Linkcart: Why Linkcart is subscription free

Why Linkcart is subscription free

It wasn't always planned but after much consideration, Linkcart decided to scrap the concept of subscriptions entirely from our product.

There's a lot of complicated ecommerce platforms that already exist for experienced and upcoming merchants that come with a plethora of subscription tiers. These tiers have the goal to funnel you onto their "Pro" or "Core" subscriptions, gating functionality from their free users and forcing them to increase their subscription tier as they grow their business. We hated the idea of joining those platforms in the freemium model.

"We believe that ecommerce shouldn't sit behind expensive subscriptions, and transaction fees and should be more accessible to all people."

Blake Waldron, Founder of Linkcart

Instead, all Linkcart pages and stores, regardless of size are completely subscription free. All functionality is available to all users as soon as they sign up. There's no free trial, no pro plan. Just Linkcart.

How does Linkcart make money?

Now, Linkcart has to cover its running costs, and occasionally buy a coffee for its team members. So how does it do that? The answer is in transaction fees.

Unlike most ecommerce platforms that require a subscription AND have transaction and processing fees (some even have listing fees!) Linkcart just has a flat 5% transaction fee. Which means, if you sell something for $100, you get $95 and we take $5.

So where does that 5% go?

In that 5% cut that we take out of all transactions, we pay our payments provider, which in most cases changes us 1.75% + 30c on all transactions. Which leaves linkcart to ~3.25% as a charge to cover the platform's running costs, and that coffee we talked about earlier. This makes Linkcart one of the most affordable ecommerce platforms ever built.

Originally published at https://linkcart.co.