When you actually need e-commerce (and the cheap way to take payments)

“I need to take payments online” and “I need an online store” get treated as the same sentence. They’re rungs on a ladder — and each rung up costs real money, so climb only when the current rung actually hurts.

Rung 1: Payment links ($0/month)

Fits: deposits, invoices, gift cards, a handful of fixed offerings, “e-transfer feels unprofessional.”

Stripe and Square both let you create payment links — a URL that opens a checkout page for a product or amount you define. No monthly fee; you pay per-transaction processing (~2.9% + 30¢, both CAD and USD supported). Put the links as buttons on your static site — “Pay deposit,” “Buy gift card” — and you’re “taking payments online” this afternoon.

Canadians: both work fine in Canada and pay out in CAD. (And keep offering Interac e-transfer if your customers like it — free beats 2.9%.)

Rung 2: Buy buttons on your own site (still ~$0/month)

Fits: up to a couple dozen products, no complex shipping.

Stripe Payment Links handle quantities, shipping addresses, even simple shipping charges. Ask your AI assistant to build a products page with a grid of your products, each linking to its payment link. You now have a “store” with $0 platform fees on infrastructure you own.

The honest limit: inventory doesn’t decrement, there’s no cart combining items, shipping logic is basic, taxes are your bookkeeping. It’s a farm stand, not a supermarket — and a farm stand is exactly the right size for many businesses.

Rung 3: A real store — Shopify and friends

Fits: many products, real inventory, combined-cart shipping, sales tax across provinces/states, returns and discount codes.

When the farm stand hurts, pay for the real thing without guilt — this is the situation where a monthly platform earns its keep. Shopify (Canadian, ironically for this site’s theme) is the default for good reason at ~US$29+/month plus payment fees; Square Online is worth a look if you already use Square in person.

Keep the two ownership rules even here:

1. Your domain stays at your registrar — pointed at Shopify, never registered through it.
2. Export your customer list and orders on a schedule. The store platform is replaceable; the customer list isn’t.

The decision in one paragraph

Count your products and your monthly online orders. Under ~20 products or under ~30 orders/month, rungs 1–2 do the job for pennies. Consistently above that — or losing sales to missing carts/shipping/tax handling — take rung 3 and treat the fee as COGS. What you should never do is pay store-tier money (US$30–80/month — CA$40–110 — forever) for deposit-taking that a free payment link handles — that’s the website builder overpay wearing a different hat.