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Selling on your website 2024 (Lemon Squeezy, Payhip, Shopify etc)

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alhawke:
This is growing out of the "sustaining a writing career-2024" thread.

You guys have excited me over the prospect of using an outside vendor to help sell direct. Lemon Squeezy charges 50c per sale with 5% back. This isn't a bad loss for a $3.99 or above ebook. I'm wondering your thoughts? Payhip is far better in cost, but they don't take care of VAT and all those things (as far as I can tell). If you sell direct, what do you use? Gumroad, Payhip, Shopify, LemonSqueezy, StoryOrigin?  What's simplest to dip one's toes into this without starting a major overhaul (I don't want to repeat the work it took to get affiliate links active when it benefited me so little).

Lorri Moulton:
Payhip says they do take care of VAT (they're in the UK), but they don't do anything for US state sales taxes. 

alhawke:
I think this was my deterrent before. I believe the point of this article :
https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/blog/saas-sales-tax-usa
was to show how complicated US state tax system is. Operating in the US, I have a very large US reader market.

So... the advantage of Lemon Squeezy is that they operate as a company that can take care of this for you. I think??? They call themselves a "merchant of record".
Hence their additional $ .50 charge per purchase

So, Lorri, or any of you, how are writers selling in US states without using a merchant of record? via Payhip, etc?

Post-Crisis D:
I haven't started selling books direct yet, but I do sell other goods.

For sales tax (U.S.), for sales within my state, I have to charge sales tax based on the destination of the shipped goods.  There are around 100 different sales tax districts you have to keep track of and then remit the sales tax payments to the state, identifying the taxes per sales tax district.

For product shipped out of state, then I need to keep watch on how many sales go to each state.  Each state has a different minimum before you have to start collecting and remitting sales taxes to them.  And, if I recall, some are based on a sum total while others are based on a per annum.

So, there's a lot.

And, at least for digital goods, that's what makes something like Lemon Squeezy attractive.  You don't have to worry about sales taxes and keeping track and collecting and remitting the appropriate sales tax per each sales tax district and all that.

So, I'm thinking, even if I sell a 99 cent book and only make 45 cents on it, not having to worry about sales tax is worth 55 cents.  Imagine if you sold hundreds or thousands of 99 cent books across the country and had to keep track of all those potential sales taxes.  I might see hundreds of dollars going out the door that could have been in my pocket but, on the other hand, it's probably worth those hundreds of dollars to not deal with the headache.

alhawke:
 :Tup2:
44c per sale is still better profit than Amazon at the moment for 99c sale (which is 35c). Of course, more expensive books make far greater profit with a flat 50c charge.

Unless they change their charge?
Or they're not trustworthy as a business with their services?

If their trustworthy and their rates remain steady, it seems like a no brainer.
Problem with StoryOrigins, who provide this as part of their service now, is $100/yr is a big chunk of profit. Doing the math again, I'd have to sell nearly 200 books at 99c. But the math gets more complicated if I sell more expensive books.  :icon_arrow: :dizzy
Advantage to StoryOrigins is, I think, they offer a sales page. But I have an active website.

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