone to do it while my time is spent more profitably? I'm still trying to hash that out. |
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My background, I was FFL01 w/SOT for 8 years. I did not have any online sales, but I did accept CCs. I want to chime in on credit card processing. I got hit with an early termination fee because they changed terms from no ETF to having it, and I did not remember when I shutdown. Always get clear answers about all the fees. Read your statements and ensure you read any updates to "agreements." CC processing is a maze. Usually there is at minimum a monthly statement fee, and probably a fee to provide "security". My monthly fees were $10-15. Then there are annual fees, which is around $80-100. Then on each charge, there is a fixed amount "swipe" fee, around 25 cents (can go up or down depending on volume and agreement), along with 2-3% off the total charged. So if you charge someone $100, you end up with $96.75 at 3% and .25 swipe. This is how my processor worked. I also had to buy a bluetooth card reader that interacted with an app on my cell phone, which sent the info to them for cc processing. My understanding at the time is that if I wanted a web store, I would need to pay monthly for a "web gateway." Also, many CC processors don't allow firearms, so make sure you check their prohibited business list. It looks like bigcommerce is advertising the swipe and % fees up front, so there may or may not be additional cc processing fees beyond their monthly charge. I suggest you get in touch with them and get answers to your questions. They are there to get your business, so talk/email them. If I was in your situation, limited time, side gig, I would go with something like bigcommerce rather than trying to roll your own site (find hosting, install wp, plugins, etc). Do you want to do updates as security issues show up? I'm a corp IT guy myself and I wouldn't want to do that if I ran a web store. When I had CC processing, I had to do the PCI compliance annually. It isn't hard since I was using their hardware and app, and I wasn't storing any info on anything (db or server) that is only in my control. |
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E-commerce was my main focus in the firearm industry since 2008. I've used a number of different platforms, Salesforce, Big Commerce, Coreware, Marketlive, Kibo, and some smaller platforms. My last big migration was to Big Commerce from Salesforce. Coreware was another that I reviewed and looked at for another FFL business. Too many flaws and not enough support. Big Commerce had some teething pains, and we were on paid support. Still took quite a bit of work to finally feel it was working well. There's a lot of flexibility with add-on software for shipping, tax tables, and distributor tie-ins with live inventory updates. At your level, you will be on a shared server (pods) that can be slow at times. Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento) will require some knowledge I've sat through a couple of demos with Orchid. While I haven't set up a company to use it yet, I would take the time to do a demo with that one. It has good FFL support, restrictions in place, and point of sale options. They are in the firearm space specifically. I absolutely hated Oracle's Netsuite for a front facing website platform. It excels with everything else, but marketing and content was a pain in the ass. Shop4Hire was clunky and we outgrew it very quickly. Just say no to Gearfire. I haven't heard of a good success story from anyone that wants to use it as a revenue generating platform. AmmoReady is another firearm acceptable platform, but I haven't spent any time with it. |
| Depending on what your product is, I wouldn't discount Amazon. Just account for the extra fees and charge more than you do directly on your site. Online shoppers are lazy. It's better to have a shoddy shop in a megacity than a palatial store in a desolate swamp. |
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Thanks guys. I didn't even think about the constant patching and security updates involved in running a site. I'll need to give some more thought to the store provider types and look at a few more of them. I'll call a few too and see what they can tell me about their services, but I will say that's one of the reasons why Haas is getting my business: I can look at their site, option out the mill/lathe I need and do the napkin math on financing and what I need to do to make it happen, vs wondering if I'm looking at a $50k or $500k machine and needing to call and deal with a sales guy to see if I'm even in the ballpark. I did glance at AmmoReady, but they struck me as having a primary focus on setting up your business around drop shipping from your distributors, which isn't what I want to do. |
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