Creating My First Webshop (And Money Troubles)

For a while now, I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a webshop. I mentioned it several times before, in articles both on this blog and my game studio blog. But I never followed through, as there were problems I didn’t know how to solve, and a severe lack of time, budget or proper circumstances.

The first “concrete” mention came at the end of my article series about the massive redesign of this blog (and my other websites). It’s a long section with all my wishy-washy considerations, so I’ll just summarize it here.

• It’s tempting to create one domain as my webshop for everything. Something like “tiamoshop” or whatever.
• But this is a fallacy, so I’ve learned after all these years. People who are interested in my books, for example, are probably not interested in any of my other work (games, music, whatever). And so they’ll need to wade through lots of irrelevant stuff, which is both annoying and likely a reason for customers to leave without buying.
• Instead, I’d like to simply attach a webshop to any website that needs it. For example, pandaqi could have pandaqi.com/store where I sell what I deem are my best games. Or, if it’s that important, it might overtake the entire website—as long as it’s a solid system I can turn on and off when I want.

And so my search started. How can I retain my current websites, and complete freedom on how to design and run them, while easily plugging in a solid and secure e-commerce system? How can I do this in a way that I can manage on my own, without large expenses, while being credible and successful? How can I do this in a way that prepares for any surprising future developments?

Why a webshop, anyway?

To help this search, I needed to define more specifically what I was searching for and why.

For years now, I’ve been producing like crazy, but giving it all away for free. I don’t want to monetize it. I hate money and all behavior/systems to which it naturally leads.

But I’m also a practical and reasonable person—or at least hope to be—so I know I need money to eat and get a roof over my head. I’ve always known I should look for opportunities to monetize something. I’ve always known this is unsustainable and “stranger donations” are never a solid accounting pan.

As such, my first requirement would be ….

The webshop is not something “on the side” that might earn money, it must be a serious business and my main source of income.

I’m not in a position where I have some steady income from a full-time job, and I just want a bit of extra cash on the side. I’m not turning a hobby into a job, selling my home-made crookery or whatever. If I go for a webshop, it’s to actually sell the products of my main job and be my main income.

What to monetize?

What could it be? What can I do? How can I use my current skills and the work I’ve already done?

Could it be VIDEO GAMES? A few video games of mine were big and “professional” enough that I sold them for money. They sold maybe 5 or 10 copies, then were forgotten. A few games I made for free, initially, were eventually bought by a website when they noticed their popularity. That has earned me way more money, but it was perhaps a lucky deal that I couldn’t replicate so far. I was even paid to write a few chapters in a (non-fiction) book about game development!

This has earned me the most money overall. But that’s still only enough to live on for 3–6 months. Most importantly, this isn’t reproducible. My hardware currently doesn’t allow video game development, not beyond anything extremely basic. My experiences the past 10 years mostly confirmed that my kind of game, which I can make and would be willing to make, does not sell a lot.

Could it be BOARD GAMES? Yes, there are a few websites that sell print-n-play board games, but they’re extremely rare. This is an untapped market … mostly because of how few buyers there are. Board games have the downside of requiring other people, and requiring that they are playtested to work with almost any group. I am hesitant to sell a board game when I can barely playtest it myself, and buyers are hesitant to buy a game if they don’t know (for sure) they have anyone to play it with.

As such, I just don’t see a way. The number of board games that I think I could sell is not high. (That is, I’ve tested them enough to be sure they work for most player groups, and they’re accessible or appealing to most buyers.) Turning a website where all games are free (and generated on the fly) into one where only a select few cost a lot of money … feels weird and unproductive. Even the most famous game designers, who have muliple world-wide physical releases a year, aren’t guaranteed a living wage.

Could it be MUSIC? I have 5 tiny albums on streaming services, from the time when I could still record stuff at home. They’ve earned me—let me check—4 dollars in total. And that’s quite lucky, actually, considering the stories I’ve heard by other budding musicians who went the same route. (They paid hundreds of dollars to get extra marketing, better service, quicker distribution … and their streams barely hit 1 dollar.)

