If you are selling ebooks, courses, templates, software, music, or any other digital product, you have probably noticed something frustrating about existing platforms: they all want a cut of your sales.
Gumroad takes a percentage. Shopify charges monthly fees plus transaction fees. Etsy takes listing fees and transaction fees. The more successful you become, the more you pay.
The Djangify eCommerce builder (also known as eBuilder) takes a different approach.
The Ownership Model
With the self-hosted eCommerce builder, you pay once for the software and then it's yours. No monthly platform fees. No percentage of each sale. No arbitrary restrictions on what you can sell or how much you can earn.
Your payment processing goes directly through your own Stripe account. Stripe's fees are unavoidable – they process the actual card transactions – but you are not paying an additional platform layer on top.
If you sell a £50 digital product, you keep what Stripe doesn't take for processing. There's no system fee from this eCommerce builder added on top.
How Digital Delivery Works
When a customer purchases a digital product, several things happen automatically. Stripe processes the payment and confirms success. The system records the order against the customer's account. Download links become available in the customer's account dashboard. The customer receives confirmation via email with access instructions.
Downloads are tied to customer accounts, not one-time links. Your customers can return and re-download their purchases whenever they need to. You can update product files and existing customers automatically get access to the new versions.
Managing Your Products
Adding a digital product is straightforward. Upload your file through the admin interface. Add your product title, description, and images. Set your price. Publish.
You can create product variations, bundle multiple files together, or sell individual items. The system handles file storage, access control, and delivery – you focus on creating products worth selling.
Why This Matters for Your Bottom Line
Let's do simple maths. Say you sell 100 products at £20 each. That's £2,000 in revenue.
On a platform taking 10% plus payment processing, you might lose £200 to the platform and another £50-60 to Stripe. You keep roughly £1,740.
With self-hosted eBuilder, you pay only Stripe's processing fees. You keep approximately £1,940-1,950.
That's an extra £200 in your pocket from just £2,000 in sales. Scale that to £20,000 in annual sales and you are keeping an extra £2,000 per year. The numbers only become more significant as your business grows.
Managed Hosting as a Starting Point
Not ready to manage your own server? Our managed hosting service lets you start selling immediately. You get all the features without the technical overhead.
This is a genuine service subscription – we host your store, handle updates, manage security, and keep everything running. You are paying for that ongoing service, not purchasing the software to download and run yourself.
When your business grows and you are ready to take full control, you can transition to self-hosted. Your products, customers, and order history come with you. The database you have built transfers to your own infrastructure, and then you own and operate everything yourself.
But remember: managed hosting is paying for a service; self-hosted is purchasing software you own and operate. They serve different needs at different stages of business growth.
