product sales software that is fully self hosted

March 22, 2023 2:55 PM

A friend wants to sell digital products (course-packs and consulting hours) on their website, and to be able to integrate plug-ins selling these products in email newsletters AND auto-responders. They want to be able to install the code doing this on their OWN server and run it. Is this a thing? They’re running Wordpress and divi.
posted by The Last Sockpuppet to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

WooCommerce is typically one of the go-to Wordpress plugins for this sort of thing. It also has lots of 3rd party extensions to do all of the stuff anybody would want. It _mostly_ runs on your local hosted Wordpress instance. Which brings us to the fun part:

...there be dragons there.

Taking credit cards? You are going to want to outsource at least the payment processing portion this unless you know the ins and outs of PCI compliance. (And if you do know the ins and outs of PCI compliance, then you will definitely want to outsource the payment processing.) WooCommerce will let you select Stripe, PayPal, and I'm sure others in addition to their own payment platform.

SalesTax is a nightmare. Outsource the calculations, collections, and remittance. Digital products are taxable in many locations. Use the WooCommerce extension and take the time to properly tag everything.

Email. You do not want your local hosted environment trying to send emails unless DKIM, SPF, and a few other things are well known to you. Punt this to MailJet, MailChimp, or similar. Use the WooCommerce extension for easy integration. :-)
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 4:10 PM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]