I don’t know when I’ll be able to record again. I have more than enough material, and I know much of it is good enough to be listened to quite widely. Even then, I could only hope to earn maybe 10 dollars a month from that.

Could it be BOOKS? For a few years now, I’ve been selling books. Yes, some of my stories (most notably Saga of Life) are still completely free, no strings attached. But at least most of my writing work is available in stores, both digital and physical, and selling for a reasonable price.

This hasn’t earned me a lot of money. But it’s a reproducible, consistent income. And as most people say, you really need a few books under your belt before you’re bought and read more widely. Over time, sales go up a tiny bit with the release of every new book. People do give a chance to an unknown author, or a weird mismash of genres, though not often.

Hopefully you see the theme here. There are many income streams, but they’re all trickles. Could barely pay rent for a month with what I earn, everything combined, in a year. Precisely because I lack money/support/a proper living space, the most promising ones have been closed off to me for a while.

Therefore, the next realization was that, at least for my kind of work, traditional stores or means of monetizing it just weren’t ideal. I could still leave my books in other stores, of course, but I can also sell ebooks for more “niche projects” myself on the webshop. I could still put my music on all streaming services, but one-off songs or musical experiments or demos can be on my webshop.

In other words,

I can’t hope to monetize a single thing, or for the webshop to just be small “extras” alongside traditional monetization. I’ll have to find a way to combine the best bits of everything into my own shop.

The unreleased gems

Then I had my next realization. Yes, I’ve been giving away a lot of stuff for free, for years. Even those websites are completely open-sourced, so if you want, you can get the source code for the board game generators, or follow several drafts of an article as I write it.

For the most part, though, I’ve given away end products.

You might get the final rules and files for a board game. But you don’t get all the original files, and images, and other things “behind the scenes”. You don’t get the input or the process, nor the discarded chapters, but only the output.

I realized this might be a way forward. I have all those files lying around, backed up somewhere! They are certainly very instructive and interesting to many people, even if only to get a jumpstart on modifying them to create your own twist on something I did.

As such,

Offer as many unreleased things, secrets, and source files as I can (for released work of which others only see the end product otherwise).

Multiple webshops? That’s a lot!

Indeed! I am just one person. I am very much focused on creating instead of selling or running a store. Therefore, my next requirement was to keep things simple, maintainable, everything in one place.

If possible, I’d like to find an e-commerce system that can handle multiple different domains from one and the same account or dashboard. More specifically,

There will be multiple webshops on different websites of mine, but they all go back to just a single thing I can easily manage.

Finding a webshop that could fulfill all my specific requirements so far has been a godsend. It’s the only reason I’m even seriously doing this. I’ll reveal what it is and how at the next section.

Anything else?

I have a few upcoming ideas. For example, a while ago I discovered I liked making “escape rooms” (and, thanks to my experience with game design, think I’m quite good at doing so). Printable escape rooms can absolutely be sold online. There’s precedent for this, with many popular and successful websites, even if they have “only” a handful of escape rooms to offer.

I also have solid progress towards “serious games”—I believe that’s how most prefer to call them. These would be printable activities/games that are more educational in nature, to be used at home, school, daycare, etcetera. I believe it is more reasonable to sell those kinds of games, than to sell my other board games (that are all free so far).

Following this line of thought, I can imagine a few more extra things I could offer in a webshop. But they’d mostly be new things, instead of work I’ve already done.

Why not use an existing service?

Of course, there are many existing services for “receiving payments / fulfilling orders”. Or services for “donations” or “subscriptions”, such as Patreon.

I’ve been checking them out from time to time over the years. I am a member of a few of them, but they … never really did anything for me.

All this time, I’ve received maybe ~20 dollars total in pure donations.

