Why I built WeSell.Cloud (and why 1% is the only fair platform fee)

Joe Wee, founder.

I've been a seller on other people's platforms for more than a decade. Shopify stores, a couple of Etsy shops, a site I built from scratch on WooCommerce, one ill-advised weekend with Magento. I know the dance. Pick a plan. Pay the monthly. Pay per sale. Pay the payment processor. Pay an app for wishlists. Pay another app for reviews. Pay a third for loyalty. Notice, six months in, that your "Basic" plan is actually costing you $160 a month before a single customer pays for a single product.

That is the tax that nobody quotes on the pricing page. Shopify calls it a platform. I started calling it a mortgage.

The App Store tax

Here is what a real Shopify Basic store looks like by month three:

• Shopify Basic: $39/mo
• Wishlist app (because customers expect a heart icon in 2026): ~$10/mo
• Product reviews with photos: ~$15/mo
• Loyalty & points (Smile, Growave, LoyaltyLion): ~$49/mo
• A multi-vendor app if you want more than one seller: ~$50/mo

That is $163 a month before you have paid the 2.9% + 30¢ on every transaction. $1,960 a year. For a feature set that should have been in the box.

I'm not even mad at the app developers. They have families to feed and the app store is where they are told to stand. I'm mad at the structural decision that says: sell the merchant a base product, then farm out everything anyone would actually need, and let the platform take a cut of the rental. Shopify takes 20% of every app subscription. They're not incentivised to stop this pattern.

What I wanted instead

I wanted a commerce platform where the plan you pay covers the features you need. Wishlist in the box. Reviews with photos in the box. Loyalty and store credit in the box. Multi-vendor — an entire marketplace with separate sellers — in the box. Wholesale tier pricing in the box. POS in the box. Webhooks, a real API, custom domains, multi-currency, all in the box.

And I wanted one commission rate, written once, honoured forever.

Stripe's standard processing fee (2.9% + 30¢) goes to Stripe. We add 1% on top. That is the entire commission structure.

Not 1% on the base plan, 2% if you downgrade, 0.6% if you also use our payment gateway. Just 1%. Same on Starter at $5/mo, same on Plus at $2,300/mo. The difference between plans is features and limits, not how big a slice we take out of each sale. If you sell $10,000 next month, we take $100. If you sell $1,000,000, we take $10,000. The math doesn't wobble.

Why not 0%? Because someone has to keep the lights on. Our servers, our support team, our Stripe Connect reconciliation, our 14-day free trial for people who don't subscribe — those cost money. 1% is the number I arrived at after modelling out unit economics for a year. It's enough to run a real business. It's not enough to extract.

Stripe direct, not Stripe-via-us

The other thing that bothered me about marketplace platforms is that they aggregate — you deposit your customer's payment into the platform's Stripe account, the platform then pays you. Which means if the platform goes down, disappears, or decides your shop broke a rule nobody explained, your money is on someone else's balance sheet.

On WeSell.Cloud you own your Stripe relationship directly. We use Stripe Connect. When your customer pays, Stripe charges their card and deposits into your Stripe account. The 1% platform fee is an application fee that Stripe routes to us at the same time. You see every transaction on your own Stripe dashboard. You can leave us tomorrow and your Stripe account goes with you — we don't own it.

14 days, no card

Shopify dropped their free trial to 3 days in 2024. If you can set up a store, add your first products, pick a theme, connect Stripe, write your return policy, and close your first sale in 3 days, you're already better at this than most of us.

We give you 14. No card. Every plan. Including the Plus tier. If 14 days isn't enough, email me — I will almost always extend it.

Try it

The trial is at wesell.cloud/onboarding. If you do try it and hate something, the reply-to on every email I send is my actual inbox. I read them.

— Joe