The Homegrown Vendor Blog

A setup fee is a year-one-only cost, which means a platform can be the more expensive choice in year one and the cheaper one from year two. Only one of those numbers appears on a pricing page.

At 480 orders a year of $25, a $120 flat plan costs $1.28 an order and a free plan with a higher rate costs $1.13. They cross over at exactly 1,200 orders a year.

At $12,000 in annual sales that is roughly $120 in subscription and $612 all-in. If your number is above 8%, do not shop for a cheaper platform: name the line causing it.

The crossover is much lower than most vendors assume: roughly $170 to $400 a month in sales, not tens of thousands a year. What percentage pricing actually buys is insurance against a quiet month.

A card fee has two parts and small food businesses focus on the wrong one. The fixed 30 cents is 3% of a ten dollar order and 0.3% of a hundred dollar one, which is why order size beats rate shopping.

One division answers this. But there are two exceptions nobody mentions: a season shorter than the break-even, and your first year on any platform, where the risk of switching cancels the discount.

You usually cannot refund an order on a platform you have cancelled. So the date that matters is not your last order, it is the end of the dispute window on your last transaction.

Switch on a signal, not on a bad Saturday. The strongest one is keeping a second list, because it means you are paying for a system that is not doing the job, and most vendors have quietly accepted it

Most vendors send one post and wonder why half their customers never noticed. The content matters less than the sequence, with one exception: lead with what it does for them.