All this time, not a single person subscribed to my Patreon channel. I’ve been using it to announce every thing I released. I’ve been managing it professionally, keeping it fresh and active, using it as my only way to truly stay up to date and follow me. And just nothing. My websites have thousands and thousands of visitors. I offer many things for free that I know are of great value and could be sold for a high price. But nobody donates, or subscribes, or even sends me an email.

This is not unique to me. I’ve had several discussions with other creators or developers, or simply read their blogs/articles, stating the same thing. People, generally, do not handle their money logically or fairly. This is just a psychological thing. They will spend way too much on something they don’t need, while never even considering giving money for that free game they received and really enjoyed. The more aggressive I became with telling people about my Patreon, or reminding them they can donate, the more I was met with deafening silence.

As common marketing wisdom states, if you want to make money, you have to make people believe something is worth paying a lot of money. This can be because you’re a content creator and your million viewers adore you, so they’ll buy anything you recommend. This can be because you’re filling a niche—you’re the only one selling shirts of type A with designs that look like B. The act of simply putting a random (high) price on something is usually enough to make people suddenly feel it’s worth that much.

I’m not kidding, absolutely not! I know that by giving away everything for free, absolutely no strings attached, most people will have this inherent assumption. This unshakeable feeling that my work is “bad” or “unprofessional” or “clearly not WORTH paying for”. We have created a perverse system where actually being kind and generous will hurt you and lower the worth of everything you do.

In that sense, I expect actually starting a webshop—and putting price tags on my work—to do wonders for my (other) work. It’s what’s needed to make people actively realize that they’re getting value, and that I need money to survive too. It’s silly. People are hurting themselves all the time with these mindsets. We could have cheaper, less predatory, more accessible products everywhere. Instead, people buy the next iPhone for 1000 dollars, despite not needing it and Apple demonstrably being a bad influence on this planet and playing you for fools. But if that website they’ve used for 5 years and taught them how to program asks for a 5 euro donation? Blasphemy! How dare they! Don’t even consider it!

But I’ve never been able to make someone wake up to that fact and change their ways. As I’ve heard many marketing experts say: there is no objective value for anything, especially not money. The only way to earn well, sadly, is to make people truly believe your shit is worth a lot of money. Some must do it consciously, like me. Some do it subconsciously, perhaps because their natural talents align or they learned from others. While telling themselves they’re absolutely not doing that and just being lucky/clever/giving people an objectively good offer.

Everyone who sells something must have convinced someone else that it’s worth the price tag, that’s simply a fact. And because money has no objective value—it’s based on banks and stores worldwide believing and promising that it has value X—you must always convince someone subjectively and perhaps irrationally.

Years of experience with human psychology and how they think about money … is another factor that finally put me over the edge. Actually asking random amounts of money for some of my work might be the only way to get people to subscribe to my Patreon, for example. A free game I made that was completely ignored last year, might now suddenly be played by many and get rave reviews, even though the game never actually changed. Simply because I assign (somewhat high) price tags to things with such conviction that people now believe it has more value.

In the meantime, my Patreon is a very active account giving people new games, stories, updates, and what not every month … and nobody has ever subscribed. I’m also convinced Patreon is not even bothering showing all that work to anyone anymore :p So I’m not too hot on continuing that, and I won’t ever see it as a reliable source of income.

Merchandise?

My biggest personal dilemma, I’d say, has been with “merchandise”. I don’t want more plastic stuff to be made. I don’t want more unnecessary stuff in general. Selling T-shirts with my designs, or mugs with a quote from a book of mine, just feels like I’m actively harming the planet and rewarding consumerism. I have never bought merchandise myself and probably never will.

At the same time, I know two things.

• Merchandise is probably the biggest seller for most people. It’s just the right thing, at the right price, to be wanted by lots of people while being easy to deliver for creators.
• I am a physical person that likes holding stuff in his hands. Working on a screen all day, having the fruits of my labor be purely digital, still feels unnatural to me.

If I offered some really nice merchandise (based on work I did), it will have a far larger chance of selling (well) than anything else.

And I would certainly like wearing a T-shirt of my own design, if only because I am severely lacking in clothes. I’d prefer holding some other nice, physical, tangible product that came from my otherwise digital work.

What to do, what to do?

I decided it was at least worth trying.

• The merchandise would have to be “print-on-demand”. I have no money (or storage space!) to invest, or stock and fulfill orders myself.
• It would have to be at least somewhat eco-friendly.
• Its editor (to set up the merchandise) should be very freeform, as I’d like to just do everything myself.
  • (I also design covers and interior fully myself with books, for example, as that’s just easier/cheaper/more free if you know how. Same with covers for my albums. Same with stuff for my games.)
• It needs a simple API/Code Hook so I can integrate that with whatever other webshop system I end up using.
  • See my previous section. I don’t want merchandise and “everything else” to be fully in two different places. If somehow connected to just one entrypoint, even if partially, that’s a big deal.

In fact, after researching this more and more, my plan changed to involve merchandise much more …

The search has ended

And there we have it! After years of sketching webshop plans, once in a blue moon, I actually have answers and plans.

There are many reputable “print-on-demand” merchandise providers. This means there is no upfront cost for me, while I can get experience selling things online and running that sort of business. It means I can slowly try out what looks good, what works, how to create proper merchandise, without much risk.

As such, step 1: create a good collection of merchandise and try to make it work. I gave myself a “runway” of about 6 months for this. I realized I still had my old Dutch domain (nietdathetuitmaakt.nl) (that used to host this blog years ago), so I repurposed it quickly into a “test webshop”. Or, rather, a playground where I could learn all about how to sell merchandise and run an online store with no strings attached.

I simply used existing free systems for this, which allowed me to get it running in a day or two. Behind the scenes, I tried a handful of different POD platforms, dropping the ones that seemed least suitable or trustworthy in the end. More articles about this specific adventure will appear in the near future.

The idea here, to summarize, was simply to gain experience making products and selling them online. I didn’t actually expect this specific web shop to do well or stay around long. But it is a full-fledged store that, within just a few weeks, taught me so much about ecommerce (without losing money).

Then, step 2: create a proper full-fledged webshop to sell source files, bonuses/extras, new work (such as those “escape rooms”). Ideally, tie this into the merchandise to make it a single system. Put this webshop on top of the existing websites, wherever relevant.

After a long search, I found one provider that fit like a glove. Headless. Easy to attach to a static website. Credible, popular, lots of freedom, lots of extra features for programmers like me. That provider is Snipcart. Within a day, I had a test shop running, using their free “test mode”, selling a few physical goods.

It was as I expected: I could keep my entire website and just add the shopping system with a few bits of code.

• To add a product, I merely have to create it in their dashboard (name, files, price, the expected things).
• Then I can use simple data files (as I was doing anyway) to create pages for those products, including the right link for buying them.
• Their system stores those digital goods, so I can keep my free (very limited) website hosting as well.
• Using some API trickery, I hooked it into the merchandise too.

The only “downside” is that they have a flat fee of $20 per month if you don’t sell enough. (Above $1000 dollars of revenue, they just take 2% of your sales.)

That’s the reason why I started slow with the merchandise, and collected everything I could possibly sell first. Because I knew I couldn’t pay 20 dollars a month for a few years, as I “slowly grew” the webshop. I had to offer a rich webshop, with at least a few sales or some profit, as quickly as possible once I started paying for that.

But it’s totally reasonable, of course. That kind of pricing actually makes me trust them more, as it guarantees they’re unlikely to suddenly go bankrupt or start applying other shady practices to earn income. I, to put it bluntly, am simply poor :p

Hence this entire journey to figure out e-commerce!

With this setup, I felt I gave it my best shot. I felt I had something sustainable, reproducible, monetizable. While taking my chronic illness and hyperactive + hypercreative brain into account. While taking my hatred for consumerism and money into account. While keeping things in my own control, running minimalist, headless and as cheaply as possible.

I have written a seperate in-depth article on my actual programming/games blog at Pandaqi. It explains exactly how I implemented the systems, connected the APIs, and whatever else I needed to do or learn to get this working.

A major revelation (or “forced change”, I guess) from that article is that I had to drop the idea of running multiple webshops from one entry point. Once I actually learned how to configure everything behind the scenes, I quickly saw this was simply impossible. For example, to be “verified” (as a trustworthy seller and handler of financial information), they require your shop to have only a single domain. And they periodically check if it fits your description and their policies. It’s simply not possible to assign multiple domain names to a single online store profile.

In other words,

• I could either create 5 separate webshops that just happen to look and function identically
• Or I could just create 1 webshop (a new and unique domain, which is ONLY the webshop and nothing else) and have all my existing websites dynamically link to it

After some consideration, that second option actually turned out better than my original plan. The entire online store is hosted on one domain, which makes it nice, streamlined and self-contained. But all the other websites of mine get a nice “widget” that can link to those products from my web shop.

For example, when you visit the official page for a book of mine, I can let that widget display a few products you can buy related to that series. Perhaps merchandise with its logo/characters, perhaps some spin-off ebook, etcetera. This data is simply pulled straight from the web shop. Which I can do, because I own it and know the exact structure and tags of each product page. All I need to do, to create that widget, is manually give it the URL of related products to promote. On the fly, as you visit the page, it grabs whatever is at that URL and displays the product image, title, price, etcetera.

This breaks my promise (to myself) that I would never have more than 5 websites. But the advantages of this system are simply too great. And that one online store would be the online store, so I don’t imagine ever opening more than one.

My views on monetization

Through all this, I had to repeatedly ask myself the same question. The one I’ve been asking myself basically since I learned the concept of money and capitalism.

What am I willing to monetize and put behind a (pay)wall? And what not?

More and more, I realized there are some clear lines here. For me, at least.

I will never put knowledge, solutions, and practical or essential information behind a paywall. If I know how to do something, I will write articles/tutorials/guides explaining to others how to do it. Knowledge should be shared. If a problem has a known solution, it’s an incredible waste of time, energy, and yes, even money, to force thousands of others to re-discover the solution. (Or, worse still, to never get that solution at all and succumb to a solveable problem.)

That’s why I write articles like these. They will never be behind a subscription, there are no ads, there is not even a hint of monetization going on here. That’s why my guide about how to work with the APIs of webshop services—which I learned through hours and hours of trial and error, as nobody else is fucking giving any of that information away—is open and accessible to all.

I am fine, however, with putting non-essential, extra creations behind a paywall. For most of my games, I can’t really argue that they are solving some essential problem or filling an urgent need. I can’t argue they are sharing some useful knowledge or making a difference in someone’s survival. I am “fine” with restricting most of my creative work to people who can and are willing to pay for it.

Doesn’t mean I like it. Ideally, culture should also not be behind a paywall. You could also say that “joy” or “happiness” should not be behind a paywall. Everyone has the right to be enriched, to be entertained, to discover the joys of boardgaming or escape rooms by merely printing out a free PDF I made. But putting a price on some of my work—just enough to get food on my table—is not the end of the world.

It’s more like offering an extra treat in exchange for good behavior, instead of withholding all food from your child unless they obey your every command.

It’s more like offering an extra blanket just in case someone is cold, instead of withholding crucial medicine from sick people who just cannot pay for it.

And that’s how I, eventually, after some weird detours and missteps, ended where I did.

I will always keep giving away knowledge, help, solutions to problems, etcetera. Not just “for free”. I have always tried to make my work open source, to write devlogs/diaries that reveal more about what I did, to make it accessible even to those with terrible computers or internet. (Which includes, you know, me.)

But all the extra treats that I make in a year—escape rooms, illustrations, stories, merchandise designs, etcetera—will be sold through my webshop(s). Hopefully, this will earn a sustainable income.

Even so, I hope to always stay minimalist. Be smarter and more creative, instead of just throwing money at a problem. That’s why I worked hard to keep my websites as small as possible, to host them for basically free, to connect all systems into a single unified dashboard, to have them all be the same streamlined set of systems. In doing so, I don’t necessarily “make” money, but I “prevent losing money on stupid stuff”.

Am I stupid? Maybe. There’s definitely a case that you’re “smarter” if you do your best to earn more money and get yourself in a position of more comfort and more power. (And better hardware!) But it’s only “smarter” if you look at your personal short-term benefits. I have the curse of having a hyperactive brain that automatically thinks long-term, thinks in systems, thinks about all perspectives instead of just my own. And when that happens, there is no way you can see “earning money whatever the cost” as a good thing. Ever.

Conclusion

Because of how I set up the webshops now, I can give it a long “test period”.

• I am still selling things outside of the webshop (my books are distributed everywhere, for example.) This can simply continue “for free”, and the larger my websites/portfolio/online presence grows, the more this helps.
• As long as Merchandise is my only thing, it costs me no money. (This includes my websites for marketing/leading people to these products. I kept them small and efficient enough to be hosted for free too.)
• As soon as other things enter the webshops, it costs me at least 20 dollars a month. This isn’t nothing, but also not going to bankrupt me any time soon. I can keep up a webshop that loses money—if things fail that spectacularly—for a few years.

During this period, I can just expand my offerings, experiment with pricing/marketing/presentation, until I actually know what I am doing. And hopefully have some successful webshops that are easy to maintain going into the future.

As a reminder, this is what I discussed in this article (and what my webshops look like at time of writing).

• I use Snipcart to easily attach a webshop component on top of any of my static websites.
  • This literally comes down to adding their JavaScript code and using the right HTML tags when defining products on my website.
  • After only a day or two, I had the entire webshop thing working nearly 100%. It was far easier to achieve this ideal setup than I thought, though the project was obviously in an ugly and empty state at that moment.
• Snipcart handles storing/downloading digital files. Without any overhead or work from my side, I can instantly sell that work for whatever price I want.
• Using a simple serverless function, I connect Snipcart with a print-on-demand API, so that physical orders are automatically processed too.
  • It’s crucial to ensure you actually received Payment through Snipcart first. Because those platforms will just create any order they receive, and then ask you to cover its costs. If you let people place orders without paying, if there’s any loophole there, you will lose a lot of money.
• I only pay for Snipcart (as soon as you make any reasonable profit, this is basically nothing). And possibly any “over-the-limit” runs of that serverless function. (Even so, if you have 500,000 API calls a day, you’re selling more than enough to pay for a more premium hosting plan :p)
• With my webshops, I …
  • Sell new creations of mine (such as the escape rooms I started making), which are mostly digital goods. Work that has been online for free so far, will likely always stay that way.
  • Sell the unreleased things (such as source files, different in-progress versions of something). You can often view these as “bonus content” on top of something more easily accessible or sold through regular bookstores.
  • Sell merchandise using aaaaaalll the illustrations, stories, characters, and whatnot I created over the years. I’ll mostly focus on my biggest “brands”, which are long-running book series or board game collections that were especially successful.

In truth, the actual webshop component was the easiest part. Over the years, I’d researched my options well. My vast experience with websites and programming allowed me to integrate it all in basically a day.

The hard part was making the choices on what to actually sell/do (beforehand), and how to design and present these products cleanly (afterwards). I spent the most time trying different visual designs that looked clean and professional, while fitting with that specific website. I also tried a few different ways to input the products (and their metadata such as price or which digital file is attached) on my website. I will likely publish another article with all my doubts, indecision and struggles trying to make hard decisions about what to sell and how to monetize it. Because it was reaaaally hard.

This article was written as I just finished setting this up. I have no statistics or experience, as of this moment, about if I’m actually selling or how successful this is. Once I have that experience, in 6 or 12 months, I will surely write more articles.

Until next time,

Tiamo Pastoor